The plays and poems of William Shakespeare, with the purest text, and the briefest notes

Community breakdown

Bars show the community-aggregated score per category. Rate this book to contribute.

Sixth of 8 volumes in 4to. pp. [4], 98, 98, 94, 152, 132. Half morocco, with wrappers bound in. One of 58 sets printed. Collier’s last Shakespeare edition, designed for a mature reader, with no general or individual introductions, the most perfunctory of notes on early quartos, minimal commentary, and above all an arbitrarily settled text, whose ‘purity’ was not over-sullied with citations of source. While some of the Perkins readings were signaled (mostly as ‘indisputable’), more than half of them were not. Contains: Timon of Athens ; Julius Caesar ; Macbeth ; Hamlet ; King Lear. See A. & J. Freeman, John Payne Collier. Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century. New Haven, 2004, II, 975-980; A184. Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.