JOINT TITLES & EBOOKS

We have just received the completed text of our final director interview - fittingly, from RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd himself, on his epic production of the three parts of Henry VI. A few high res pictures still to come from the archive, but otherwise everything is on course for delivery of the last batch of individual volumes. If all goes well in production, our ten year task will be over. We began work shortly before Michael became Artistic Director; we published the Complete Works in 2007, at the climax of the extraordinary RSC Complete Works Festival, and we will bring the Individual Titles to completion as the RSC-produced World Shakespeare Festival gets under way in London in April 2012.

Since the RSC has nearly always produced the Henry VI plays as a cycle, we were always keen to publish all three parts in a single volume.The question then arose as to whether there should be any other joint titles or double volumes. We seriously explored the idea of doing Henry IV Part 1 as both a double volume with Part 2, in the Folio texts, and an individual volume of Part One alone in its Quarto text. This would have got round one of my few regrets about our Folio-based editorial policy: the watering-down of Falstaff's magnificent oaths and exclamations. I argued that theatregoers, who often get treated to paired productions of the two parts (most recently at the Globe), would like the double volume but that students doing Part One as a set text (it is prescribed far more often than Part Two) would like the singleton. But the publishers did not buy this argument.

The publishers' decision is always final: especially now the world of print publishing is so much tougher than it was ten years ago when we began. Being brutally realistic, we had to ask: how many copies will be sold of a solo volume of Timon of Athens or King John? We seriously considered not doing some of the plays in this format (and have, indeed, with regret decided not to do The Two Noble Kinsmen, on the grounds that it contains a fair bit more Fletcher than Shakespeare). A compromise was eventually reached: we are putting King John and Henry VIII together in a single volume -- the two "non-cyclical" histories, paired provocatively together (i.e. the two that are not part of a sequence of four plays, as all the other English histories are). I think it works, not least because they are both plays in which religion and politics go together: King John gives an important part to the dispute with a papal envoy, while Henry VIII turns on the break from Rome. Maybe we should have boldly called them "Two Reformation Histories".

The solution for Timon, meanwhile, was to pair it with Titus. "Two classical plays", bringing together Athens and Rome, the great warrior turning on the city and the great philanthropist turning on his friends. Titus has become a much studied, sold, produced and discussed play: we hope it will help Timon along. The pairing also avoided another publishing problem: Jonathan Bate edited Quarto Titus for the Arden Shakespeare series and there was a non-compete clause in the contract: he could not edit the play again in a single volume for a different publisher. Whilst we could have argued that an edition of Folio Titus was a different play, that might have been pushing it a bit.

Questions of this sort around publishing agreements also explain the non-appearance (yet) of e-books. We have a complex arrangement whereby Random House hold US rights and Macmillan publish us in UK/Europe/Commonwealth. But the enforcement of regional rights in e-books is much harder to sustain, so discussions are ongoing. There are various other rights and related issues to be ironed out, as well as technical ones. Thanks for patience ...

On the matter of "Shakespeare & Fletcher", now I'm off (at last) to watch Cardenio. And any readers who have stayed with this blog despite its long silences may like to watch this space for an announcement coming soon regarding Shakespeare's Collaborative Plays.

Comments

[Colin Simmonds]

Huge thanks for this detailed and fascinating blog! I must say that I personally regret the decision to combine TA/ToA and KJ/KH8, but I fully understand the legal and commercial reasons behind it. But it IS a pity that we won't get individual volumes of ALL the Shakespeare plays in the RSC edition.

One of the trivial reasons for my regret - as someone who intends to collect and own the entire series - is how to order them on my bookshelf! At present I am putting them in the order that Shakespeare wrote them, which will no longer be possible! There must be dozens of ways of ordering the plays, and it would be interesting to find out what choices people have made. Histories, Comedies, Tragedies. Romances? Problem Plays? There are so many categories! And what of Isaac Asimov's scheme of dividing them into Greek, Roman, Italian and English?

Anyway, thank you again for your timely blog. I look forward with interest to your announcement about the collaborative plays!

[Tad Davis]

On the ebook topic: as a frequent user of Kindle, both hardware and iPhone versions, not to mention Apple's iBooks app and the Nook app, I have yet to find a Shakespeare ebook whose formatting actually works.

Here's some of the things that always seem to happen.

(1) The poetry is indented too far to the right, causing many lines to wrap.

(2) The wrapping process is stupid beyond belief. Verse is not wrapped with a hanging indent, but goes flush left. The following line begins, as the previous one did, too far to the right. That only makes problem (1) worse. The result is a "ragged left" margin rather than the more pleasing (on electronic devices) "ragged right."

(3) The marginal line numbers get mixed up with the text. "To be or not to be 100, that is the question."

(4) The glosses display after whatever text ends the printed page, regardless of what "page" the ebook is on. So we have something like this: half a screen of text from the play, followed by five lines of glosses, followed by a fourth of a screen of text from the play.

The only way to do glosses effectively in an ebook (in my opinion) is to set them up as hypertext. A light underline under the glossed passage indicates the presence of the gloss; the reader can move the cursor over the passage to see the gloss.

(5) Prose passages are forced into full justification, but the display technology is not able to fine-tune the spacing between letters, opting instead for massive spacing between words. If "muse of fire" were in prose, it would look like this:

"Oh for a muse of fire...."

Actually, this becomes a problem in verse as well, when a half-line is printed right-justified: the beginning of the line is so far over to the right from the rest of the text it looks like a satellite.

These examples are all taken from real Shakespeare ebooks on all of the above devices. In fact, I have yet to find a single Shakespeare ebook that DOESN'T commit some or all of these crimes against the text.

If you have any "political capital" to use in this situation, please argue for a more sophisticated use of ebook formatting. Otherwise there's no point in doing them. I would LOVE to have the complete RSC Shakespeare in ebook format, even if I have to buy each play all over again -- but not if I have to mentally reconstruct the text as I'm reading it.

[Tad Davis]

I see (of course) that my "muse of fire" example fell flat because HTML took out the extra spaces.

[Anon]

For anyone who stumbles onto this blog entry: the RSC eBooks are now available in the UK in both Kindle (from Amazon) and ePub (Waterstones; bookdepository; but not kobobooks.com yet) formats.

Thank you so much for releasing them: I grabbed Hamlet immediately, and will be picking up a good chunk of the remainder as my wallet allows :)