This new edition is based on the quarto, the version closest to the original manuscript. The introduction illminates the plays' origins and practicalities of composition, its reception and influence. Detailed notes pay especial attention to language and staging, and the volume includes King Lear's first derivative, a contemporary ballad, and guides to appreciation of the play and its multiple offshoots.
Shipwrecked on an unknown island, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself surrounded by its six-inch-tall natives, the Lilliputians. But this is only the first in a long line of wonderful discoveries, as his adventures take him to other far-off lands such as Brobdingnag, populated by a race of giants, Luggnagg, home to the eternally ageing Struldbrugs, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, a race of benevolent talking horses. Parodying the popular travel accounts of its time, Gulliver's Travels is not only a tour de force of imaginative and comic writing, which has thrilled readers of all ages for almost three centuries, but also a masterly, merciless satire on Western society and human nature.