Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of his
comic imagination, which throughout his life enveloped and
contained his tragic one. His early comedies—with their baroque
poetic exuberance, intense theatricality, explosive bursts of
humor, and superbly concrete realizations of the dialects of
love—capture as in a chrysalis all that he was to become. They
provide a complete inventory of the mind of our greatest writer in
the middle of his golden youth.
This volume contains The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and it's companion piece, Romeo and
Juliet, which Tony Tanner describes in his introduction as "a
tragedy by less than one minute." The texts, authoritatively edited
by Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented with textual notes,
bibliographies, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life and
times, and a substantial introduction in which Tanner discusses
each play individually and in the context of Shakespeare's
oeuvre.