3b - Editions and textual studies

Summary

In reviewing The RSC Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen’s edition of the Complete Works (2007), in the TLS (17 August 2007), I complained that ‘the RSC-ness of The RSC Shakespeare is an invisible element’, for, apart from the title-page, a one-page foreword by the RSC’s Artistic Director, Michael Boyd, and a single insert of some photographs from RSC productions, there was no sign of the RSC’s work informing the edition. Now, with the appearance in 2008 of the first five volumes of individual plays in the series, there has been a distinct turn for the better.

Chosen in part to match the RSC’s 2008 repertory, the editions of (in F1 order) The Tempest, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard Ⅲ and Hamlet use the introductions, texts, commentary and collations from the Complete Works, unaltered as far as I have checked. But they add to them brief but deft ‘Overviews’ of each play’s stage-history by Jan Sewell, a more extended and well-researched examination of the play in performance at the RSC by Karin Brown and, probably most significantly, interviews with and, in some cases, an essay by actors, directors and designers who have been involved in productions, mostly, though not always, at the RSC. Richard III, for instance, has interviews with the actor Simon Russell Beale (Richard in 1992), the director Bill Alexander (1984) and the designer Tom Piper (2006) and an essay by Richard Eyre reflecting on his National Theatre production (1990), while Hamlet has interviews with Ron Daniels (RSC 1984 and 1989), John Caird (NT 2000) and Michael Boyd (RSC 2004).