The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [Vol. 3 Of 9]

This third volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare gathers four plays that span the full arc of Shakespeare's genius. Here is Twelfth Night, that fizzy confection of mistaken identities, cross-dressing, and longing, where love is a mirror that distorts as much as it reveals. Here too is The Taming of the Shrew, still capable of provoking argument centuries after its composition, a comedy that refuses to let its audience relax into easy comfort. Between these poles sits All's Well That Ends Well, a problem play dark enough to make you wince, and The Winter's Tale, that breathtaking late work where jealousy curdles into tragedy before time and forgiveness perform their strange surgery. The Cambridge Edition of 1891, edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, remains one of the most respected scholarly texts of Shakespeare's corpus. These are plays that have never stopped being performed, adapted, argued over, and loved. They matter because they hold up a mirror to every era's contradictions about love, power, and what it means to be human.