World Famous Comics: William Shakespeare Complete Works (Modern Library)
William Shakespeare Complete Works (Modern Library)
By: William Shakespeare Publisher: Modern Library Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Modern Library Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 2560 Publication Date: April 03, 2007 Release Date: April 03, 2007
Product Description: FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’S FIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES.
Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably the most important literary work in the English language. But starting with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day, Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, gradually corrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflated textual variations.
Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio as a complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century. Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary and textual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values, this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theater professionals, and general readers alike.
For more information on this Modern Library edition, visit www.therscshakespeare.com
The Best Complete Works Available? This is the best Complete Works of Shakespeare that I own, and will likely to remain as such if the excellent people at the Arden Shakespeare do not deliver something magical when they most likely release a Complete Works set after wrapping up their third series editions in the next three years.
I will try to be brief yet lengthy enough to give you a good idea what this volume is all about. First, I will give a general introduction to its editing principles, the size of the volume and paper-quality. From that I will advance to talk about the positive things about the edition and then the negative. In the end I will try to summarize which edition you might want to buy and in what circumstance.
"Introduction"
What makes this edition different from any else is that its basis is the 1623 First Folio. In other words, they have not created hybrid texts as everyone else seems to be doing, whatever their intentions be. Instead, we get a rather strict update of the Folio, which as a literary work is unsurpassed perhaps only by the King James Version by its importance to the Western English-speaking culture.
What does it mean, then? If you go to the Oxford edition, they will give you two Lears. Why? Because they consider the Quarto Lear and the Folio Lear as different plays, and thus print both. The Norton, a student version of Oxford, adds to this a conflated version, which borrows from both. A sort of a best-of piece. Indeed, most versions you will see are conflated from the Q and F sources, but this is what happens with the RSC Shakespeare: they follow the F source all the way, but do print passages missing from the Folio after the play. They do the same with "Hamlet" and other plays with such problems. What this means is that technically everyone else has printed a hybrid version of a play Shakespeare never wrote or that was never published.
They also retain the conservative language-policy of the Folio. In early stages of the 17th century a decree was given according to which profanity was to be put under surveillance in the play-books that had become a market on their own. Thus, when we have an early quarto of our dear sir John Falstaff cursing, it most likely will have been softened for the Folio. Bate and Rasmussen retain this distinction, and whether you like it or not is up to you: at least they are not ambiguous but follow the Folio. After all, that was the point of the whole edition.
"The Two Noble Kinsmen", "Pericles" and the poems were not in the Folio, you may say. Are they included? They are. The two plays after all the others in double-column forward, edited, alright, but in a smaller font to make distinction between what was in the Folio originally and what was not. Also the scene from "Sir Thomas More" attributed to Shakespeare is there. All the poems are there, as well, so this is a complete works of Shakespeare even by our modern standards.
"Book Size and Weight"
The book is a hefty one, a ludicrous statement considering that it is a Complete Works of Shakespeare I am talking about. In other words, do not feel betrayed when this arrives to your doorstep and it actually takes space in your bookshelf and actually weights a bit. The hardcover might be problematic if you have to carry it to college all the time, yet you could buy individual plays, then. Of course, I do not know about other countries and their academic course structure, but here in Finland we had specific plays we read during the year and analyzed, in fact separated to "Comedies" and "Tragedies", so I have never really had this problem. If you have a vaguely titled course entitled as "Shakespeare", I can only sympathize with you.
But then again, we pamper too much the student-audience of Shakespeare, when in fact not all of us who read the RSC Shakespeare are students attending to the university (although I am one, admittedly). This is a marvellous edition, and its heftiness makes it feel secure and strong.
"The layout and editorial heft"
I will now advance to the generally positive remarks. In other words, the stuff that makes this the standout edition that it is. Firstly, the one-column layout. Of the editions I have seen (Penguin, Arden, Oxford, Bevington, Riverside, Collins, Norton) only the Norton has a single-column layout for the text. Of the ones mentioned only Bevington does not feel crammed as the others do with their two columns, yet Bevington has insufficient space for one's notes. For notetaking the Norton isn't so fit, either, because although the page contains only a single column, the page is not too wide to include much white space. In this respect this is such a pleasure to read, and after reading it once from beginning to end, all 2,500 pages of it, I may now find myriads of notes written on the white space on many pages. For discussion of page-thickness, see below.
"Introductions"
How is the editorial matter? I am one of those who is put off by too much in too little space, and the Norton is a prime example of this. There is much in small print which simply discourages me to read any of it. One gets used to it after a while, but sometimes, especially with the introductions, I wonder if Greenblatt could have edited his contribution a bit further. Also, I do not like if there is too much cultural knowledge in the beginning of the book, as I like, for the first time, to read from beginning to end, and have the wholeness of it experienced. I remember being discouraged by the Bevington, the Riverside and the Norton.
As you might have guessed from my rhetoric, not so here. Bate gives a general introduction which is short yet long enough to get us excited about Shakespeare and immersed enough in the cultural surroundings. This is coming from a reader who has read a bit about Elizabethan culture and commerce, so I cannot vouch for the general acceptability or sufficiency of the introduction and whether it really is suitable for first-timers. Either way, his gift is his theatrical knowledge, and it is wonderful to read about some of his insight about the staging and the theatre-trivia that he embeds in his introductions, and a problem for many introductions is that they only seem like massive libraries, not written introductions in themselves, which might seem daunting. This, on the other hand, is a well-structured and balanced text. One important scholarly aspect of this edition is that it acknowledges Lukas Erne as an influence, whose Shakespeare As Literary Dramatist is destined to become the first real classic of twenty-first century Shakespeare criticism. Erne's groundbreaking analysis shows that Shakespeare was more likely to have written future publication in mind than is generally presumed (the length of "Hamlet" and "King Lear" in the Folio being good examples in themselves). Although the theatrical director of the Royal Shakespeare Company understandably tries to diminish this by musing that Shakespeare, first of all, wrote for the stage and not for the page (the man has tickets to sell!), we no longer have to cope with the embarrassingly out-of-date "scholarly" methodology of an Anthony Gurr who goes on to argue, even in the second edition of the Norton Shakespeare, that Shakespeare couldn't have been any less interested about the publication of his works. We are lucky that this edition does not rehash material, making it the first real edition of Shakespeare in this century, not the Bevington, Norton or any other.
"Introductions to the plays"
How about the introductions to the plays themselves? Unfortunately so many of the editions floating around are designated to the student that there isn't much to say about the introductions besides the obvious points. They are short this time, yet much of them are still full of the most obvious stuff, especially when Bate analyzes the play. Succinct but uninspiring. The good thing is, indeed, that the introductions are very short and do not get in the way when one wishes to read the play, but this is also the downfall: the introductions are general and so is the attempted analysis. I don't mind: I have my Goddards, Nuttalls, Blooms and Garbers for commentary. The point of a good introduction is not to analyze exhaustively but merely to give the essential knowledge to enjoy the play and give the proper key to unravel the mysteries of the play and actually find out things by ourselves. Sometimes Bate does get a bit redundant, and sometimes I outright disagreed with him, but generally the introductions are fine. However, there is some unbelievable occasional blather, as well. For example, he writes of the ending of "The Two Gentlemen Of Verona" that " We do get the ending we expect and desire, but the abruptness with which it comes about is a sign of impatience or immaturity on Shakespeare's part--but then again, his mind was so restlessly inventive that he never really cared for endings." (p. 55) Thus, the introductions can be theatrically illuminating at best and at worst as clueless as shown above. Such analysis is not pervasive, thankfully (you may read a fine analysis of the ending, which I by the way think is superb, in Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker), and often the introductions are nice reads.
But the best thing about the introductions are the fact-boxes: the plot summarized, the date given, primary textual sources given and then, the best of it all, the ratio of the verse and prose in the play, and a list of how much does a character speak of all the lines, how many speeches does he or she have, and in how many scenes does he or she appear in. This is pure gold and very useful. I haven't ever really realized that 90% of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is prose, only the remaining 10% is verse. Also, Iago has a very small percentage of lines in the play he dominates, and Prospero and Hamlet utterly dominate theirs.
As these are theatre-people giving us a text, they have made one wonderful contribution to enhance our understanding of the text. As you may know, the division of the play into five acts is not so much a Shakespearean convention (he does it occasionally) but a later frivolity. I think Shakespeare can be better understood as a continuation of scenes that follow one another, and for example for "Hamlet" we have besides the traditional numbering "5.2" a marking in the right margin that counts the number of scenes without interruption ("running scene 17"). These are utterly indispensable. With "Othello", as Bate remarks, they dramatically enhance our understanding of the double time Shakespeare employs.
"The Negative"
Is there anything generally negative in this edition? Sure, but we have to be reasonable. For example, the page-thickness is, if not exactly biblically thin, very close to it. In fact, if I pressed too hard with my pencil (a lead pencil, by the way) I could see the mark three or four pages ahead. That is, I often mark compelling passages with a vertical line on the left side of the text, and sometimes I pressed even so slightly too hard and I saw the line on not only the next one, but the following, as well. It should be noted that I also wrote my running commentary on the white space on the right side of the text, and some of it bleeds, or should we say, is "pressed" from the recto to the verso on the other side, but nothing too drastic. I do admit that this might be a problem if you either press too hard, as I was deliberately delicate with my writing as not to damage the pages. Yet to be reasonable, to have the volume be any thicker from what it is already would be off the limits and I'm sure they did try to make the pages as thick as possible in the circumstances.
The real drawback that they could have done better is the way they printed the glosses on the bottom of the page. I found the glosses quite good in this edition, but this shares the problem of the Riverside that it is bothersome to find a line where you have a difficult word to understand and then count the line number which ever it is, for example l. 247, and then go to the bottom of the page to see if it is glossed. To my surprise I saw myself not using glosses that much anymore apart from a few crucial places where the meaning is utterly obscure and not understandable from the context and the RSC did provide a gloss in most cases. The problem is that most often my eye skipped right to the bottom column and of course it took time to find the correct place. The Norton, for all its flaws, has a nice system as it prints the gloss in the right margin on the same line as the text. This, of course, discourages the reader from figuring things out by himself as I like to do, and would have been impossible for the RSC as they print their stage directions in that space. But they could have done what Bevington did: to add a line number to each line for which there is a gloss in the bottom section. Bevington's drawback is that he only marks the line numbers according to the glosses, so counting lines is occasionally a difficult procedure. The RSC at least has a constant numbering system as they mark every fifth line.
"Summary"
Apart from this and the occasional lack of illumination in Bate's analysis and comments, this is the best collected edition of Shakespeare that I know of, and am very glad that I now have it in my home library to take and read. It is also very nice to have the plays in the Folio order (Oxford and Norton have them in so-called "chronological" order; others mainly add a fourth genre for "The Tempest", "The Winter's Tale" and "Measure For Measure", etc.)
In short, this is a very attractive volume, and the white space is useful for an avid commentator such as myself. The pages are thin and the introductions are occasionally disappointingly redundant (and, let's face it, no writer can live up to the expectations of every reader), yet the editing is superb, and it makes all the difference in the world to have a clear source edition on which this text is based. I very much recommend this volume for each enthusiast.
But which volume to buy? Well, they are all hefty ones. The Riverside stands the tallest, then the Bevington, then the Norton pretty much at even height with this. This volume is perhaps the thickest of the four I own. I do not recommend the Oxford edition for a personal grudge concerning its editorial policy, and naturally I wouldn't recommend its offspring, the Norton, although it is the only one besides the RSC that has single-column layout for the plays. The Riverside is the only one at the moment that does not print the full names of the characters in the speech headings, a noticeable flaw.
I would lean towards this edition for a few reasons. First of all, it is consistent when it has taken as its mission to edit the First Folio. This means that they actually have real editions of plays, not hybrids that take bits and pieces from everywhere. I find the idea of having a newly-edited First Folio at hand very attractive. Secondly, the layout is magnificent for note-taking, and although the paper is thin, it does not bother me. The page does not feel crammed like the Riverside or even the Norton. The Bevington is pleasurable to read as well, but because of two columns it has less space for notes. The final reason is the most personal, but not the least important: Bate recognizes an influence in Lukas Erne, the author of Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, in which Erne gives solid evidence that Shakespeare not only wrote for the stage but wrote long plays (that obviously had to be cut for performance) publication in mind. The Norton is so immersed in its flawed methodologies concerning the authenticity of the text that they even to this day have Andrew Gurr announce in their introduction that Shakespeare could not have cared less about publication. This edition is the first one to really take advantage of this shimmering thought: Shakespeare was not indifferent toward the publication of his works, and we should not forget this when we read him. Quite ironic that such an edition comes from an acting company of all people.
Not good The book was not the same book that the picture showed. I thought it would be one book with a nice cover that had all of William Shakepeares' works however, it was two volumes and not very nice at all. Furthermore the books only had his plays. I decided I wanted to return the books so I sent the seller two separate messages asking them to tell me their return policy...that was weeks ago and I still have not heard from them. I do not recommend this seller.
A Comfortable, Friendly Edition As a translator of Shakespeare's plays, I use every edition I can get my hands, so I was thrilled to see that the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has added a newly edited and glossed collection of all the plays, drawing mostly from the First Folio. As a complete works entry, the RSC version has a lot going for it.
True, the paper is thin and a bit too transparent, but this is also true of the recent The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. If that bothers you, choose the The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Edition, which has less transparent paper. But recognize that the Riverside is about 500 pages shorter and crams the text into two columns, with character names abbreviated and no room for your notes. It tires my eyes quickly. The RSC is very comfortably laid out with lots of white space and a nice font of school-book clarity. The bold-faced sans-serif font for the characters stands out clearly from the serif font for the lines. The extra stage directions help comprehension, and their location in the right margin rather than in brackets in the text removes clutter.
I also enjoyed immensely the General Introduction by Jonathan Bate. Usually, I find myself daydreaming and wanting to skip ahead through these formalities, but I could not put this one down and wished that it were longer. I particularly enjoyed his efficient rebuttal to the Oxfordian authorship claims. In the blogosphere, Oxfordians have convinced each other that Shakespeare was no more than an illiterate grain dealer, but Bates expertly displays why almost all scholars accept Shakespeare as the author. The blogosphere should take note.
The text itself offers a generous number of glosses. I hold that the more help modern readers get the better. So I did a spot check of how many words or phrases were glossed in a famously difficult passage from King Lear (often left out in performances because of its difficulty). Here is the passage:
KENT. Sir, I do know you, And dare, upon the warrant of my note, Commend a dear thing to you. There is division, Although as yet the face of it be covered With mutual cunning, 'twixt Albany and Cornwall; Who have--as who have not, that their great stars Throne and set high--servants, who seem no less, Which are to France the spies and speculations Intelligent of our state. What hath been seen, Either in snuffs and packings of the dukes; Or the hard rein which both of them have borne Against the old kind king; or something deeper, Whereof, perchance, these are but furnishings...
The RSC offered 12 glosses while the Norton and Riverside both offered 9. And thankfully, the gloss uses both a line number and a bold-faced repetition of the word or phrase in question to make it easier to reestablish your place in the text.
All in all, the RSC is a friendly, helpful edition. Naturally, at nearly 2500 pages it is difficult to hold in your lap, and the flimsy pages mean durability problems. So for intense study of one play, opt for one of the many paperback versions of individual plays. But as a single source for someone with a spontaneous urge to read a play, the RSC edition fits the bill.
Modernization of The First Folio The RSC Complete Works is a wonderful addition to anyone's library even if you already have another version of the Complete Works. As other reviewers have pointed out this edition follows the sequence and format of the First Folio making it somewhat unique in the selection of Complete Works that are available.
The Text is easy to follow and the introductory material is first rate.
ALso the price at Amazon is really a bargain for a book of this quality.
I still have my Bevington edition, that I enjoy but this is a great second version to use as a comparitive text..
A great piece of work As a non-english major whose only acquaintance with Shakespeare was to see some or the plays a number of times and reading some of the plays in HS and college. I have to say the concept of this work attracted me and the notes, and essays were a great help to understanding this work. I like the idea of having a recreation of the first folio with all of it in one volume. The quality of the paper is fine to me and the size of the volume makes it possible to read without too much trouble. For an average reader who wants all of Shakespeare in one place with useful explanations and notes along the the historical idea of the first folio its a perfect combination. Also the price given the size and quality of the work is reasonable. The chronology notes are especially interesting as they provide details beyond when it is thought a play was written.
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