The Chinese translator Zhu Shenghao was born in Jiaxing, Zhejiang province, and attended Zhijiang University, where he was a well respected member of the River Poetry Society. After graduating in 1933 he became an English editor at the Shanghai World Book Company, and was commissioned to produce a translation into Chinese of Shakespeare’s plays. He began with the Tempest, and had completed work on 31 of the plays by the time of his early death, despite the disruptions caused by China’s wars with Japan, and later the Second World War. His translations were first published in 1954, and a complete edition with translations of the remaining plays and sonnets were published from 1966. A translation of Hamlet had been published in 1922 by Tian Han, a Chinese playwright and translator, perhaps best known for his lyrics for what became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. Zhu Shenghao’s work was the first attempted translation of the complete works of Shakespeare and are today viewed as Chinese classics in their own right. This edition is published with parallel text in English and Mandarin.