King Richard III (The Arden Shakespeare)

Usual Arden Shakespeare - worth purchasing for the scholarly introductory material and the footnotes. The latter sometimes take up the rest of the page when 2 lines of text have been printed at the top BUT this is all to the good, since they are a great help to scholars of any age and level and those doing amateur dramatics.

excellent

does what it says on the cover

How many times have you met such a king?

GREAT EASY TO READ

A bit of a disappointment this. Prof Siemon has put a massive effort into this introduction and notes, but rather than being informative the notes are over detailed and miss the main points. To give two examples from the first few pages of the text:When we come in Act one to the mention of the death of Rutland we are merely told he is a second son of Richard of York, not that his name is Edmund nor that he was killed aged seventeen after the battle of Wakefield nor why Lord Clifford killed him. Even more confusingly he is omitted from the genealogy of the House of York.We are told that 'plantagenet' was the nick name taken by Geoffrey of Anjou, the father of Henry II but not what it means (sprig of broom)nor why Geoffrey took that name (his crest).Some basic sensible historical information, please, and less stating the obvious such as when we are told 'homicide' means 'murder.' We could have worked that one out ourselves,thank you.Hammond's earlier second series volume is to be preferred.

This is one of the Shakespeare plays I know best and it was lovely to have this big thick new Arden edition. It's probably helps to have read the three Henry VI plays, first but that isn't essential.