What is the best edition of the Complete Works of Shakespeare?

>Why?
Trust me. I looked into it. I compared every edition available today and Pelican was my favorite. RSC is also good, so it comes at 2nd place. Norton has decent notes but it's edited by a pretentious kike so it's a no-no. Riverside (now Wadsworth) is pure boomer nostalgia. New Oxford is a total SJW fest, regular Oxford is just the text and edited by hamfisted clowns. Arden is useless since they don't have the notes and extras of their individual editions, it's just the text. Pelican is the perfect balance.

I think it's worthwhile to have individual and specialized copies of works of especial interest, e.g. Hamlet or the Sonnets, but I also want to be able to pick up a book off my shelf for any passing Shakespearean fancy without individually buying every single work of Shakespeare, or otherwise relying on .pdf's or Gutenberg. But then, anthologies are sometimes clunkily overheavy...I should buy a bookstand.

Thank you for providing a real response, user. Since you rate the RSC second, what differentiates it from the Pelican? I notice that the RSC is a little bit cheaper and quite a bit prettier. And so also I assume that both the Pelican and the RSC include guiding annotations but aren't intrusive, since you hold them in higher regard than the noteless Arden and the intrusive Oxford? Do any of these include critical essays or historical commentaries that toe the narrow line between obnoxiousness and banality? (But I know that last question may be an unrealistic demand.) Are these copies excessively bulky, and if so, are there any Complete Works editions that escape that?

Also, on the note of Shakespeare, what do people feel are his best non-tragedies? It's easy to get wrapped up in Hamlet and Macbeth and King Lear, at least among Yea Forums types, but I'd like to broaden my view. I'll definitely be rereading Midsummer Night's Dream. I'd especially like to become better versed in Shakespeare's flashes of philosophical skepticism and bawdy sentimentalism.

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What I liked about the RSC is the purity of the text, and by that I mean, that they follow the First Folio very closely and in general choose the best word available when there's different options (between the First Folio and the later editions). Take for instance the first page in Romeo and Juliet when Sampson says "I mean, if we be in choler, we'll draw". Pretty clear, right? That's how it appears in the folios, quartos and the RSC. BUT in Oxford, Norton and other editions it reads "I mean, an we be in choler, we'll draw". I've literally checked all the folios and quartos in facsimiles and that "an" doesn't appear in either one. I have no fucking idea where it comes from, but I guess it's from an spurious edition from the 1800s or something and I think it's a misspelling of "and" but I'm not sure. This convinced me to think that people at RSC actually do their job instead of senselessly repeating nonsense. And if that's one mistake that some asshole like me noticed in a single afternoon, then I don't know what else could I find. So, if that's the cheaper one where you live, by all means get it since you'll be in good hands, and yes, the notes aren't intrusive. About the editions being bulky, all Shakespeare's complete works are destined to be bulky, I think the Pelican one is the less bulky, and Norton also has a 3-tome edition (different from their one tome edition) which can be pretty comfy if you want that. Whatever you do don't get the Riverside, that shit is awkward and hard to manouver, the notes are scarce and unhelpful, the names are abbreaviated, etc. Go for RSC, Pelican or Norton (dismiss my previous "pretentious kike" comment). And good luck, user.

>I have no fucking idea where it comes from, but I guess it's from an spurious edition from the 1800s or something and I think it's a misspelling of "and" but I'm not sure.
I don't know about its textual derivation in Shakespeare, but "an" used to mean "if." So it's a different word for the same thing.

Yeah, either way the notes in Norton and Pelican explain that it means "if". It's just that I'm an autist so I checked all the folios and quartos and it wasn't there.

Yeah I understood. I check an older variorum edition of R&J on Google Books and it listed "an" as being in the Quartos (which is how R&J was originally published) and Theobald, and "if" originating in the First Folio.

Also I'll inject my personal opinion that "an" reads better -- "I mean, an we" has consonance and assonance by repeating the ending consonant of "mean" and then its vowel sound (and simply rolls off the tongue easier), where "I mean, if we," has only assonance.

Really? I guess I must've missed one of the last quartos or something. Thanks for the info, user.

I found this online, which is a parallel text of the first two Quartos of R&J. The first has "if I be in choller" the second has "and we be in choller". Who fucking knows.
books.google.com/books?id=13gLAAAAIAAJ

Ah, also if you check a dictionary you can find that "and" used to mean "if" as well.

You don't want a "Complete works" seriously, they're practically fucking unusable in book form.

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Not for /fit/lit/

The best edition is the one you will actually read. I got the Pelican Shakespeare for 75 cents at a used book store, and because it was so cheap I felt no shame in treating the physical book like shit while reading, defacing it by writing inane comments in the margins. So I managed to get through all of Shakespeare.

I've always been partial to the Tempest myself, it's got this really otherworldly feel to it, from the actions to the speeches

Good recommendation, I thought of it after I'd posted. Is Othello good? I know that's still a tragedy, but I feel that it's spoken of often and I've never read it.

Are the histories good? I may read the Henry IV's just for Falstaff.

Yes, at least to me Othello is his most tragic character (except for perhaps Lear) and the denouement is almost straight out of an ancient tragedy.

The Tempest, which is also his best play overall.

Othello is a pathetic character but the story is decent. Iago is Shakespeare's most based character.

Why best?
Why pathetic? Why Iago?

>Why pathetic?
Because he's retarded, naive and doesn't have a brain.
>Why Iago?
Because he's based and manipulates people's destiny using the spoken word.

So you're an edgy teen?

Not at all, just telling you what you'll find in Othello.

To bump, or not to bump!

Read the Henriad (Henry Iv pt 1 and 2 with Henry V after). It's some of his best writing and Falstaff is one of his greatest characters. You'll see his influence all over fiction afterwards. Richard II is the official beginning of the saga but I think it doesn't match up to the Henry plays.

A facsimile of the First Folio.