PREFATORY NOTE

Summary

Though this edition of Othello is the joint-product of Dr Alice Walker and myself, she has generously shouldered a good three-quarters of the burden by making herself responsible for the preparation of the text together with everything in the volume that comes after the text, leaving the introduction to me. Once we had made our drafts, however, they were exchanged and criticized freely. The Notes and Glossary, indeed, passed to and fro between us more than once, and readers will observe that we were not always able to find agreement even then. Textual scholars will also remark that the conclusions of the Note on the Copy, which is by right Dr Walker's alone, do not entirely tally with those reached by Sir Walter Greg in his recently published The Shakespeare First Folio. Such, differences of opinion are in fact inevitable in the existing state of textual research, especially when dealing with a play like Othello where the origin and character of one of the two substantive texts can only be guessed at. Nevertheless, I believe Dr Walker has here succeeded in giving us a far cleaner text than that printed by any previous editor. And for myself it has been an exhilarating and encouraging experience to collaborate, after thirty-five years of editorial endeavour, with one whose masterly handling of textual problems is matched by so sensitive an appreciation of the aesthetic issues involved. Her next undertaking for ‘The New Shakespeare’ will be an even more difficult one—Troilus and Cressida.