What are the best editions of the works of William Shakespeare both a Complete Works and individual plays.
I don’t know about the best, but my favorite collected edition is the Riverside Shakespeare (excellent notes, background material, artifacts, etc.) and my favorite individual play format for my students is the Signet, which is affordable and portable and has good notes on the facing page, so beginners can look up allusions, paraphrases of archaic (or just distinctively Shakespearean) phrasing, some drawings.
My favorite individual versions are usually the Arden versions, but don’t get the complete works Arden.
I’ve found the Oxford School Shakespeare Series to be quite good, but I’m no expert on Shakespeare and I haven’t tried a lot of other editions.
I personally like Arden, although when I’m teaching it to beginners Signet works well. (The notes for Arden are more academic and detailed.)
I was quite fond of my First Folio (pub. 1623), but had to flog it when I was a bit short of pocket money.
I would also recommend the Arden editions if you want to read / study the plays with any seriousness.
The best edition within reach of most pocketbooks is the Arden edition. Very well annotated, with textual variants, etc and scholarly introductions and annotations.
For those who want more depth the best edition by far is the Furness Variorum Shakespeare. A variorum edition (short for cum notis variorum, with the notes of various critics) has not only printing history, textual variants, etc but a wealth of selected annotations of past Shakespeare editors and critics: Nicholas Rowe (who edited in the early 18th century the first collected edition of the plays other than the Folios) through successive editors such as Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Stevens, Capell, Malone, etc.
It’s a delightful bonus to watch these scholarly titans rend and tear their predecessors’ readings and interpretations to shreds, and some of their comments are hilarious. Modern critics are in comparison as dry as dust.
(Dover Publications used to do affordable editions of some of the Furness volumes, I’m not sure if that’s still true.)
I just bought this at my library’s books sale for a dollar.* It’s great if you want an education but a little bulky if you purpose is to, stay, stand on a chair and read it out loud.
*It was, unfortunately, the library’s own (single) copy – I haven’t checked to see if they replaced it (it’s a bit beat up), but somehow I doubt it. All my town’s budding Shakespeare scholars will have to come to me!
By far and away- imho- Spark Notes’ No Fear Shakespeare. They’re available in print and reasonably priced, but most are also available free online. (I much prefer print but the online version will give you an idea for you.)
It’s a dual text: on the left side Shakespeare, on the right side it’s translated into modern English, and with some annotations on things like puns and in-jokes that don’t translate into the modern era. I’m a college librarian and I’ve had some very bright college students who say that No-Fear is the only way they were able to understand Hamlet and Richard III.
The series also contains a volume entitled Shakespeare’s World (or something like that) which is also good. It’s a general introduction to late 16th/early 17th century England, the evolution of theater (from courtyard performers to The Globe/The Swan/etc.), and the politics of Shakespeare.
An intro to the times is very important when reading him. Shakespeare is timeless in some ways but in others he was one of the most bound-to-a-particular-time/place authors who ever wrote. Always remember that he wrote at a time when royalty could do a lot morethan give you a bad review, and he had to watch his step. He also had some elements strictly gained to court royal favor: pinning the murder of the princes in the Tower on Richard III for instance (because the more likely candidate was Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, aka Queen Elizabeth’s grandpa), or incorporating witches into MacBeth because England’s new king James I/VI* considered himself an authority on the occult, “writing” a book on the subject a decade before the KJV first appeared. Some authorities argue that he beefed up the witches even more in later productions (James loved the play and had it performed many times over the years) to cash in on the Pendle witches, the 1612 equivalent of the OJ Trial in terms of the news event everybody was talking about, much like Law & Order will often do thinly veiled accounts of big news stories.
The NFS Shakespeare book goes into some examination of the “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” arguments as well but not a lot of detail. (Personally I tend to agree with whoever I read last on the subject but to be honest I don’t much care- it’ll never be proven one way or the other and I just take him for the beautiful spoken-opera that he/she/they were.)
*Elizabeth was of course a powerful and beloved by some/feared by all monarch, while James’ lack of people skills and finery and rumored predilections for his own gender gave rise to a 17th century English joke, never said in a public place, which translated to the effect of “with Elizabeth England had its greatest king, with James we have our greatest queen”.
Frankly, there’s no such thing as the “best” edition of Shakespeare. I have an Arden Shakespeare edition of The Merchant of Venice that hasn’t been updated since the 1960s, although I think that there is a new edition coming out next year. Furthermore, the Oxford, Arden, and New Cambridge Shakespeare editions all include different introductions with different focuses. For some uses, one version will be better than the others (New Cambridge, which is what I make most use of, has nifty drawings on possible stagings in Shakespeare’s day), and you will have to find out by looking at all of them.
As a practical matter, I believe the Oxford Shakespeare is the most current scholarship across the board, but I have not had all of them in hand and can’t vouch for that.
I’ll cast a second vote for the Riverside Shakespeare. Bought mine for $18.95 about 30 years ago.
I’ll assume you are going for The Funny here - I would suspect that a FF would go for millions these days…
Avoid the Scratch’n’Sniff Shakespeare. The “hoisted on his own petard” selection will just about knock you out.
The Oxford Shakespeare makes some weird editorial choices, though (e.g., changing “Falstaff,” “Peto,” and “Bardolph” to “Oldcastle,” “Harvey,” and “Russell,” since there’s evidence that these were the names Shakespeare would have used if the Oldcastle, Harvey, and Russell descendents hadn’t gotten up in arms about it. Basically, the Oxford editors seem to be trying to reconstruct a no-longer-extant original version rather than edit the texts we actually have, and I’m skeptical about the usefulness of this enterprise, especially if you’re looking for a text for casual reading rather than scholarship).
I use the Norton Shakespeare in my classes; it’s based on the Oxford, but without some of the wackier editorial choices, and the notes and introductory material are very good. That said, I do have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this text, since it still takes more editorial liberties than I’d like (and some of them suck the fun out of the text – e.g., they relegate “Groping for trouts in a peculiar river,” which is my favorite euphemism EVER for sex, to the appendix at the end of Measure for Measure). I have not used the Riverside, but from what I understand, it’s a bit more conservative it its editing.
The Folger Shakespeare individual volumes are cheap, and probably the best choice for beginners – they’ve got detailed facing-page notes and a short summary of each scene, enough to give readers a road map to follow without babying them. (I’m not a fan of No Fear Shakespeare; frankly, I think “study aids” that hold students’ hands too much induce a sense of learned helplessness. The best way to learn how to read early modern English is to immerse yourself in it and grapple with the text on your own – it’s not that hard, especially if you get hold of a good film or audiobook version and get used to hearing the language spoken.)
The single-volume Ardens are the gold standard for scholars, but they tend to footnote all sorts of things the casual reader won’t care about, and not to footnote all the stuff that scholars already know but the casual reader won’t.
Ah, now THAT’s fascinating. I don’t have the histories (except for Richard III, which I think is the best to get), but that’s indeed an odd choice.
I would even go so far as to say that if an English major does not get Shakespeare in the original, he should probably choose a different major. Shakespeare is difficult, I will admit as much; but paraphrasing will not only take the textual difficulty, but also any subtlety, and almost any humor.
And again: depending on the particular play, their most current edition may not have been updated in thirty years or more, which, given the pace of Shakespeare scholarship, is quite a while. Not that it’ll be a problem in just reading the plays, of course.
Actually, I do have a cool edition story: I have a 1784 edition - **The Stockdale Shakfpear **- yeah, it is spelled that way in the book. All the “s’s” which occur in the middle of words are represented by an “f” - which back in the day was referred to as a “soft s” - it, like the Folio’s, features a portrait of Will opposite the title page, but it is not the famous Droeshout (sp?) portrait; instead it is more “normal” looking…just a handsome, bearded Elizabethan man…
What’s even cooler is that this is the first single volume Octavo edition. The First Folio is referred to as such because not only is it the first gathering of Will’s plays into a single volume, but it was published in Folio format - an oversized format where the page fills the full sheet (vs. smaller editions where multiple pages are printed on 1 sheet and then folded into the proper sequence). After the four Folio editions, his works were published in multi-volume sets - until this version from Stockdale.
Now - why did Stockdale revisit the single-edition format? Well, in the Publisher’s Preface, he states that the purpose of the book is two-fold: So the common people of the land (i.e., Great Britain) could afford the works of their most famous writer - and he goes on to complain about the sad state of affairs where most common folk don’t know the first thing about Shakespeare - in 1784! The other reason is so that a Gentleman could keep a copy in his coach, the better to resolve wagers over specific quotes or to have ready if the need otherwise arises.
I just love that - I picture two aristo’s getting blitzed on Bordeaux and arguing over what MacDuff said to MacBeth and one sending their “boy” off to the horse carriage to retrieve their Shakfspear volume to settle the bet…
So this volume was the equivalent of Elizabethan Google, if you will…
I’ve got an Oxford complete works, but it’s definitely not portable and it’s not very accessible - they have multiple versions of a few plays, and while that’s interesting, it’s not the best place to start. The same goes for the Oldcastle/Falstaff issue.
I think I started on Arden editions when I was a kid, and they’re still good. I’d have to check out bookshelf at home, but I think my girlfriend will use either Arden or No Fear Shakespeare when she’s working on a role or a monologue.
Shouldn’t that be an “ſ”, i.e., “The Stockdale Shakſpear”? The long “ſ” is not an “f”.
For junior high student level, which IIRC is what Curtis is, I still say NO FEAR SHAKESPEARE. SUPER easy to understand. It’s not scholarly but it’s easily read.
Advantages: While it may not have footnotes that say
the side by side translation will make this clear.
Disadvantages: it does not notate double meanings as well as it could. Perhaps the two best known double entendres:
is translated
In fact nunnery, while then as now literally a convent, was slang for whorehouse; he’s telling her your reputation is ruined even if you’re a virgin, so you may as well go to a whorehouse".
Likewise in Hamlet when he says R&G were like an engin[e]er “hoist with his own petar”, the literal meaning- which still works- is “an engineer blown up by his own explosive”, but the double meaning (from Elizabethan slang- remember that Shakespeare played for the masses, not just the elite) is “the farter is made to sit on his own fart”.
However, the literal translations do work well enough, and once you get the jist of the play then you can move on to more elaborate annotation. You’re also going to do better probably to buy or research individual titles than a “Complete works” annotated copy, since the individual copies have far more space to elaborate.