The collection also includes a first folio edition of William Shakespeare's collected plays, published in 1623, seven years after his death -- the primary source of our knowledge concerning Shakespeare's texts.
Mr. Field, a former schoolteacher, collected playing cards, and had reason to think that his 6,000 decks might be the world's largest agglomeration of them.
In an introduction to a volume of his collected plays, Michael Frayn explained the number of ways in which a work can be classified.
Her collected plays, many of which continued to be performed at the turn of the 20th century, were published in 1972.
Then, as a musical project he called Invisible System, he started tinkering — extensively and transformatively — with what he collected, playing guitar, bass and synthesizers and adding collaborators.
Possibly even better known is the black-and-white engraving of Shakespeare's head and shoulders made by Martin Droeshout the Younger for the first printed edition of his collected plays, known as the First Folio and published in 1623.
Snoo Wilson's collected plays constitute a glorious Corybantic frieze covering vast tracts of human experience, filtered through an imagination that took in anthropology, history, physics, alchemy, mathematics, painting and the occult.
For every hit, such as Noises Off or Copenhagen, there has been an equally substantial flop, the nadir being 1990's Look Look, which is not included in Frayn's four volumes of collected plays.
Both Shakespeare's collected plays, first published in 1623, and the most ill-conceived and trivial tract published in that or any other year were designed as instruments of communication.
But he never fails to throw me the occasional literary curveball, like the collected plays of the Belgian avant-gardist Michel de Ghelderode or Eugene Burdick's prescient 1964 novel "The 480".
