AN exciting year-long Shakespeare festival, bringing together all of his works for the first time, has been announced in Stratford.

The Royal Shakespeare Company is hosting the festival - The Complete Works - featuring all the 37 plays, the sonnets and the long poems by its own performers, guests and international performers at venues which include new purpose-built theatre spaces.

The Complete Works will start in the spring and run through a whole year, also incorporating the likes of film, new writing, contemporary music and a comprehensive survey of theatre artists currently interpreting Shakespeare all over the world.

Company members will now be busy preparing 15 productions for the festival which will include a new cycle of Shakespeare's history plays. Patrick Stewart will be returning to the company to star in The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra, there will be a new musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor with Dame Judi Dench and as a festival finale, Sir Ian McKellen will play King Lear, directed by Trevor Nunn.

International artists who have made an impact on the performance of Shakespeare, like Peter Stein and Yukio Ninagawa, have been invited along and there will be some of the most exciting home-grown Shakespeare-interpreting theatre companies taking part.

Visiting companies from North and South America, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe will be exploring the Stratford Bard's influence abroad and it is hoped the festival will be the beginning of many more talks and collaborations.

The festival director is Deborah Shaw, who joined the RSC last year from the Bath Shakespeare Festival.

RSC artistic director Michael Boyd said: "While there will be some who'll relish the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all the plays in one festival, The Complete Works is not only for Shakespeare aficionados.

"The festival looks set to be the most extensive celebration of Shakespeare's genius - at once a national knees-up for the RSC's house playwright and a survey of the different approaches to his work from around the world.

"Our ambition is to stage one of the most significant cultural festivals of the year in Stratford."

He added: "We want to do much more than pay lip service to Shakespeare's internationalism as we prepare the ground for artistic collaborations that will continue beyond the life of the festival."

Specific details of the festival timetable will be released later in the year.

l AS well as taking over existing RSC theatres, the festival will branch out all over town and in some new, purpose-built venues.

Henry VIII will be performed in Holy Trinity Church, there will be debates at Shakespeare's Birthplace and a new outdoor theatre, The Dell, is planned to be set up in the theatre gardens to host a fringe festival of works by amateur and school groups.

In October next year, there will be a new temporary 100-seat studio theatre inside the RST auditorium for a month to host smaller scale productions and most importantly of all will be the July opening of a 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre which will then continue as the company's main theatre when work starts to revamp the RST in 2007.