From Stephen Greenblatt
What do think are the main challenges of editing a collection of Shakespeare’s work?
First things first: figuring out what texts to print. About half of Shakespeare’s plays appeared both in small-format versions (quartos), printed in the playwright’s lifetime, and in the large-format First Folio (1623), published seven years after his death. Even setting aside a variety of blunders that were made by the workers in the printing house, the plays that exist in both quarto and folio form have many differences, sometimes minor and sometimes quite significant. Any responsible edition needs to establish and articulate a set of clear principles of editing based on a conception of what “Shakespeare’s work” actually is and how to represent it as faithful as possible.
And then: Shakespeare’s first editors, Heminges and Condell, wrote that if you do not like Shakespeare, “surely you are in some manifest danger, not to understand him.” They added, “And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can be your guides: if you need them not, you can lead yourselves, and others.” The overarching challenges of editing the works of Shakespeare are to act as the author’s friend and to help the reader understand him. To act as his friend means to try to determine, as best you can, what he wrote and to respect his choices. That is, I am dead set against editions of Shakespeare that “translate” him into contemporary English. At the same time to help the reader understand and therefore like him means to provide whatever guides you can to make the experience as deeply pleasurable as possible. This includes modernizing spelling, inserting stage directions where needed, adding notes and glosses to explicate archaic or obscure words and phrases, providing genealogies, maps, bibliographies, filmographies, etc.
What do you see as the distinguishing features of your edition of Shakespeare’s complete works?
I hope that our edition provides a text scrupulously edited on principles that are consistent, transparent and fully explicated; clear and illuminating introductions; helpful notes and glosses, along with other explanatory materials. Our edition, which has a robust digital presence as well as a handsomely printed and illustrated text in a variety of formats, includes such features as fully edited texts of all three versions of Hamlet (Q1, Q2, and F) and three versions of King Lear (Q, F, and a conflated version). On the digital site, readers can hover over a word or phrase to see the gloss – leaving the text on the screen completely clear—and click on passages to hear them read by professional actors and click on longer interpretive and performance notes. It is not the words alone that can thereby come to life. There was a remarkable and pervasive presence of music in Shakespeare’s plays, and our edition includes recordings of all of the songs, accessible with a click.
How much do you feel the work of previous editors of Shakespeare have informed and shaped your own edition? Is there a particular one you would single out?
The 3rd edition of the Norton Shakespeare edited all of the plays and poems from scratch, an enormous enterprise. But, of course, any edition is built upon the entire editorial tradition. For many years I taught from the Riverside edition, and inevitably I was both influenced by it and acting against it. Likewise with David Bevington’s edition. And the texts of the 1st and 2nd edition of the Norton Shakespeare were both based on the Oxford edition. Here too what we have produced in the 3rd edition is both indebted to and pushing away from what the Oxford editors chose to do.
In which ways do you think the technological, social, and political changes of our times may affect future editions of Shakespeare’s complete works?
I look forward to editions that will make it easy to compare performances of the same scene – the video equivalent of Bible Gateway. But I have learned not to be confident about making any such predictions. When years ago, in the first edition of the Norton Shakespeare, I pointed out in a gloss the racist subtext of a line in Much Ado About Nothing, I was attacked (by one of my former teachers, Harold Bloom, no less) as the chief of the School of Resentment. I do not think that many people would now regard such a gloss as the expression of ressentiment. It is, in my view, part of friendship to acknowledge differences, including those marked by the passage of 400 years.