Dante’s epic story of a man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. Undergraduate courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso. In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigour, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem readers will appreciate. Prue Shaw’s, Reading Dante, was praised as: "[an] experience of a lifetime[...]"—The Spectator "Writing an introduction [to The Divine Comedy] for the general reader is not an easy task. Prue Shaw has done this in a way that manages to be at the same time scholarly, compelling and original."—The Times Literary Supplement [Shaw] keeps us so enthralled with her compelling and fast-paced prose that the only reason one would want to put down this book is to open the one she is talking about."—Times Higher Education

"At last, the greatest of all Italian poets and everything you need to know about him in one fat volume of lucidity and lightly worn learning." -- Howard Jacobson - New Statesman, ‘Books of the Year 2025’
"The Essential Commedia isn’t a standard translation but a radically abridged version of the text, with chunks of the poem (in Italian and in Shaw’s translation) set like jewels into a running commentary made up of narrative bridges, historical context, interpretation,  and occasional witty asides. It all fits into one volume… and Shaw—a first-rate British Dante scholar—provides a momentum of her own." -- Claudia Roth Pierpont - The New Yorker
"Those who have previously quailed or failed before the Commedia—those parallel texts, the million notes, the intricacies of Florentine politics—will relish Prue Shaw’s new version. It cleverly runs its commentary in and out of the text, and (whisper it quietly) is not afraid to cut or summarize the boring bits. And for the first time, I understood the Paradiso." -- Julian Barnes

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in Florence to a family of minor nobility. He entered into Florentine politics in 1295, but he and his party were forced into exile in a hostile political climate in 1301. Taking asylum in Ravenna late in life, Dante completed his Divine Commedia, considered one of the most important works of Western literature, before his death in 1321. Prue Shaw is an emeritus reader in Italian at University College London. She is the editor of the edizione nazionale of Dante’s medieval Latin treatise Monarchia and of a groundbreaking digital edition of the Commedia (freely accessible at www.dantecommedia.it). She lives in Cambridge, England.