Kittredge Shakespeare
Kittredge Shakespeare is a series of scholarly edited volumes of individual plays by William Shakespeare. The original series were edited by noted Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard University. The series has been revised and updated twice in more recent years.
Original series
George Kittredge born in 1860, was nearly 80 years old when the first volumes of Kittredge Shakespeare were published in 1939. The original series included text and analysis of sixteen of Shakespeare's Plays. Kittredge, who had taught Harvard undergraduates an introductory course on Shakespeare called English 2, had written very little on the subject, other than an address in 1916 at the Sanders Theater, before publishing his Complete Works in 1936 and the individual play series, starting in 1939. The original series included an introduction to each play, text of the play, copious literary notes following the text, textual notes, and a glossary. The original series included the following volumes:Released 1939: As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Tempest.
Released 1940: Henry IV, part 1, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet
Released 1941: Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, Richard The Second, and Twelfth Night.
Also released between 1939 and 1941: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing
Released posthumously: Henry V, The Merchant of Venice
Kittredge died in July 1941 at age 81, and was working on the original series of these books until shortly before he passed. In 1945, Arthur Colby Sprague, of Bryn Mawr College, edited volumes for Henry V and The Merchant of Venice from Kittredge's explanatory notes.
Sixteen Plays of Shakespeare, with a preface by Arthur Colby Sprague, was released as a single volume in 1946. This collection includes the full introductions and all of the notes, textural notes and play glossaries found in each individual volume.