Shakespeare

The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
$40.00
I own and have read thousands of books, and this Oxford edition of Shakespeare's complete works is by far the worst bound book I have ever come across. I had pages falling out of my copy within days of using it. Oxford University Press should be ashamed for binding this book so badly. If you want the text of the Oxford edition, then buy the hardcover Norton Shakespeare, which uses the text of the Oxford edition. Better yet, check out the RSC Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen and published by Modern Library.

Shakespeare Adult T-Shirt
$10.50
5.6 ounce t-shirt made of cotton/polyester blend with 1x1 ribbed crew neck and two-needle hemmed sleeves and bottom with design printed on the front.

The works of William Shakespeare
$48.75
This is one of the first books I got for my Kindle. I've gotta say it's really nice, but I was hoping for a few annotations, footnotes, etc. The product description says, "All books feature hyperlinked table of contents, footnotes...". So far, I've found only one footnote, and it links to a Wikipedia article. Sometimes a little help is nice reading Shakespeare. In the print editions I have read, I have appreciated annotations explaining archaic language, humor that was obvious to Shakespeare's audience but not to modern readers, etc. Why is there none of that here? Are there other Kindle versions of Shakespeare that makes this information available?

William Shakespeare Complete Works (Modern Library)
$65.00
This is the best Complete Works of Shakespeare that I own, and will likely to remain as such if the excellent people at the Arden Shakespeare do not deliver something magical when they most likely release a Complete Works set after wrapping up their third series editions in the next three years.

I will try to be brief yet lengthy enough to give you a good idea what this volume is all about. First, I will give a general introduction to its editing principles, the size of the volume and paper-quality. From that I will advance to talk about the positive things about the edition and then the negative. In the end I will try to summarize which edition you might want to buy and in what circumstance.

"Introduction"

What makes this edition different from any else is that its basis is the 1623 First Folio. In other words, they have not created hybrid texts as everyone else seems to be doing, whatever their intentions be. Instead, we get a rather strict update of the Folio, which as a literary work is unsurpassed perhaps only by the King James Version by its importance to the Western English-speaking culture.

What does it mean, then? If you go to the Oxford edition, they will give you two Lears. Why? Because they consider the Quarto Lear and the Folio Lear as different plays, and thus print both. The Norton, a student version of Oxford, adds to this a conflated version, which borrows from both. A sort of a best-of piece. Indeed, most versions you will see are conflated from the Q and F sources, but this is what happens with the RSC Shakespeare: they follow the F source all the way, but do print passages missing from the Folio after the play. They do the same with "Hamlet" and other plays with such problems. What this means is that technically everyone else has printed a hybrid version of a play Shakespeare never wrote or that was never published.

They also retain the conservative language-policy of the Folio. In early stages of the 17th century a decree was given according to which profanity was to be put under surveillance in the play-books that had become a market on their own. Thus, when we have an early quarto of our dear sir John Falstaff cursing, it most likely will have been softened for the Folio. Bate and Rasmussen retain this distinction, and whether you like it or not is up to you: at least they are not ambiguous but follow the Folio. After all, that was the point of the whole edition.

"The Two Noble Kinsmen", "Pericles" and the poems were not in the Folio, you may say. Are they included? They are. The two plays after all the others in double-column forward, edited, alright, but in a smaller font to make distinction between what was in the Folio originally and what was not. Also the scene from "Sir Thomas More" attributed to Shakespeare is there. All the poems are there, as well, so this is a complete works of Shakespeare even by our modern standards.

"Book Size and Weight"

The book is a hefty one, a ludicrous statement considering that it is a Complete Works of Shakespeare I am talking about. In other words, do not feel betrayed when this arrives to your doorstep and it actually takes space in your bookshelf and actually weights a bit. The hardcover might be problematic if you have to carry it to college all the time, yet you could buy individual plays, then. Of course, I do not know about other countries and their academic course structure, but here in Finland we had specific plays we read during the year and analyzed, in fact separated to "Comedies" and "Tragedies", so I have never really had this problem. If you have a vaguely titled course entitled as "Shakespeare", I can only sympathize with you.

But then again, we pamper too much the student-audience of Shakespeare, when in fact not all of us who read the RSC Shakespeare are students attending to the university (although I am one, admittedly). This is a marvellous edition, and its heftiness makes it feel secure and strong.

"The layout and editorial heft"

I will now advance to the generally positive remarks. In other words, the stuff that makes this the standout edition that it is. Firstly, the one-column layout. Of the editions I have seen (Penguin, Arden, Oxford, Bevington, Riverside, Collins, Norton) only the Norton has a single-column layout for the text. Of the ones mentioned only Bevington does not feel crammed as the others do with their two columns, yet Bevington has insufficient space for one's notes. For notetaking the Norton isn't so fit, either, because although the page contains only a single column, the page is not too wide to include much white space. In this respect this is such a pleasure to read, and after reading it once from beginning to end, all 2,500 pages of it, I may now find myriads of notes written on the white space on many pages. For discussion of page-thickness, see below.

"Introductions"

How is the editorial matter? I am one of those who is put off by too much in too little space, and the Norton is a prime example of this. There is much in small print which simply discourages me to read any of it. One gets used to it after a while, but sometimes, especially with the introductions, I wonder if Greenblatt could have edited his contribution a bit further. Also, I do not like if there is too much cultural knowledge in the beginning of the book, as I like, for the first time, to read from beginning to end, and have the wholeness of it experienced. I remember being discouraged by the Bevington, the Riverside and the Norton.

As you might have guessed from my rhetoric, not so here. Bate gives a general introduction which is short yet long enough to get us excited about Shakespeare and immersed enough in the cultural surroundings. This is coming from a reader who has read a bit about Elizabethan culture and commerce, so I cannot vouch for the general acceptability or sufficiency of the introduction and whether it really is suitable for first-timers. Either way, his gift is his theatrical knowledge, and it is wonderful to read about some of his insight about the staging and the theatre-trivia that he embeds in his introductions, and a problem for many introductions is that they only seem like massive libraries, not written introductions in themselves, which might seem daunting. This, on the other hand, is a well-structured and balanced text. One important scholarly aspect of this edition is that it acknowledges Lukas Erne as an influence, whose Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist is destined to become the first real classic of twenty-first century Shakespeare criticism. Erne's groundbreaking analysis shows that Shakespeare was more likely to have written future publication in mind than is generally presumed (the length of "Hamlet" and "King Lear" in the Folio being good examples in themselves). Although the theatrical director of the Royal Shakespeare Company understandably tries to diminish this by musing that Shakespeare, first of all, wrote for the stage and not for the page (the man has tickets to sell!), we no longer have to cope with the embarrassingly out-of-date "scholarly" methodology of an Anthony Gurr who goes on to argue, even in the second edition of the Norton Shakespeare, that Shakespeare couldn't have been any less interested about the publication of his works. We are lucky that this edition does not rehash material, making it the first real edition of Shakespeare in this century, not the Bevington, Norton or any other.

"Introductions to the plays"

How about the introductions to the plays themselves? Unfortunately so many of the editions floating around are designated to the student that there isn't much to say about the introductions besides the obvious points. They are short this time, yet much of them are still full of the most obvious stuff, especially when Bate analyzes the play. Succinct but uninspiring. The good thing is, indeed, that the introductions are very short and do not get in the way when one wishes to read the play, but this is also the downfall: the introductions are general and so is the attempted analysis. I don't mind: I have my Goddards, Nuttalls, Blooms and Garbers for commentary. The point of a good introduction is not to analyze exhaustively but merely to give the essential knowledge to enjoy the play and give the proper key to unravel the mysteries of the play and actually find out things by ourselves. Sometimes Bate does get a bit redundant, and sometimes I outright disagreed with him, but generally the introductions are fine. However, there is some unbelievable occasional blather, as well. For example, he writes of the ending of "The Two Gentlemen Of Verona" that " We do get the ending we expect and desire, but the abruptness with which it comes about is a sign of impatience or immaturity on Shakespeare's part--but then again, his mind was so restlessly inventive that he never really cared for endings." (p. 55) Thus, the introductions can be theatrically illuminating at best and at worst as clueless as shown above. Such analysis is not pervasive, thankfully (you may read a fine analysis of the ending, which I by the way think is superb, in Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker), and often the introductions are nice reads.

But the best thing about the introductions are the fact-boxes: the plot summarized, the date given, primary textual sources given and then, the best of it all, the ratio of the verse and prose in the play, and a list of how much does a character speak of all the lines, how many speeches does he or she have, and in how many scenes does he or she appear in. This is pure gold and very useful. I haven't ever really realized that 90% of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is prose, only the remaining 10% is verse. Also, Iago has a very small percentage of lines in the play he dominates, and Prospero and Hamlet utterly dominate theirs.

As these are theatre-people giving us a text, they have made one wonderful contribution to enhance our understanding of the text. As you may know, the division of the play into five acts is not so much a Shakespearean convention (he does it occasionally) but a later frivolity. I think Shakespeare can be better understood as a continuation of scenes that follow one another, and for example for "Hamlet" we have besides the traditional numbering "5.2" a marking in the right margin that counts the number of scenes without interruption ("running scene 17"). These are utterly indispensable. With "Othello", as Bate remarks, they dramatically enhance our understanding of the double time Shakespeare employs.

"The Negative"

Is there anything generally negative in this edition? Sure, but we have to be reasonable. For example, the page-thickness is, if not exactly biblically thin, very close to it. In fact, if I pressed too hard with my pencil (a lead pencil, by the way) I could see the mark three or four pages ahead. That is, I often mark compelling passages with a vertical line on the left side of the text, and sometimes I pressed even so slightly too hard and I saw the line on not only the next one, but the following, as well. It should be noted that I also wrote my running commentary on the white space on the right side of the text, and some of it bleeds, or should we say, is "pressed" from the recto to the verso on the other side, but nothing too drastic. I do admit that this might be a problem if you either press too hard, as I was deliberately delicate with my writing as not to damage the pages. Yet to be reasonable, to have the volume be any thicker from what it is already would be off the limits and I'm sure they did try to make the pages as thick as possible in the circumstances.

The real drawback that they could have done better is the way they printed the glosses on the bottom of the page. I found the glosses quite good in this edition, but this shares the problem of the Riverside that it is bothersome to find a line where you have a difficult word to understand and then count the line number which ever it is, for example l. 247, and then go to the bottom of the page to see if it is glossed. To my surprise I saw myself not using glosses that much anymore apart from a few crucial places where the meaning is utterly obscure and not understandable from the context and the RSC did provide a gloss in most cases. The problem is that most often my eye skipped right to the bottom column and of course it took time to find the correct place. The Norton, for all its flaws, has a nice system as it prints the gloss in the right margin on the same line as the text. This, of course, discourages the reader from figuring things out by himself as I like to do, and would have been impossible for the RSC as they print their stage directions in that space. But they could have done what Bevington did: to add a line number to each line for which there is a gloss in the bottom section. Bevington's drawback is that he only marks the line numbers according to the glosses, so counting lines is occasionally a difficult procedure. The RSC at least has a constant numbering system as they mark every fifth line.

"Summary"

Apart from this and the occasional lack of illumination in Bate's analysis and comments, this is the best collected edition of Shakespeare that I know of, and am very glad that I now have it in my home library to take and read. It is also very nice to have the plays in the Folio order (Oxford and Norton have them in so-called "chronological" order; others mainly add a fourth genre for "The Tempest", "The Winter's Tale" and "Measure For Measure", etc.)

In short, this is a very attractive volume, and the white space is useful for an avid commentator such as myself. The pages are thin and the introductions are occasionally disappointingly redundant (and, let's face it, no writer can live up to the expectations of every reader), yet the editing is superb, and it makes all the difference in the world to have a clear source edition on which this text is based. I very much recommend this volume for each enthusiast.

But which volume to buy? Well, they are all hefty ones. The Riverside stands the tallest, then the Bevington, then the Norton pretty much at even height with this. This volume is perhaps the thickest of the four I own. I do not recommend the Oxford edition for a personal grudge concerning its editorial policy, and naturally I wouldn't recommend its offspring, the Norton, although it is the only one besides the RSC that has single-column layout for the plays. The Riverside is the only one at the moment that does not print the full names of the characters in the speech headings, a noticeable flaw.

I would lean towards this edition for a few reasons. First of all, it is consistent when it has taken as its mission to edit the First Folio. This means that they actually have real editions of plays, not hybrids that take bits and pieces from everywhere. I find the idea of having a newly-edited First Folio at hand very attractive. Secondly, the layout is magnificent for note-taking, and although the paper is thin, it does not bother me. The page does not feel crammed like the Riverside or even the Norton. The Bevington is pleasurable to read as well, but because of two columns it has less space for notes. The final reason is the most personal, but not the least important: Bate recognizes an influence in Lukas Erne, the author of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in which Erne gives solid evidence that Shakespeare not only wrote for the stage but wrote long plays (that obviously had to be cut for performance) publication in mind. The Norton is so immersed in its flawed methodologies concerning the authenticity of the text that they even to this day have Andrew Gurr announce in their introduction that Shakespeare could not have cared less about publication. This edition is the first one to really take advantage of this shimmering thought: Shakespeare was not indifferent toward the publication of his works, and we should not forget this when we read him. Quite ironic that such an edition comes from an acting company of all people.