1891-93 9vols SHAKESPEARE Works Cambridge Ed WRIGHT

Finely bound volumes in half leather with gilt decoration to the spines, marble paper pastedowns and marbled foredge.

William Aldis Wright (1831 - 1914), was an English writer and editor.

This is the second and best edition of the very well regarded 'Wright' Shakespeare.

"The Works of William Shakespeare (1863-6), edited by William George Clark, with at first W. Aldis Wright and later John Glover as collaborators, was published in nine volumes by Macmillan, but printed at the University Press, so that it became known as the Cambridge Shakespeare. This important edition was based on a ‘thorough collation of the four Folios and of all the Quarto editions of the separate plays, and of subsequent editions and commentaries’ (preface), so that in textual matters it constitutes a virtual variorum. Prefaces provide accounts of the early textual history of each of the works, and the volumes include the texts of first quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, as well as the quartos relating to Henry V, The First Part of the Contention (2 Henry VI), and Richard Duke of York (3 Henry VI). Clark and Wright used the Cambridge edition as the basis for the influential one-volume Globe Shakespeare. Both the Cambridge and the Globe editions were revised in 1891" (The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare)

He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1888 became vice-master of the college. He was one of the editors of the Journal of Philology from its foundation in 1868, and was secretary to the Old Testament revision company from 1870 to 1885. He edited the plays of Shakespeare published in the "Clarendon Press" series (1868–97), also with W. G. Clark the "Cambridge" Shakespeare (1863-1866; 2nd ed. 1891-1893) and the "Globe" edition (1864).

He published a facsimile of the Milton manuscript in the Trinity College library (1899), and edited Milton's poems with critical notes (1903). He was the intimate friend and literary executor of Edward FitzGerald, whose Letters and Literary Remains he edited in 1889. This was followed by the Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1895), his Miscellanies (1900), More Letters of Edward FitzGerald (1901), and The Works of Edward FitzGerald (7 vols., 1903). He edited the metrical chronicle of Robert of Gloucester (1887), Generydes (1878) for the Early English Text Society, and other texts.

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