From Jonathan Bate
What do think are the main challenges of editing a collection of Shakespeare’s work?
There are two main challenges, one technical and the other cultural. The technical problem is that 50% of Shakespeare’s plays exist both in Quarto form (single editions, a bit like modern paperbacks) and in the First Folio (the collected works put together by his fellow-actors after his death). And in several of the greatest plays, such as Hamlet and King Lear, there are many differences between Quartos and Folio. So which version do you begin from? The one closest to Shakespeare’s original manuscripts—which do not survive—or the one authorized by the men who actually staged the plays? The second challenge is the fact that language, orthography and cultural expectations have changed drastically in the four centuries since the plays were written. Do we modernize the spelling and punctuation? What do we do about words that have changed in meaning or that are now little understood? And how do we deal with allusions—to the Bible, say, or classical mythology—that were easily recognizable in Shakespeare’s time, but now are not?
What do you see as the distinguishing feature(s) of your edition of Shakespeare’s complete works?
Ours is the first modern-spelling edition since that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to use the First Folio as the base text for all of the thirty-six plays gathered by the original editorial team of Shakespeare’s fellow-actors and their scribes. Our first edition (2007) was also the first to separate out Folio stage directions from those that are merely inferred from the text, and which are often speculative, akin to the decisions of a stage director. Also the first to include what we called “running scene” numbers, acknowledging that Shakespeare’s staging was much more fluid than is implied by the traditional division into five acts. We were also, perhaps naughtily, more explicit than any of our predecessors in our glossing of Shakespeare’s ribald language. Our second edition (2022) is unique in introducing a marginal commentary revealing key staging decisions in one hundred Royal Shakespeare Company productions, showing how the plays can be interpreted in so many different ways.
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?
Our main influences were the editors of the 1623 First Folio (John Hemmings, Henry Condell, Ralph Crane and Edward Knight), the first “modernizing” editor Nicholas Rowe (1709), and the pioneering women who created the first (old spelling) Folio-based edition (Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 1903).
In which ways do you think the technological, social, and political changes of our times may affect future editions of Shakespeare’s complete works?
We are nearing the end of the age in which print is the primary medium for scholarly editions of the complete works: digital and Cloud-based editions, downloadable to iPads, smartphones and so on, are the inevitable future. There will be amazing opportunities for hypertext, links to archival materials and video of productions. My worry is this: digital media evolve so fast and are so vulnerable to interference, that they do not have the durability of print. In the early 1990s, I was general editor of an amazing Complete Works that included the entire Arden second series, facsimiles of all the Quartos and the Folio, a collection of Shakespeare’s sources and many other resources, all with hypertext links. But the Internet did not yet exist. The publisher thought that the future was the CD-ROM. There is hardly a single computer left anywhere in the world on which our edition can be read!