The New Way with Shakespeare’s Texts: An Introduction for Lay Readers

Summary

By the beginning of the War of 1914–18 it was becoming clear, thanks to the work of Pollard and Greg, that the study of Shakespeare’s texts was making a fresh start, the right start at last, because leading to the true high road, from which there would be no turning back. It was, as I shall now show, some years yet before we actually found it. But round about 1920 many of us already felt confident that we were close upon it. To what extent Greg shared this premature optimism I do not know. But his intimate friend and fellow bibliographer Ronald McKerrow, a man almost morbidly cautious by temperament, was contemplating an edition of Shakespeare as early as 1910, so that I suppose both men must have considered this a not impossible task even then. As for their senior, and my intimate friend, Alfred Pollard, he was certainly an optimist, for I possess a typescript copy of the Textual Introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare (published in The Tempest volume, 1921) which he had read with approval and in the margins of which he had pencilled suggestions, some of which found their way into the published version. Yet that Introduction, though I still think it well-planned, seems a generation later almost ludicrously optimistic in tone.