The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text

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Nectanebo controls the moment of Alexander’s birth with complicated astrological calculations and manoeuvres. Alexander is educated by Aristotle and tames Bucephalus ( sic in the Romance, though the correct form is Bucephalas). At the age of twelve, Alexander asks Nectanebo to give him an astronomy lesson; the magician takes him to a hill outside the city whereupon Alexander pushes him over a cliff. As he dies, Nectanebo reveals that he is the boy’s father. At fifteen, Alexander attends the Olympic Games and defeats his opponents in the chariot race. On his return, he finds Philip taking a new wife, Cleopatra, but Alexander succeeds in restoring relations between Philip and Olympias. I read new dramatic literature, when I can find some of any value, but had not tried Shakespeare until now. I have just concluded "The Comedy of Errors," purportedly the funniest of the lot. Though the play is not well written, that is not in itself a crucial liability. It is much better to see the movie, "The Wizard of Oz," than to read the book upon which it was based, but even the book possessed an authentic imaginative vision. "The Comedy of Errors" does not, so that one needs to look elsewhere for the play's remarkable success. Such speculation should follow an account of how and why "The Comedy of Errors" asks to be read. Recensio poetica (recensio R), vernacular: D. Holton, Διήγησις τοῦ Ἀλεξάνδρου. The Tale of Alexander. The Rhymed Version [ Βυζαντινὴ καὶ Νεοελληνικὴ βιβλιοθήκη. Thessalonica, 1974] Shakespeare spent the last five years of his life in Stratford, by now a wealthy man. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The first collected edition of his works was published in 1623.

In the 12th or 13th century, an anonymous translator or translators translated a lost Arabic translation of the Latin Historia de Preliis into Hebrew. This is found in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Héb. 671.5 and London, Jews' College Library, MS 145. These may represent a single translation in different versions or else two translations, with the Paris version having been used to complete the London. The translator (or one of them) may have been Samuel ibn Tibbon, who made other translations from Arabic. [9]

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There is so much to love here. Epic tragedies - Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King Lear - joined by their lesser, but poetically affecting counterparts like Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare plays with and shuffles around comic tropes in his wide variety of comedies: peaks include The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing.

There was the beautiful Maria (who, strangely enough, didn’t look Puerto Rican). There was a gorgeous man named Bernardo. My tomboy days were over.

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This tome includes all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, as well as his poems and sonnets. It was produced "for college students in the hope that it will help them to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the works for themselves. It is not intended for the scholar ..." Recensio λ (Pseudo-Methodius redactio 2) H. van Thiel, Die Rezension λ des Pseudo-Kallisthenes. Bonn: Habelt 1959 In medieval England, the Alexander Romance experienced remarkable popularity. It is even referred to in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where the monk apologizes to the pilgrimage group for treating a material so well known. There are five major romances in Middle English that survive, though most only in fragments. There are also two versions from Scotland, one sometimes ascribed to the Early Scots poet John Barbour, which exists only in a sixteenth-century printing; and a Middle Scots version from 1499:

Favager, D.J. (translator) The Romance of Alexander of Alexandre de Paris (abbreviated translation) Kindle (2021)

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In the 14th century Immanuel Bonfils translated the Historia de Preliis directly from Latin into Hebrew. This is found today only in the manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Héb. 750.3, but an illuminated copy once resided in the Royal Library of Turin ( c. 1880) before being destroyed in a fire. [9] I have reviewed each play individually and have shelved them here on GR so won’t comment here about any specific play. Described in the Guardian on its first publication in 1951 as ‘a symbol in the history of our national culture’, the Collins edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by the late Professor Peter Alexander, has long been established as one of the most authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works, and was chosen by the BBC as the basis for its televised cycle of the plays. The Greek Alexander Romance, a fictionalized life of Alexander the Great, originated in the 3rd century bce, in Alexandria. Its origin can probably be linked to the efforts of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II to anchor the authority of their regime firmly in the legacy of Alexander. However, the first definite evidence for the circulation of the Greek text in antiquity comes from the Latin translation made by Julius Valerius, who is generally identified with the consul of that name of 338 ce. This window of six hundred years is an unusually wide one for the dating of an ancient text. The attribution by the monk Nectarius in MS B (Parisinus gr. 1685) to Alexander’s court historian Callisthenes must be discounted, since the Romance includes an account of Alexander’s last days and death ( June 323 bce) and burial in Memphis, whereas Callisthenes had died in 327 bce. This edition seeks to give us every word attributed to Shakespeare (although, as it points out at length, we can't really know what he wrote: all of our current versions come from a variety of sources typeset in his later years, and primarily from the First Folio printed after his death. Any work of the Bard's is distorted in some way). With appendices and footnotes, notable textual errors or areas of debate are highlighted.

Recensio Byzantina poetica (cod. Marcianus 408): S. Reichmann, Das byzantinische Alexandergedicht nach dem codex Marcianus 408 herausgegeben [Beiträge zur klassischen Philologie 13. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1963]

Book II begins with a debate in Athens about how to react to Alexander’s incursions; this is absent from all versions subsequent to alpha. Next Alexander is found in Cilicia, where he is cured of illness by the doctor Philip. He exchanges more letters with Darius, and makes a visit in disguise to the Persian court, from which he escapes by crossing the frozen River Stranga, which melts as soon as he has crossed it. Second and third battles with Darius (both based on Gaugamela) are followed by the murder of Darius by two of his own commanders. The dying king bids Alexander marry his daughter, Roxane, which he does. Book II ends here in A, but the beta recension continues with a letter from Alexander to his mother describing his adventures and his travels into the land of darkness (II. 32–41; but there are no chapters 24–31 in this recension). Chapters 39–41 are extended in Lambda by Alexander’s construction of a diving bell and a flying machine, and his search for the Water of Life. Chapters 42–44 occur in Gamma only: chapters 42–43 repeat the events of chapters 24–41, with some additional episodes, and chapter 44 describes an encounter with pygmies. The alpha recension, which was the basis of the Latin translation by Julius Valerius, survives in a single MS, A (Parisinus gr. 1711), dating from 1013–1124. The scribe was working from a poor exemplar from which he copied at times meaningless strings of letters. All subsequent copyists of the Greek Romance, as well as Julius Valerius in Latin, seem to have been working from this text, or something like it: many of their alterations can only be seen as attempts to restore sense to something that made no sense in A. Kim Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream or the Prophecy of Petesis,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, eds. A. Blasius and B. Schipper (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002), 230. Recensio δ (e cod. Vat. gr. 1700, 88v‑89r): G. Ballaira, "Frammenti inediti della perduta recensione δ del romanzo di Alessandro in un codice Vaticano", Bollettino del comitato per la preparazione dell'edizione nazionale dei classici greci e latini 13 (1965)