Being "straight to paperback", the individual volumes have not garnered the wide review coverage of the Complete, but the 400th anniversary of the Sonnets has inspired La Stampa to review the Sonnets and other Poems: link here. Very fitting to have such coverage in an Italian paper, since the sonnet is the quintessential Italian renaissance lyric form. Cap doffed for a moment to Petrarch, wthout whom, etc.
Tomorrow, May 20, is the 400th anniversary of the entering of Shakespeare's Sonnets on the Stationers' Register. In honour of this, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a sonnet of sonnets -- 14 poems dispersed through the day's classical music. They will be read by Sir Ian McKellen ... from our text.
Our second batch of individual titles - Macbeth, Lear, Winter's Tale, Antony and Cleopatra and Sonnets and other Poems - are published this week.
We are especially proud of the poetry volume: other editors have either published the sonnets and narrative poems separately (Penguin, Arden, Cambridge etc.) or produced a book of unwieldy bulk (Oxford). Ours not only has a better title than rivals ("narrative poems" is offputting and doesn't take into account the fact that 'Phoenix and Turtle' is elegiac rather than narrative), but is also neither skimpy on annotation nor too bulky - just under 400 pages - and yet it still has a lovely clean page, with just one sonnet per page.
Timely too, as the 400th anniversary of the first publication of the sonnets is now upon us: see this article in yesterday's London Times.
Naseem Dawood, the distinguished translator of the Koran and the Arabian Nights for Penguin Classics, argues that we have a textual error in the great temptation scene Othello, 3.3: at lines 298-300 Othello says "O curse of marriage! / That we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites!" Dawood proposes that the last word should have an apostrophe: And not their appetites'. Men call wives their own but the real possessor of women is their appetites. They belong to their appetites, hence a possessive apostrophe. Or maybe even 'appetite's'. Analogy:
O curse of editing / That we can call these delicate decisions ours / And not Shakespeare's.
Without an apostrophe it means "we can say that we own our wives but not that we own their appetites", which is plausible but weaker than the idea of "legally we own them but in reality their sexual appetites own them".
Insertion of an apostrophe would direct ultra-careful readers to the primary meaning proposed by Dawood, but it might look fussy on the page. And in a way this is hair-splitting, since in the theatre you can't hear the difference between the two readings. The individual edition of Othello is just going into proof. Does anyone think we should emend?
This blog was persuaded to contribute to the Guardian blog today: here's the story (Hamlet again).
Today's Guardian has a picture of mission control in its Writers' Rooms feature. The Complete Work, with the first five individuals atop it, is just visible.
For David Tennant's first response to our Hamlet edition, follow the link to a feature in The Stage.
This blog has been silent while JB works on proofs of a new "intellectual biography" of Shakespeare, forthcoming in the UK at the end of October, under the title Soul of the Age: the Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare and in the USA next April, under the title Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. The sub-title is only one of the many subtle differences between the US and UK versions, the result of the curious fact that, despite the best efforts of globalisation, New York and London publishers have very different views about all sorts of things, ranging from cover designs to typography to expectations regarding assumed reader knowledge to single versus double quotation marks. We were unusually lucky to persuade our New York and London publishers to go for the same cover and content for the Complete Works. The individual volumes, now out in the USA and coming on 5 September in UK, do, by contrast, have different covers and slight differences of typography and text streaming. Content, however, is substantively the same.
In the wider world of Shakespearean textual publishing, there are some interesting questions around at the moment. For instance: Cengage Learning, publishers of the venerable Arden Shakespeare series, have recently completed acquisition of the Houghton Mifflin College Division, publishers of the Riverside Shakespeare, which -- until our arrival on the scene! -- was in our view one of the two best single volume annotated complete works editions (the other being the David Bevington). But Arden and Riverside have very different editorial principles (e.g. in the area of spelling modernization): in the long-term, one wonders how well they will sit beside each other ...
The impending first batch of individual volumes is trailed in this week's Bookseller magazine.
A very interesting article has appeared in the best internet think-journal, Slate. By Ron Rosenbaum, who's on our advisory board (but didn't have anything to do with the decision in question), it discusses our exclusion of "Lover's Complaint" and inclusion of "To the Queen" in the Complete Works. Here's the link: do read it.
But some clarification is needed. We have not thrown the Complaint out of the entire edition. We have edited and annotated it, and it's here on this website. Furthermore, it will be included -- as will The Passionate Pilgrim -- in our edition of the Sonnets and Poems forthcoming next April. It was excluded from the print Complete because the argument of Vickers and others did enough to persuade us (mainly me, JB) that it belongs in the category of dubia -- uncertain attribution -- along with certain of the Passionate Pilgrim poems and the possibly Shakespearean scenes in Edward III and Arden of Faversham, which we've also edited on the website.
It was only possible to include 2576 pages in the Complete Works. That meant we had to make tough inclusion/exclusion decisions at the margins, and since it is an RSC, a theatre-focused, edition, the Complaint was the loser.
"To the Queen" -- which we call an "epilogue" but the scholar Mick Hattaway has recently, interestingly, suggested may actually have been a post-performance prayer of a kind that was customary at court performances -- was included because it provides a rare window onto an original Shakespearean performance. The provenance is very strong and, when it was played on the Stratford stage by Nicholas Day soon after publication, it sent an authentically Shakespearean shiver down the spines of all who were present. Maybe it was a bit risky, a bit provocative, to give it an upgrade when we were giving Lover's Complaint and Passionate Pilgrim downgrades -- though, to repeat, not ejections -- but taking risks and provoking debates is one of the things most worthwhile about the editorial project. And Rosenbaum's piece is a most welcome addition to the debate.
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