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What I can do, however, is to go over each of the thirty-eight plays and two narrative poems written by Shakespeare in his quarter century of literary life, and explain, as I go along, the historical, legendary, and round

In the process, I will, in sole short speech which requires a great deal of background knowledge for its proper total appreciation I h whole acts which require nothingof a few archaic words to be crystal clear (On the whole, I shall make no attempt to translate simple archaisms This is done, quite adequately, in any briefly annotated edition of Shakespeare)

In dealing with the plays, I will quote whatever passage inspires an explanation, but I will quote very little else If the reader is reasonably fah the chapter devoted to it without needing to refer to the play itself If he is not familiar with a particular play, it would probably help to keep it at hand for possible reference

One th of time was the question of the order of presentation of the plays The traditional order, as found in roups the coedies This traditional order is very far removed from the order in which the plays ritten Thus, The Tempest, which is the first play in the ordinary editions, is the last play that Shakespeare wrote without collaboration The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which is next, is one of the earliest

It is possible to prepare an edition in which the plays are presented roughly in the order of their writing, so techniques and ideas This order can only be rough because it is not always certain in exactly which year a particular play ritten Worse yet, placing the plays in the chronological order of writing disrupts the histories and places them out of order as far as the historical events they deal with are concerned

Since I aendary, and round of the events described in the various plays, I have decided to place the plays in the chronological order of those historical events as far as possible

To begin with, I divide the plays into four broad groups: Greek, Rolish

The Greek plays will include those that have their basis in Greek legend, as for instance, Troilus and Cressida; or in Greek history (however faintly), as Timon of Athens It will also, however, include pure romances, with no clairound is arbitrarily set in a tinize as Greek-as The Winter's Tale

The Roman plays include those that are based on actual history, as Julius Caesar, or on utterly non-historical, but Rome-based, inventiveness, as Titus Andronicus (As it happens, even historical fiction such as The Winter's Tale and Titus Andronicus can be faintly related to actual historical events No fiction writer is an island and no ination alone, the real world will intrude)

The Italian plays are those set in a Renaissance Italian setting (or in nearby places such as France, Austria, or Illyria) which cannot be pinned down to any specific period of time I will present the plays in this section in the order in which Shakespeare (as best we can tell) wrote them

The English plays include not only the sober historical plays such as Richard II or Henry V, but also those which deal with the legendary period of English history before the Nor Lear and Cymbeline, before the Roman conquest

There is so The Greek plays set latest in time are later than the earliest Roman plays; and the latest Rolish plays The radical difference in scene, however, ical inconsistency With that out of the way, the order of plays and narrative poeht centuries of history, froendary Greece before the Trojan War, to Shakespeare's own time

To make a reasonably even division of the book into two volumes, the Greek, Rorouped into Volulish plays, to which I have devoted a little more than half the book, to form Volume Two

In preparing this book, I have eneral reference books: encyclopedias, atlases, raphical dictionaries, histories-whatever came to hand

To one set of books, however, I owe an especial debt These are the net Classic Shakespeare" (General Editor, Sylvan Barnet, published by New American Library, New York) It was, as a h these volumes that the notion of Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare occurred to me