Every generation has its preferred scholarly Shakespeare series. For my parents it was The New Shakespeare, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson. Replete with the fruits of early and mid-20th century scholarship, the Cambridge was gloriously attractive too, its text design by the celebrated American typographer Bruce Rogers being both functional and aesthetic.
Preceding — and contemporaneous with and following — was the Arden Shakespeare, begun in 1899 under WJ Craig and blessed by other notable general series editors. Decades of South African university students will have memories, fond or otherwise, of the Arden editions with their extensive introductions, critical apparatus, appendices and copious footnotes on every page of the play text.
The advent of The Oxford Shakespeare was revolutionary. Its editors set as guiding principle Shakespeare’s “final intentions”. Hindsight here confers few favours: How does one second-guess Shakespeare from a multiplicity of textual variants? And how can an “authoritative” text be established from the confusions between the Quarto and First Folio editions of his works?
Yet the Oxford triumphed in the painstaking scholarship of its editors, supervised by general editor Stanley Wells. While a defining text is still a chimera, what the Oxford editions have done is provide scrupulously researched, collated and thought-through texts, buttressed by superb introductions, appendices and footnotes. Significantly, the Oxford is an edition for scholars, students, general readers and those in both the non-professional and professional theatre. It wears its knowledge lightly, moving easily from scholarly and critical contention to explanations of the arcane for modern readers.
The Oxford is surpassing in its introductions to each play. Invaluable here are the considerable segments devoted to the play in performance, and its interpretation. Michael Neill’s introduction to Othello (published last year) is 183 pages of gripping reading; the appendices are no less engaging, with that on the various texts of the play a masterly piece of incisiveness. It is here that Neill concludes: “… the collations should be regarded for what they are — not as a merely scholarly accessory, but as a reservoir of poetic and theatrical possibility”.
Into this rich field steps The Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) William Shakespeare: Complete Works (Macmillan), edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. The size of one and a half bricks, and as weighty, this magisterial tome offers all the plays, poems and sonnets, with a general introduction, introductions to each play, chronologies and genealogies. What bestows on it epochal status, however, is that it represents the first time in more than 300 years that the First Folio of the plays has been edited in its entirety.
When it was published in 1623, the First Folio brought together all Shakespeare’s plays in one volume for the first time. (About half the extant plays were published in his lifetime in Quarto — sheets of paper folded in four — format.) The Folio has textual authority over the Quarto editions of the plays, and is widely regarded by actors as a sacred script, given that it was compiled by Shakespeare’s stage colleagues Burbage (who died soon into the vast undertaking), Hemings and Condell, from the King’s Men company.
Almost 400 hundred years on, we have in this handsome volume their legacy and that very plenty of which Neill writes. Bate, one of the foremost Shakespearean scholars of the day, reminds readers in his general introduction that the Folio text “keeps his plays anchored in the place from which they came and where they continue to be most alive: the theatre”.
That emphasis is reinforced by Michael Boyd, artistic director of the RSC, whose foreword points out, “remember that you are reading scripts … There’s an extent to which you shouldn’t ‘read’ this book at all, but rather speak the parts out loud.” Follow that advice and you will thrill to the realisation that these are the words that the King’s Men rehearsed and performed.
While remaining faithful to its raison d’être as the authorised version of the RSC, Complete Works does much in the realm of Shakespearean textual scholarship, providing careful explanations of Folio and rival Quarto variants. The differences astonish, as in Bates’s example from Othello, Act I, Scene 3, line 173. “Nearly all editions follow Quarto, even when Folio is their base text,” he notes.
This leaves the line ingrained in practice and popular memory as: “She gave me for my pains a world of sighs”, whereas the Folio reading is “She gave me for my pains a world of kisses”.
There is a world of difference here, and the RSC Folio is filled with such illuminations. (As a note: Neill’s very fine edition of Othello favours “sighs”, providing a lengthy footnote on the choice, which also indicates Olivier’s preference for that reading.)
If there is such a thing as a must-buy, this book is it. In effect, you are paying less than R10 a play, and what you are acquiring is a universe of human emotion and experience written by a genius, edited and introduced by superb scholars and played out on the boards for nearly 400 hundred years by great actors. Complete Works, though intended for a 21st-century audience, will never grow stale.
Will such longevity be the fate of Manga Shakespeare, a series of graphic novels based on the plays? Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are the first to be rendered in manga form, and work splendidly in the genre.
Staying in the land of manga, Romeo and Juliet is set in today’s Tokyo. The Capulets and the Montagues become rival Yakuza clans, Friar Laurence a Shinto priest, Tybalt a dragon-tattooed, takana-wielding youth. Romeo is a rock star and Juliet hangs out in Shibuya, the heartland of teen and twentysomething consumer fads.
Sonia Leong’s illustrations are striking and instantly engaging, giving the transplanted story an immediacy and urgency. The cover blurb claims that the series uses “Shakespeare’s original texts”, a moot point given the RSC edition, but it doesn’t really matter: words are respected here, and so too is the spirit of the original. Manga fans aside, Shakespeare scholars will find something to savour here, as well as in Hamlet, illustrated by Emma Vieceli and set in 2107 with climate change adding to what is rotten in the state of Denmark.