It was a job worthy of William himself: not only the ambitious scale of the project, but the speed with which it was completed. In just seven years, between 1958 and 1964, Argo Records, with the Marlowe Dramatic Society, released the complete works of Shakespeare in forty box-set LPs, unabridged and fully dramatised with a cast of hundreds.

This remarkable venture was led by George Rylands (1902–99), a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and for many years the head of the Marlowe Dramatic Society, a university theatre club. Known among his Bloomsbury friends as ‘Dadie’, Rylands was a leading Shakespeare scholar and a more than capable project administrator. When the British Council first floated the idea of creating unabridged recordings of Shakespeare, it was Rylands who insisted that a complete set should be released in time for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. And he saw it through, ahead of schedule and under budget.