For half a century George Lyman Kittredge enjoyed world-wide fame as a Shakespeare scholar with a gift for imparting to Harvard University students his own abounding enthusiasm for his subject. Persuaded by his English friends and admirers to give his Shakespeare lectures at the University of London, he held large audiences spellbound. Oxford University paid recognition to the breadth and quality of his scholarship with an honorary degree, and Jesus College of Cambridge University made him an Honorary Fellow. Other institutions awarding him honorary degrees were the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Brown, McGill, and Yale.

Kittredge's editing of the Shakespeare play represents a major landmark of American scholarship. IN the new editions, Professor Irving Ribner has prepared introductory text. Where Kittredge had provided explanatory notes, Ribner has augmented them and brought them up to date in the light of textual, literary, and historical research of the past thirty years, during which time our knowledge of the dates, sources, and general historical background of Shakespeare's plays has vastly increased. Elsewhere, he has provided completely new explanatory notes.
(back cover)