To the last syllable

“Men of few words are the best men.”-- from “Henry V” Act 3, Scene 2

Coming from William Shakespeare, it’s a pretty ironic comment, given that he wrote hundreds of thousands of words himself -- in poems and in 38 plays. But what words. Words that resonate down the ages more than four centuries later. Words that read brilliantly on the page but are shown to their best advantage when spoken.

And this is where “The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare” comes in. In this mammoth undertaking, all of Shakespeare’s plays have been produced on CDs in their entirety, without a single word of the Bard’s being cut. The plays are now available as a boxed set; it is the first time in audio publishing history that one creative team has achieved such a gargantuan task.

How gargantuan? The set consists of 98 CDs, with a total playing time of almost 102 hours. All of the plays were recorded in studios in London, and almost 400 British actors -- many of them members of the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Royal National Theatre -- were employed. The distinguished names that can be heard on various plays include John Gielgud (who recorded two roles before his death), Eileen Atkins, Joseph Fiennes, Adrian Lester, Simon Russell Beale, Damian Lewis and Alan Howard -- the cream of British stage actors.

All this took 4 1/2 years, and, astonishingly, one man directed every play. Clive Brill, who spent seven years producing drama for BBC radio and six more for BBC television, agreed to embark on the entire Shakespeare canon in 1996.

That was the year he was approached by Tom Treadwell, a British university professor who specialized in Elizabethan drama. Treadwell, who had just retired, had long nurtured the dream to produce an audio version of all Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety and formed Arkangel Productions to achieve his ambition.

Treadwell had heard a BBC radio play Brill had produced and contacted him to see if he would participate. “My only condition was that I could do them all,” recalled Brill, 42, at his East London home. “The bigness was part of the attraction.

“The original idea was that I’d do all the plays in 3 1/2 years, but it ended up being 4 1/2. We started with ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the middle of 1996, and we ended, deliberately, with ‘The Winter’s Tale’ around Christmas 2000.”

Because Brill had produced British radio plays, he already knew many of the 400 actors who participated. “There’s a certain amount of shorthand that goes into radio drama,” he said. “I’d make sure I knew about half the actors.”

Gielgud, who played Time in “The Winter’s Tale” a month before his death, was in frail health. “But I don’t think ours was his last performance,” Brill said. “I’d love to say it was, but I think he sneaked in one other small thing before he died.”

Simon Russell Beale, today one of the respected actors on the British stage, played Hamlet, and Imogen Stubbs was his Ophelia. Lester, who received rave reviews for his performance as Henry V in the National’s current production, played Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar.” Treadwell was disappointed not to secure the services of the great Shakespearean actor Paul Scofield to play Lear; instead, the role went to the lesser-known Trevor Peacock, who is highly rated among the British acting fraternity.

Brill took advantage of a delightful tradition among British actors, even eminent ones, who are happy to record radio plays for next to no money if they find themselves free to do so. They regard it as being all in a day’s (or a week’s) work.

“Each actor was paid the same day rate,” he recalled. “If they showed up for a day and said even a single line, they got paid. On a per-production basis, the budget was around 25,000 to 30,000 pounds [$40,000 to $48,000], so no one will get rich.” He devoted about six weeks to each play, including an initial two-week reading period for himself. Each production was then scheduled for five days, in one of two London studios.

Brill estimated the total budget for the 38 plays at $4 million. “That’s why we need to sell a lot of sets,” he joked. “The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare” is released by the Audio Partners Publishing Corp., based in Auburn, Calif.

One composer for all the plays

Listening to a selection of the plays, one is struck by the clarity of the recording and the precise, thoughtful delivery of Shakespeare’s verse. Brill has gone to great lengths to encourage his casts to bring out the meaning of the Bard’s words. It’s also notable that even actors in minor roles are hugely competent.

Another remarkable aspect of these recordings is the music. Brill was not the only talent who stayed around for all the plays; so did composer Dominique Le Gendre, Trinidadian-born, classically trained and a musicologist who studied at conservatories in Paris. Speaking by phone, Le Gendre recalled that she and Brill had first collaborated on a BBC radio production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1991; together they had fixed on the idea of that play’s “mechanicals” as a Caribbean calypso band, and she had written appropriate music for them.

“For most plays, Clive had a clear idea of the sort of world he wanted to create,” she noted. “And I basically materialized that. For ‘King Lear,’ we wanted an industrial sound. We went to a warehouse I knew with four percussionists and two sound engineers. All the music was completely written and scored for industrial iron window shutters, bricks, bottles and a drill, mixed with percussion and drums.”

That feckless pair, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, suggested a jazz score to Brill and Le Gendre. For “Hamlet,” she composed “tragic, plaintive music, using mostly strings. It’s tonal but multilayered, summing up Hamlet’s contradictions.” In “The Merchant of Venice,” Le Gendre composed klezmer music for Shylock’s scenes.

She and Brill disagreed over “Othello.” “Clive wanted me to go and see ‘The Lion King’ and think in terms of an African score, but I deliberately avoided it,” she said. “I wanted to concentrate on the fact that Othello was a Moor rather than a central or western African. I decided to stick with Arabic music, and I hired an Egyptian singer and oud [lute] player.”

A change in acting styles

For a comparable achievement in committing Shakespeare’s plays to a recorded medium, one needs to go back to the early 1960s, when Argo and Caedmon, two rival British companies specializing in the spoken word, each released vinyl albums containing about half the plays in Shakespeare’s canon. “When you listen to them, the lead actors were magnificent for what they were at the time,” Brill said. “But some of the minor roles were played by students. And acting styles have changed a lot.”

Certainly the actors on the Arkangel CDs seem more naturalistic and do not declaim in a manner aimed at ensuring every word can be heard in the back row of a theater.

The question now is how to market “The Complete Arkangel Shakespeare.” (The set retails at $600, though it costs less through such outlets as Amazon.com.) “Frankly, I think it’s well priced,” Treadwell observed. “After all, for $600 you get nearly 100 CDs. We’re counting on schools and libraries and colleges, but I’d be disappointed if families didn’t pick them up too. The set can be part of an heirloom market: something you leave to your grandchildren.

“We’re not going to be Eminem, we know that, but I’d like to sell 1,500 sets in our first year. We know this is a long-term project and that we’ll be in the marketplace for years,” he said. Brill was even more emphatic: “I would like to think any family interested in the arts would like the idea of a complete Shakespeare.”

Indeed, Brill is bullish about the set and stoutly defends it against those who would say that listening to the Bard’s plays at home, in the car or even on headphones at the gym cannot compete with the true theatrical experience of seeing the plays performed live.

“If you go and see a great play in a great theater, with a great director and actors, you can’t beat it,” he admitted. “But when do you ever see that? Almost never. At the theater you’re battling air conditioning, coughing, you can’t hear everything. The good thing about this is if you cast it well, you have very good actors, and you’re not screwing it up, then you can hear every word. And you can hear it again and again if you want.”

He also insists that the set has intrinsic value for featuring each play uncut: “There’s no point in doing a complete set if you’re not complete. You can jump over the bits you don’t like on a CD. But it’s silly not to have them there. And it makes the set valuable for schools and universities.”

Though it was a long labor, Brill looks on his directing marathon with affection: “It was fantastic. I really love Shakespeare, and for 4 1/2 years I worked with 400 of the best actors in the country. My big worry now is it’s going to be the best job I ever do.”