The Oxford Complete Works
The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works was published in 1986 and brought Shakespeare’s plays and poems back into a single volume, with a second edition published in 2005. It was edited by John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells. The general introduction is written by Stanley Wells and in it - besides providing some historical background - Wells extensively discusses the task of the modern editor and the rationale for their own editorial decisions.
The Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works differs from other Shakespeare editions in attempting to present the plays as they were likely to have been performed, which resulted in some quite radical editorial decisions, such as the juxtaposition of different versions of some passages, and even two separate texts of King Lear. The second edition (2005) also added Edward III and the full text of Sir Thomas More giving thus further emphasis to Shakespeare’s collaborative work.
A significant departure from the Folio is that the plays are presented in a tentative chronological order instead of following the well-established division of the plays in the three categories: tragedies, histories and comedies.
The second edition includes an essay on the language of Shakespeare, written by David Crystal, that can be helpful to language teachers and learners exploring Shakespeare from structural, rhetorical, and semantic perspectives.
Among the most interesting supplementary material included in the second edition (2005) are a list of contemporary allusions to Shakespeare and a collection of commendatory poems and prefaces spanning from 1599 to 1640. Such inclusions could perhaps work as reliable evidence to counteract the conspiracy theories about Shakespeare's authorship that were still quite prominent at the time of the publication of the 2nd edition.
