No other edition offers extensive textual apparatus such as explanatorynotes, plot summaries, particularly vital as stories are complex and interwoven.The Sultan Schahriar's misguided resolution to shelter himself from thepossible infidelities on his wives leads to an outbreak of barbarity in hiskingdoms and a reign of terror in his court, stopped only by the resourcefulScheherazade. The tales with which Scheherazade nightly postpones the muderousintent of the sultan have entered our language and our lives like no othercollection of narratives before or since. Sinbad, Aladdin, Ali Baba: all maketheir spectacular entrance on to the stage of English literary history in theArabian Nights Entertainments (1704-17). The stories contained in this 'storehouse of ingenious fiction' initiate a pattern of literary reference andinfluence which today remains as powerful and intense as it was throughout theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries.This edition reproduces in its entirety the earliest English translation of theFrench orientalist Antoine Galland's Mille et une Nuits. This remained for overa century the only English translation of the story cycle, influencing anincalculable number of writers, and no other edition offers the complete textsupplemented by full textual apparatus.