Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse

For this new edition, first published in 1971, Ted Hughes augmented his original selection of Shakespeare’s poems and dramatic speeches and completely rewrote his accompanying essay, intending to restore to the common reader much of what, in Shakespeare, was instinctively available to the audience of his day, and to show how Shakespeare’s language unites in its sinews and substance the full range of Elizabethan preoccupations, philosophical and social.