Decca's Shakespeare in Music & Words presents two CDs of orchestral and vocal music, and spoken word performances, inspired by William Shakespeare's plays, to give the Bard of Avon his due on the 400th anniversary of his death. The first disc is a collection of familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts, though the best-known selections are the Dance of the Knights from Sergey Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet, the Scherzo and Wedding March from Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, Nino Rota's A Time for Us from Franco Zeffirelli's film of Romeo and Juliet, and the "Love Theme" from Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. While the other excerpts by Gerald Finzi, Charles Gounod, Giuseppe Verdi, Henry Purcell, Hector Berlioz, William Walton, and Ralph Vaughan Williams are not exactly from greatest hits, they have a strong appeal for listeners who are interested in the variety of ways Shakespeare's texts have been set to music. The dramatic readings on the second disc by such theatrical legends as Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Christopher Plummer, Vanessa Redgrave, and Sir John Gielgud, among many others, provide a sampling of Shakespeare's scenes and poems that enthusiasts will appreciate.