Editions and Textual Studies

Summary

New editions of three of Shakespeare’s plays from Oxford (Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and four from Cambridge (2 Henry IV, Henry VIII, 1 Henry VI and King John), of the narrative poems from Penguin and of a new venture in photo-facsimile publishing, amounting in all to well over two thousand pages, present a daunting prospect to the neophyte reviewer. All of these editions contain valuable and useful material, which Shakespeare scholars cannot afford to ignore: they all deserve close attention, but they are of rather varying quality.

The single-volume Oxford and Cambridge editions go their different ways, the one rather grand and austere, the other from time to time quite lively. As a whole the introductions to these editions are disappointing. Only Brooke's to Macbeth rises above the discussion of character and narrative and, while the other editors have interesting things to say about the plays, they are surprisingly lacking in ideas about them as dramatic fictions. Too often (especially with this group of plays), editors resort to an appeal to the theatre of the 'This may not be Shakespeare's best or most interesting play, but it works on the stage' kind. Most of the editors of the Oxford and Cambridge volumes feel that the way to show how the play works in the theatre is to go through its plot but, with the exception of Beaurline's King John (heavily indebted to Emrys Jones), they make little use of scenic analysis and rarely point out Shakespeare's self-borrowing beyond the purely verbal level. Few editors draw qn the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries outside the theatre to set his achievements in the context of Renaissance poetry or prose; there is little here to suggest how he might be responding to the works of other writers.