The play's the thing, all 39 of them

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

One place the noble yet doomed Montague can be found every year is at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, which produces the famed Romeo and Juliet every February to keep the locals, especially school groups, happy as they watch the familiar tragic story of Juliet and her love, the self-styled "fortune's fool."

The Atlanta company recently made a splash for being the first American Shakespeare company to have produced all 39 plays written (at least in part) by William Shakespeare. "All the world's a stage" indeed.

Traditionalists, in the winter of their discontent, might object to the number 39, since scholars through the "vale of years" have traditionally ascribed 37 plays to the Bard. Yet in recent years, many scholars have added The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III to the canon, on the theory that enough of each of those plays is Shakespearean enough to have been written by Shakespeare himself.

With Edward III, the company's founding and artistic director, Jeff Watkins, has completed the 39-play cycle. The Atlanta company began in 1990, with a production of The Tempest. By putting on such favorites as Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, the company is able to make enough money to also produce some of the lesser-known plays like Pericles and The Winter's Tale. If those are obscure, then Edward III, about a 14th Century monarch, is really obscure. Edward was certainly not "the noblest Roman of them all." Yet it completes the "new" canon, and so it was produced, and so it was seen, and so it goes.

"A thousand times good night!"