Observer Review Books Pages 11 May 2008

Paperback of the week: The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen RSC/ Macmillan pounds 19.99, pp2,576

ROBERT McCRUM   

© Copyright 2008.  The Observer.  All rights reserved.
Like many very good ideas, a collected Shakespeare in paperback is such a remarkably simple one it's surprising it has not been done more often before. Indeed, almost everything about this edition is outstanding. To begin with, it's an attractively produced volume of the plays based on the 1623 First Folio, the landmark Shakespeare edition. Second, it's the work of two fine scholars who have harvested the labours of many experts to produce an edition that contains the fruit of the best contemporary research. Third, this exemplary text has greatly benefited from the active involvement of the RSC, a company whose recent work, notably Henry VI, under the direction of Michael Boyd, has exhibited an almost obsessional devotion to the meaning of Shakespeare's words in performance. Most important, and for all its academic credentials, this new edition has also been produced for the general reader, with one eye firmly on the school and university market.

And why not? Shakespeare was always a writer who, as a shareholder in the Globe theatre, understood the need to put bums on seats. So, as part of the prefatory material to each play, the reader gets not only a useful plot summary, but also some vital (and strangely interesting) statistics about the texts. For example, in The Merchant of Venice , this edition tells you that

13 per cent of the lines go to Shylock,

7 per cent to Antonio (the Merchant) and 22 per cent to Portia. Again, in Julius Caesar , it's interesting to discover that it's Brutus who has the lion's share (28 per cent), while Mark Antony (whom everyone remembers) gets just 13 per cent. As well as the kind of information that would suit a pub quiz, there are also some excellent mini essays on the historical background to the works, some reliable source summaries and an authoritative body of footnotes. The chronology of the Bard's creative life will no doubt enrage the Oxfordians, but to sensible people will simply confirm the astonishing creativity of our greatest writer.

As a bonus, this chunky paperback also includes the Sonnets and the Long Poems ( The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis ).

All's well: the Bard has been reborn.

The acclaimed Michael Grandage Othello with Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor has been recorded for radio and will be on Radio 3 at 8 o'clock on Sunday night. Not an RSC production but, intriguingly, Grandage was an actor in the great Nunn/McKellen production, which emphatically was.

This link will remain live for 7 days from broadcast - not sure if it's archived after that.

In proof reading the 'individual volume' text of Love's Labour's Lost, eagle-eyed Associate Editor Trey Jansen has spotted that at Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.508-10 (p.354 in Complete Works) Boyet is completing Berowne’s verse line (indicated by rhyme of ‘merrily’ with ‘eye’). So Boyet is speaking verse, beginning with indented half-line ‘Full merrily’, then ‘This brave manage … run’ is a fresh verse line (‘run’ rhyming with Berowne’s ‘done’ in next line). Apologies to all readers. We have informed Gregory Doran, who has our Love's Labour's script in the rehearsal room as David Tennant prepares to play Berowne.

For JB's reflections on the claims of the new complete Middleton edition, see this week's TLS. We welcome responses from avid Middletonians in the comments section of this blog.

Here is the book being consulted on BBC1 prime time television on Shakespeare's birthday.

Shakespeare Complete Works ed By Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

This meticulously scholarly new edition has been produced in association with the RSC, which is highly appropriate given the emphasis in Jonathan Bate's Introduction (he also provides essays on each play) on Shakespeare as a pragmatic man of the theatre, and his plays as working scripts, not untouchable texts.

This edition is based on the First Folio, seen into print by the Bard's fellow actors and not fully edited for more than 300 years. It is sure to become the standard Shakespeare.

Sunday Telegraph, 20 April 2008

The paperback edition is now out (in the UK only). Its initial effect seems, very pleasingly, to have been to boost sales of the hardback:

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 773 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories:

#1 in	Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Shakespeare, William > The Plays
#1 in	Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Drama > By Period > Shakespeare
#1 in	Books > Poetry, Drama & Criticism > Drama > Playwrights, A-Z > ( R-S )

Of course we are delighted that there is a paperback, especially for course adoption for students, but we do strongly encourage everyone to get at least one hardback, to endure through the generations. It's still a bargain, given its beauty and size!

Some people are snobby about customer reviews on Amazon. We are not, especially when they are like this one. Thank you "Alixayd", whomseover you may be:

          

                Best ever edition, 16 April 2008       

      

       

By	Alixayd (London, England)  - See all my reviews

      

Every play and poem in one book with footnotes at the bottom so you can understand what virtually every word means. There's also great introductions to each play so you get some background information on the characters, so you feel the emotion because you feel where every character is coming from when they say certain lines. People usually avoid reading Shakespeare because they think its just some esoteric babble that got forced on them at school as a form of torture, but what the RSC do is they make it accessible, so much Kudos to them. I have to agree with Dame Judi Dench's review that every household should have this book because its absolutely brilliant.

An excellent new project has been announced: the digitization of all the pre-1641 Shakespeare Quartos. It is a transatlantic collaboration led by the Bodleian at Oxford and the Folger in DC. Most of the Quartos have been available online for some time, e.g. from the British Library and the Internet Shakespeare Editions, but this will be a welcome addition. It reinforces the case made in the pdf essay on this website concerning the textual principles of our edition that the future for what might be called "primary source" Shakespeare lies with the web. The concept of an original-spelling edition must now be moribund: why have such a thing when you can see the originals? But, as the essay also argues, the ready accessibility of the primary materials frees the print editor to focus more directly on questions of how best to present "mediated" -- i.e. edited, annotated, spelling and punctuation modernised -- Shakespeare to students, actors, playgoers and readers. One publishing industry press report of the digitized quarto project has expressed surprise that no publisher is involved in the scheme. That seems a curious claim, given that publishers are commercial operations, whereas the digitization grant consists of UK and US government funding in the public interest, to make these fascinating materials freely available to all. The role of publishers should be to take the raw materials and, working with scholars and teachers, transform them into artifacts -- whether digital or print -- that make Shakespeare "our contemporary", a living playwright and poet, to be read, performed and understood. No student ever begins with raw quartos. They are a fascinating complicating factor for the second or third stage of the journey. And of course we continue to maintain that Folio, not Quarto, texts are the best place to begin.

Meanwhile, the indefatigible scholar Sir Brian Vickers has published a fascinating essay in this week's TLS, using plagiarism detection software as a device for attributing Elizabethan plays. The plagiarism software detects patterns of usage by identifying repeated use of triplets of words. Vickers suggests that literary self-plagiarism can be a marker of authorship. If there is a group of three words that recur repeatedly in one author's works and nowhere else within a large corpus save in an anonymous work, then the anonymous work may be attributed to the author who uses the triplets. This has led him to attribute a whole bunch of anonymously-published plays to Thomas Kyd, author of the great Spanish Tragedy, among them Arden of Faversham, Fair Em the Miller's Daughter of Manchester and King Leir. It's long been argued that Hamlet is Shakespeare's reworking of a lost Hamlet play by Kyd. We now have to consider the possibility that Lear is also WS's reworking of Kyd!

I am waiting to hear from Brian Vickers whether his research revealed any variaiton of patterns in the "quarrel" scene in Arden which Macdonald Jackson has attributed to Shakespeare in an essay sufficiently persuasive to make us include that scene, along with the Countess of Salsibury scenes from Edward III, on this website as scenes of possible Shakespearean authorship.

Vickers' other contention is that Kyd is the hitherto unidentified Third Man behind Henry VI Part 1. As we say in the edition, current scholarship considers this to be the odd-one out in the Henry VI "trilogy". Shakespeare only seems to have contributed the Temple Garden and Talbot scenes. Nashe seems to be the other contributor, but scholars have also detected a third hand (some even find a fourth) and Vickers suggests that it is Kyd's. Perhaps Nashe & Kyd wrote the play as a "prequel" to cash in on the success of Shakespeare's two-parter now known as Henry VI Parts 2 & 3, but Shakespeare then took it over and added bits such as the Temple Garden scene, which ties it to his drama on the Wars of the Roses.

The main problem with the self-plagiarism argument is that there is so much plagiarism of phrases between dramatists in the period. After all, the first reference we have to Shakespeare as a man of the theatre is Greene/Chettle's accusation that he is a plagiarist who beautifies himself with the feathers of other dramatists, among whom Kyd is surely to be numbered. If Shakespeare acted in some of Kyd's plays, as is likely, he would have learned his lines and internalised Kyd's habits of speech. So: health warning applies, but all fascinating stuff, showing that the story of Shakespearean revision and collaboration will never be over.

The UK paperback edition of the Complete Works is coming very soon. Once again, Amazon are offering a shockingly competitive discount, equating to a cost of about half a pence per page. We would recommend everyone to have a hardback -- with the sturdy binding, double bookmarks and superb paper with no show through -- as a permanent heirloom and reference work on their shelves, but also to get the more portable paperback and make notes in it, take it to class, bash it around, read it (as the original Folio editors said) "again and again" ... and don't treat it with quite the reverence that is due to the lovely hardback.