The Necessary Shakespeare

"This volume comprises not only twenty-one of Shakespeare's plays but also all of the sonnets, accompanied by a comprehensive General Introduction that addresses questions of context, language, and critical reception, and appendices that explore dates and alternate texts, sources, Shakespeare in performance, and a new guide to current films."--BOOK JACKET.

David Bevington is an American literary scholar. He is Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. He taught drama at the University of Chicago, focusing on Shakespeare and his contemporaries (Jonson, Marlowe, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, etc.), as well as medieval drama and then the entire sweep of Western drama from Aeschylus and Sophocles down to Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard. In addition to courses on Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and medieval drama, he co-taught in Theater and Performance Studies ((variously with Heidi Coleman, Director of University Theater, John Muse, English  Department, and Drew Dir, resident dramaturg at Court Theatre) a two-quarter sequence called The History and Theory of Drama from the 5th century B.C. down to the present day. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specializes in British drama of the Renaissance, and has edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition. He also edits the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama and an important anthology of Medieval English Drama. Bevington's editorial scholarship is so extensive that Richard Strier, an early modern colleague at the University of Chicago, was moved to comment: "Every time I turn around, he has edited a new Renaissance text. Bevington has endless energy for editorial projects." In addition to his work as an editor, he has published studies of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and the Stuart Court Masque, among others, though it is for his work as an editor that he is primarily known.