Complete Collection of Tragedies

This edition features all twelve tragedies of William Shakespeare: "Romeo and Juliet", "Macbeth", "King Lear", "Hamlet", "Othello", "Titus Andronicus", "Julius Caesar", "Antony and Cleopatra", "Coriolanus", "Troilus and Cressida", "Timon of Athens", and "Cymbeline". The edition is intended for the widest publishing audience.
Shakespeare's works are part of the golden fund of world literature. In the so-called "First Folio", that is, the first collection of the great playwright's works published in England in 1623, twelve of the thirty-six plays were classified as tragedies. These are the plays "Romeo and Juliet", "Macbeth", "King Lear", "Hamlet", "Othello", "Julius Caesar", "Antony and Cleopatra", "Titus Andronicus", "Coriolanus", "Troilus and Cressida", "Timon of Athens", and "Cymbeline". All of them are included in this collection. Some of Shakespeare's tragedies are widely known and have been adapted into film multiple times. Other plays are less familiar to the general public. Reading them will be no less interesting, as they are literature of the highest caliber. Interest in Shakespeare's works in Russia began to grow in the first half of the 19th century, thanks to performances on domestic theatrical stages. In 1830, the first prose adaptation of all Shakespeare's dramas in the Russian language was published. It was done by N. Kh. Ketcher. In 1893, prose translations of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets were published under the editorship of P. A. Kanshin. By the early 20th century, there were already more than a hundred translations of various works of Shakespeare in Russian. The best of them, carried out by A. I. Krohneberg, P. I. Veynberg, A. V. Druzhinin, and other outstanding domestic writers, were included in the fifth complete edition of Shakespeare. It was published in 1902 and became part of the twenty-volume "Library of Great Writers", which was printed by the famous publishing house "Brockhaus and Efron". The editor of the "Library" was the renowned literary historian and critic S. A. Vengerov. He enlisted the best specialists of his time to work on the edition of Shakespeare's works. Among them were corresponding members of the Academy of Sciences N. P. Dashkevich and A. I. Kirpichnikov, prominent Shakespearean expert A. V. Druzhinin, Doctor of Literature M. N. Rozanov, and brilliant journalist and polyglot L. A. Polonsky. They and other literary scholars of the highest rank are the authors of fascinating prefaces to all of Shakespeare's dramas in this edition. In 1842, the renowned British publisher, editor, and writer Charles Knight published a large volume titled "The Illustrated Shakespeare". Among several artists whose work was included in this book, the engraver and painter John Gilbert held a special place. He was a talented self-taught artist who created hundreds of splendid illustrations for many significant works of English literature.