William Shakespeare (c. 26 April 1564 - 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, renowned by many as the world's greatest writer in the English Language. Among his plays are "Romeo and Juliet", "Hamlet", "Macbeth" to name but a few.

The Winter's Tale is a kind of miracle play in which performance is of the essence of an exciting, imaginative, and inspiring plot embodied in visionary dialogue. In creating a course in Shakespeare Performed (2010) with his students staging an abridged Winter's Tale, Mark Muggli was in an ideal position to edit the play especially from the perspective of performance, as he did. This is a twenty-first-century edition up-to-date enough to include the Guthrie Theater's production of 2011 together with the solid twentieth-century scholarship of G. L. Kittredge. Kittredge's introduction, lightly edited, begins with Muggli's "Spoiler Alert" about plot revelations the reader might prefer to experience first in the play itself. His notes are designed less to interpret than "to facilitate the reader's interpretation," and the reader and the play are primary in this presentation of The Winter's Tale. —Tom Clayton, Regents Professor, University of Minnesota

"No edition gives such equal balance to the play as it appears on the page, the stage, and the screen as does the New Kittredge Shakespeare. This edition of Winter's Tale begins that balancing act with Mark Muggli's engaging introduction and continues it throughout the text of the play per se with considerations of stage choices, abundant photographs, and a concluding essay on the play as performance. The result is that the reader is always in touch with the work in its multiple dimensions as a literary, theatrical, and cultural phenomenon. That approach makes Muggli's edition an excellent introduction to the play and equally an ally of the teacher and the director." — Ralph Alan Cohen, Mary Baldwin College