Shakespeare at Work [Paperback]

Why did Shakespeare revise his plays? In a brilliant and pioneering analysis, the distinguished critic John Jones explores the critical and dramatic significance of Shakespeare's revisions. Analyzing such plays asHamlet,Othello,King Lear, andTroilus and Cressida, he reveals the artistic impact of the revisions and their importance for our understanding of each play's moral and metaphysical foundations.

1. The One Manuscript: Sir Thomas More
2. The Printed Texts: The History Plays especially, and Troilus and Cressida
3. Hamlet
Alas, Poor Yorick
What's Hecuba to Him?
The Heart of My Mystery
Denmark's a Prison
4. King Lear
Prince Hamlet and King Lear
The Seven Stars
Value and Meaning
Romance into Tragedy
5. Othello: Improving This Play
Coda
Bibliography
Index

It bears in fascinating ways on the kinds of local decisions editors of Shakespeare constantly make....A book for anyone who wants to write aboutHamlet, King Lear, orOthello, and it will be especially interesting to any who set out to reedit them. --Studies in English Literature

...a good, idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare....so courteously written, so curiously intimate in manner and so engagingly clear and resourceful in argument, that anybody with a genuine interest in Shakespeare...should read it for pleasure and then reread it to pick quarrels about details....Few readers, glancing past the sigla in the footnotes of their copies, can ever have expected that so much delight and wisdom might be gotten from them, and many rewards in the forms of both agreement and dissent. And how rare a pleasure it is actually to admire a book on Shakespeare! --London Review ofBooks

...I find the book filled with striking insights,...Jone's work is productive, engaging and lucid. --Sixteenth Century Journal