What additional features will readers find in the Folger editions?
As in the Folger Library General Reader’s Shakespeare, we include explanatory notes designed to help make Shakespeare’s language clearer to a modern reader, and we place the notes on the page facing the text that they explain. We provide fresh accounts of the life of Shakespeare, of the publishing of his plays, and of the theaters in which his plays were performed. We also include a section called “Reading Shakespeare’s Language,” in which we try to help readers learn to “break the code” of Elizabethan poetic language. Current ways of looking at the plays are reflected in our brief prefaces, in many of the commentary notes, in the annotated lists of “Further Reading,” and especially in each play’s “Modern Perspective,” an essay written by an outstanding scholar who brings to the reader his or her fresh assessment of the play in the light of today’s interests and concerns.
