ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare’s plays and poems have a textual history of almost unrivalled complexity. His works survive in multiple, often contradictory or spurious, editions; and around half of the plays were published after his death in versions possibly altered by the playwright himself, more often by another hand. Shakespeare wrote principally for the theatre, a popular form of entertainment, but one that in the Elizabethan period at least did not readily lend itself to the production of literary texts.
