A good question.

I'm a fan of the Arden Shakespeare series. The standard edition of the Complete Works I generally use is the Norton Shakespeare, 2d edition. That's what I usually cite from when I'm writing an article; it is standard.

If you're looking for inexpensive paperbacks, both the Folger Shakespeare Library and the new Pelican series are overseen by very smart editors.

The longer answer is that there are particular editors I prefer more than others, although I'm not going to name any individuals whose work I don't trust. That's not helpful, because it's not a useful guide for you. The question of how to edit Shakespeare -- the Quarto and Folio stuff -- has turned into a thorny one, with various camps, and most of the major series (Arden, Cambridge, Oxford World's Classics) include editors with very different approaches.

I'm partial to the Arden series myself, and it always gives the most useful additional material. But the quality varies with the editor to some extent ... some of the newest Arden editions are favorites of mine, and a couple make me roll my eyes.

As for the someone-besides-Shakespeare theories: no. There's really nothing there. William Shakespeare is actually a very well-documented historical figure and the evidence that he's the primary writer of these plays and poems is so strong that to throw it out we'd have to throw out all the rules of evidence. (There are other important writers from the period that we have less biographical evidence about, but we don't doubt them, either.)

The standard of proof here is original historical documents. There are dozens and dozens of documents from during and just after Shakespeare's lifetime in which dozens of separate witnesses identify him as the writer of those works. There is no documented witness who ever points to anyone else as the author. Not one. It's pretty simple.

Good question. Shakespeare is not like Homer, in that he's an identifiable historical individual. Homer is a legendary figure who didn't quite exist. William Shakespeare was a person who got married, bought land, paid (and sometimes didn't pay) taxes, and we have records of those things. We have his baptismal record. We can read his will. And we have lots of records identifying him as the primary author of his poems and plays.

Our record of his works starts with print. Everything we have of his was printed in his lifetime or in the ten years or so after it. He dies in 1616 and nearly everything is in print by 1623.

What we don't have are manuscript (i.e. hand-written) copies of his works from before they were printed. [Where did those manuscripts go? The printers might have thrown them away. They might have been lost when the Globe playhouse burned in 1613, or when all of England's acting companies got shut down in 1642. Or they might have been lost when Shakespeare's family died out in the late 1600s. Impossible to say. The real answer is that no one even thought about looking for the writer's personal manuscripts until the 1700s, and by then they were gone.]

Editors from 1709 until now have worked by analyzing, recombining, and massaging the early printed versions into new editions. And yes, those reflect all kinds of editorial decisions.

But the early versions have also clearly been edited in all kinds of ways ... changed by actors, scribes, printers, whatever. And there are definitely some mistakes ... misprints, transcription errors, and so on. Also, many of the important works exist in multiple early versions that contradict each other, so that when you get a modern copy of Hamlet, King Lear, or Romeo and Juliet some of what you're reading has been spliced together from different early printings.

There are two basic approaches. One is to try to clear away everything but what Shakespeare wrote himself. But that's almost impossible, because we can't ever know for sure which parts were his and which weren't. The other approach is to accept that there are other hands involved, especially in the plays, and not to worry about that. The thinking there is that his writing for the theater was supposed to be a collaboration with his acting partners and sometimes with other playwrights, and so trying to take out the collaborators might be a mistake.

The two "cleanest" early printings are his narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which are carefully printed and which Shakespeare himself dedicates to a noble patron. So those have been overseen by Shakespeare in ways that the other books might not have been. And those two books are really just his in ways that his plays weren't necessarily.

Good question. On film, my favorite has to be Richard Loncraine's Richard III, with Ian McKellen as Richard and the 1930s costuming. That works because they don't just use it to make the obvious point (i.e. the bad guy is like a fascist) but to get across a lot of smaller points that can get lost in translation. The Queen and her family are nouveau riche upstarts that the "real" nobles look down on; in Loncraine's film, the Queen and her brother are Americans. That gets the basic feel across.

On stage, I've enjoyed two different versions of Midsummer Nights Dream: a Harlem Renaissance setting directed by a friend of mine, with African-America fairies who were invisible because the white characters didn't notice them, and a charmingly executed Beatlemania MND done by Cleveland's resident Shakespeare festival, which had the two most important things that play could have: a strong actor to play Bottom and a strong actress to play Helena.

My dad's still raving about a Much Ado About Nothing my parents saw in New York on their honeymoon: a Spanish-Civil-War-era setting and Sam Waterson as Benedick. I've never seen it, but I feel as if I have.

Well, that's what's great. There are different Shakespeares for everybody. Your friend can surely find enough broad-and-simple performances to keep him happy (plenty of regional companies specialize in it), but there are also lots of other productions that are more geared to your taste.

The great thing about Shakespeare on stage today is that if you don't like one version, you can always count on there being another. Someone can ruin your night at the theater, but they can't ruin the play. Someone else will be along to do the play again.

When you see me blogging again and again about the importance of the public domain, this is where I'm coming from. The richness of Shakespeare in our century comes from the fact that everyone is free to try a different approach, and no one needs to ask permission.

There are five or ten I especially love, but if I have to choose I'll always go with 130, "My Mistress's Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun," because it's such a brilliant 180 degree turn on the typical sonnet. And it was the first one I learned, which matters.

Yes. I've known Kirby off and on for a long time. I've never been his student, but we get along well socially.

I don't know every other Shakespeare scholar, but I probably know a couple of hundred others in the US, UK, and Canada, simply from going to a few conferences every year. And social media has made it much easier to stay for academics to stay in touch with the networks they build at conferences.

On the other hand, I think I have to draw the line at discussing individuals any further. A blog or a comment thread isn't a good place to gossip about people; I wouldn't do it on a blog that had my professional name attached to it, and I definitely won't do it on a blog that uses a pseudonym. I hope you understand.

Sure. Shakespeare is the most famous playwright from a golden age of great playwrights. Think of him as analogous to The Beatles: the biggest single story of his art form in his generation, but nowhere close to being the whole story.

Marlowe, who was Shakespeare's age and was clearly the better playwright in their 20s, died young and left only six or seven plays, but four of those plays are incredibly good.

Ben Jonson was Shakespeare's greatest frenemy: protege, rival, critic, friend. He wrote the tribute verses in the first collection of Shakespeare's plays, and you've heard some of the famous phrases. He was a wonderful comic playwright (I don't love his tragedies), and his Volpone and The Alchemist are classics.

Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Kyd, John Ford, and a bunch of others all did good work. None of them wrote 20 plays as good as Shakespeare's best 20, but they all wrote between 1 and 6 that any playwright would be proud of.

These playwrights get performed more often in Britain than they do in America. Here's an anthology that you can look for in a good public library.

Henry IV is one of my all-time favorites. It's great.

The trick with the histories is that they're not self-contained. It can be harder to follow the plot because you're always joining a complicated story in progress. So, watching Richard III is like watching Return of the Jedi if you've never seen or heard anything about any of the other Star Wars movies. Also, lots of scenes just have a crowd of noblemen, who can be hard to tell apart, because they're all heavily-armed politicians.

This is one of the times when going and getting a plot summary and some sense of the back story from previous plays can be a big help. A lot of the obstacle is just getting the plot straight, and so knowing the plot in advance is a big help. That won't spoil the fun; this a history play, not a mystery play. Everyone knows how it's going to end. And it's written with the expectation that some of audience already knows these characters and this story.

Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 are actually the middle two parts of a four-part mini-series. [The BBC just did all four as "The Hollow Crown.']

In the first part of the series, Henry knocked his weak and corrupt cousin, Richard II, off the throne, and then had him murdered without ever *exactly* ordering it. Richard really *was* a bad king, but he was also the *rightful* king, and so this is a problem. Also, Henry wasn't even next in line for the crown; there were a lot of cousins, and a cousin named Edmund Mortimer *should* have been next in line after Richard. So, these are serious problems, and when Part 1 starts Henry is losing his hold on some of the supporters who helped him to the crown.

Meanwhile, his son Prince Henry is hanging around in bars with a fat criminal named Falstaff, arguably Shakespeare's greatest comic creation and his most famous character in his own day. That's where we start.

The finale of the series is Henry V, in which the former Prince leads the English to military victory over the French. When you meet the not-so-promising Prince, remember that he is on the road to being that guy, and everybody knows it. He will reform. He will be a beloved king. You're watching a prequel, but all the fun is in how he gets there.

A "problem play" is a comedy whose ending we've come to be uncomfortable with. As in: that doesn't feel like such a happy ending. Depending on who you ask, Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and others.

A "romance" is one of the late comedies, long on miracles and short on probability. It also tends to be written more from the father's viewpoint than the young lovers'. The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen.

We do not.

The number of parts he can prove he played is zero. We have almost no cast lists from that era. We know who the main actors were, but except for one or two stars we seldom know who played  which part.

There is an old tradition, essentially a 300-year-old rumor, that he played the Ghost in Hamlet. Some people will cite that as fact, although it isn't quite.

There's a less famous tradition that tentatively casts him as the old servant, Adam, in As You Like It. And there's a general tradition that he played supporting parts more than leads. We know he wasn't Romeo or Hamlet or Lear.

We know for sure that Shakespeare was in some of Ben Jonson's plays, because Jonson printed actor lists, but we don't know what roles Shakespeare had.

But we can prove he was an actor. That's well documented. And we know he was in at least some of his own plays; the first collection of his plays has a list of the major actors (over 30 years of company history) and Shakespeare is at the head of the list (not because he was the star actor but because the book is a tribute to him).