The reputation of this one-volume Shakespeare edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander has increased steadily since its publication. Professor Alexander's scholarship has produced a text that is internationally accepted as consistently sound, reliable and authoritative: a lifetime's experience of teaching Shakespeare to his students has devised just the aids that the ordinary reader and student need, without swamping the text with a mass of extraneous material. A glossary of nearly 2,500 items gives the meaning of obsolete and difficult words and phrases, with line references to each occurrence. The introduction summarizes what is known of Shakespeare's life, sketches his development as a dramatist, and describes the origins of our text of the plays in the First Folio and the early "good" and "bad" Quartos. The Alexander Text is widely used by scholars, and students will appreciate the fact that its line numbering relates to the standard concordances: and all readers will be grateful for the carefully chosen typography which makes this edition the pleasantest to use of all one-volume Shakespeares. The Alexander Text of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare was chosen by the BBC as the basis for its major production of the complete plays. --front flap