Developed in partnership with The Royal Shakespeare Company, this edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare combines exemplary textual scholarship with elegant writing and design. Sir Jonathan Bate and Professor Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, lead the expert editorial team. Bate's excellent general introduction and essays on each play draw on a unique wealth of experience and resources and will help the reader to understand Shakespeare's plays as they were originally intended - as living theatre to be enjoyed and performed.

The text is based on the iconic 1623 First Folio: the first and original Complete Works lovingly assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors and the version of Shakespeare's text preferred by many actors and directors today. The result is a fresh and definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century that will inspire students, teachers and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

SIR JONATHAN BATE is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick, UK. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, and a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A prominent critic, award-winning biographer and broadcaster, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador), which was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as "the best modern book on Shakespeare." In June 2006 he was awarded a CBE by HM The Queen 'for services to Higher Education'.

ERIC RASMUSSEN is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, USA. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama and has edited volumes in both the Arden Shakespeare and Oxford World's Classics series. He is the General Textual Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project - one of the most visited Shakespeare websites in the world. For over nine years he has written the annual review of editions and textual studies for the Shakespeare Survey.