Weak Rant About Shakespeare Collections

The BBQ Pit
1

I’m a sweet guy, so I’m not good at pitting. You’ve been warned.

But what the fuck is wrong with the publishers of Shakespeare’s complete works?

I have three different versions, and all are full of explanations and annotations, so they must be targeting the lay public, not scholars. And yet, they go out of their way to make it hard to find the damn plays. I was helping my 14-year old nephew with his term paper tonight, and we both thought they must be fucking with us.

There are are three dozen or so plays, covering a span of nearly three thousand years. Since most laymen are a bit shaky on chronology, the easiest way to arrange them is simply alphabetical order by short name. It might offend the purists to call a play, say, “Richard III,” instead of “The Tragedy of King Richard III,” but even a sixth-grader would be able to find the play he wants easily, which presumably is a Good Thing. They can give the full title in the introduction to the play, if anybody cares.

A distant second best would be chronological order of the play’s action. It wouldn’t be nearly as easy to find a play, because although people probably know that Henry IV comes before Henry V, they may not know where Richard III goes, and they probably don’t have a clue where the comedies should be. But at least a reasonably educated person would have a clue where to look.

But most “Complete Works” do neither. They arrange the plays in the order they were written, and since that’s debatable, not even a scholar would know where to look. Shakespeare himself wouldn’t know where to look, because the editor of the book might disagree with him. Or, as one of my books does, they might group them by periods, e.g. “Early Comedies” and “Early Tragedies,” rather than have them in strict individual order.

The Oxford edition I was using to help my nephew not only has Henry IV after (way after) Henry VI, it even has Henry VI Part 1 after Henry VI Part 3. And for Christ’s sake, it has Julius Caesar right after Henry V.

What is the point of this? Nobody thumbing through the book is going to expect to find Henry IV after Henry VI, and nobody reading the plays is going to want to read Part 3 before Part 1. And nobody but a scholar is going to know the order the plays were written, and probably won’t care. I can see that a scholar might care, but the book wasn’t published for him, and even if it was, all the publisher has to do is print the order of the plays on the inside front cover, and let anybody who cares do what he wants with it.

All they accomplish is to throw another completely unnecessary hurdle in front of young readers, who really don’t need another reason not to read Shakespeare.

Yes, they have a table of contents. But how would you like to be reading, say, Harry Potter, and after reading chapter 5, you have to go back to the table of contents to see where chapter 6 is? Why should you have to do that? Why can’t you assume that after you finish Henry V you can turn the page and start Henry VI, rather than Julius Caesar? What can’t you even assume that when you do find Henry VI, part 1 will come first, rather than third?

So, to quote some Shakespearean movie I once saw (I know it was Shakespeare because they wore armor and had English accents), I fart in their general direction.

2

Shakespeare prof here. OK, I agree with some of what you’re saying, at least the part about why plays should be identified in the table of contents by their simplest and most familiar title. (The Oxford Shakespeare editors, in particular, are notorious for trying to change things up for no good reason, and I’d suggest pretty much any version of the complete works other than the Oxford edition would be a better choice for the casual reader. Any edition that calls Falstaff “Oldcastle” is Trying Too Hard To Impress. If you want super-user-friendly versions that are targeted toward high school students and casual readers, try the individual Folger Library paperbacks.)

But, as you point out, there is a table of contents, and arranging plays by approximate chronological order of composition has been the standard convention for well over a hundred years. (I just checked my 1906 edition of the Complete Works, and it does exactly that for both the comedies and tragedies. Interestingly, the English history plays are arranged in order of the monarchs they cover, as you suggest.) This doesn’t seem to be a custom that poses any particular difficulty for most readers.

And the audience most editions of Shakespeare’s complete works are targeting is scholars, and scholars-in-training – undergrad students who are taking a semester-long Shakespeare course. Most universities organize such courses either chronologically, or by genre (so that you’d have a full semester of tragedies, for example), and even the genre courses will usually devote some attention to how Shakespeare develops as a writer over time, so the chronological organization makes sense for this audience.

3

I respectfully disagree. I find it annoying now, and I and my friends found it annoying in college. For anyone who doesn’t have the order memorized, it might as well be completely random.

As for the target audience, I did take a college course that used a “Complete Works” as a text (which I still have), and I guarantee you that nobody in that class would be considered a Shakespearean scholar.

On the other hand, having them in alphabetical order would pose no difficulty at all for a true scholar to read or study the plays in any order he wants. I can’t imagine a situation where not having them in chronological order in the book would make any difference to someone doing a detailed study. And having them in alphabetical order would probably make it easier even for a scholar to find the play he wants, because as I noted, the various editors disagree about the exact sequence.

4

And, dammit, why can’t somebody publish a Bible with the books in alphabetical order?

5

So, suppose the order is completely random… What, you don’t know how to use a table of contents?

I don’t have memorized the order of the books of the Bible. If I want to read something in Zephaniah, I have to look it up in the t.o.c.

This ain’t rocket surgery!

6

Because everybody has agreed that The Revelation of St. John the Divine makes such a kick-ass ending that there is no point to reordering.

7

Well, I memorized the order of the Bible books in Sunday School, so I guess that makes me a scholar. But you guys are shooting yourselves in the foot, because the Bible DOES generally follow my second preferred method in the OP. From Genesis through 2nd Kings, e.g. the “historic” part, the order of the books follows the chronology of the alleged events, in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles. It would be a LOT harder to find a given book if the Bible were arranged in the order the books were written, or if I Samuel came ten books after II Samuel. And as with Shakespeare, the order would vary, depending on current scholarship and editorial opinion. They might even have to split up books like Isaiah and Daniel.

I addressed the TOC in my OP. Yes, I can use one. No, I shouldn’t have to use one if I’m on the last page of Henry IV, and I want to next read Henry V.

8

I agree with the OP wholeheartedly! That is a super weak rant.

9

Kick-ass, schmick-ass. That book should be put at the beginning.

You know, so the story can open in media revs.

10

How can you be worrying about The Bard when there’s a much more egregious ordering going on? Of course I refer to Harper-Collins buying the rights to the Narnia books in 1994 and immediately re-ordering them by the chronology of the events depicted.

So, the first book is no longer The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which holds up fine as a stand-alone work) (handy if you’re annoyed by the “Metaphorical Messiah Lion” and decide to quit there). Instead, they want the public to start with the prequel The Magician’s Nephew, which makes much less sense if you read it first… and it has a number of spoilers in it which make reading the other books less of a delight.

It makes the cub Aslan weep.

11

I have never seen an anthology where the anthologized works were presented in alphabetical order, unless there was some other reason to do that.

In fact, chronological is the only one I consistently see aside from ‘the editor’s whim’.

12

Ah, here’s an article on Narniaweb.com:

The case for reading the books in published order includes the following:

1: The Lion is presented very much as the first of a series. It concludes with the words ‘That is the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia.’ The ‘second’ book, Prince Caspian, is subtitled ‘The Return to Narnia.’

2: The narrator of The Lion says ‘None of the children knew who Aslan was, any more than you do.’ But if ‘you’ are supposed to have read The Magician’s Nephew, then you do know who Aslan was.

3: The charm of the opening of The Lion is spoiled if you already know, from Magician’s Nephew, that the wardrobe is magical; that the Professor has been to Narnia, and why there is a street lamp in Narnia. Similarly, the ‘shock of recognition’ in Magician’s Nephew is spoiled if you don’t know the significance of the wardrobe.

4: Why should The Horse and His Boy, which happens during the final chapter of The Lion, be set after it? Could an equally valid case not be made for saying that it should be set after The Silver Chair where it is presented as a story-within-a-story?

(I’m ignoring the next line: “Given that most people read and re-read the books many times, does this sort of nit-picking matter? Almost certainly not.”)

Oh, and just to make an attempt to stay on topic, I agree with the OP. What’s the downside of making Shakespeare’s works less difficult to find and appreciate?

13

A bible like that would make a nice Memento…
:slight_smile:

14

The reason to put them in alphabetical order is to make it easier for everyone to flip to them without having to look them up in the TOC. The reason to put them in historical order is to have Henry V be followed by Henry VI, instead of Julius Caesar. I can’t think of any reason to put them in order of composition, since anyone who is interested in the order they were written will have much easier ways to find out than looking through a heavy book.

15

Assuming the reason people read Shakespeare’s plays is to learn more about Shakespeare, composition order is correct because it’s the best way to track his development as a writer.

16

What a strange assumption! Do you also assume that people read Harry Potter to learn more about Rowling? At any rate, I would guess that of the 1% of people who care about Shakespeare’s development, 99% of them will just look in Wikipedia.

If you’re in the 1% of the 1%, swell, but anyone who cares that much will likely have single volumes devoted to each play anyway.

17

IMHO, people generally don’t read Shakephere’s plays for pleasure - they *watch *them for pleasure, but they *read *them for more scholarly purposes.

18

I’d much rather read a book than go to a play or movie based on it, but I’ve been told I’m weird.

19

Would you stop with the comparison with Harry Potter? It’s beyond stupid.

Ordering a collection of a writer’s work chronologically is perfectly reasonable. You find it inconvenient for this one particular writer, due to your particular interests for reading him. It’s rather obvious that the vehemence of your dislike for this are not rooted in the actual problem, but in you spending years running your stupidity through a feedback loop, instead of just realising that this is how collected works are ordered whether it be Shakespeare or Ghoete.

And if someone published the collected works of Rowling, the books would still come in the order you want to read them, because that’s how they were published.

20

Sheesh. I skipped past the real argument for my first point. Harry Potter is a 7 book series about the same fictional character, they’re intended by the author to be read in order. Shakespeare wrote plays. Plays intended to be performed and watched, in isolation, not read as a serialisation of history or a comment on the nature of the alphabet.