In 1964 the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used binary oppositions to argue that some mental constructions transcend cultures. One in particular will resonate for Shakespeare’s editors, who strike a balance between ‘raw’ sources and ‘cooked’ texts. Scholarly readers want raw transcriptions: texts in original spellings; textual variants of each witness and every compositor; tables of data; and essays on editorial decisions like chronology or attribution. Meanwhile, student readers want the cooked outcomes of editorial decisions: readable interfaces; helpful annotations; and introductions to ideas and performance histories. So what’s an editor to do?

For Gary Taylor, principal editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, the question is how to produce an edition to satisfy these divergent readers. In an introductory essay (‘Why read this complete works?’), Taylor and Terri Bourus state their goal ‘to give readers as many options as possible,’ and describe how this edition ‘offers readers more forms of Shakespeare’s work than any other’.

The New Oxford thus provides two parallel editions of Shakespeare’s complete works: a Modern Critical Edition (or MCE) for students, edited by Bourus; and a Critical Reference Edition (CRE) for scholars, edited by John Jowett. The MCE offers modernised texts with an explanatory apparatus described as ‘fresh’ and ‘innovative’; while the CRE offers original-spelling texts for ‘literary and bibliographic’ scholars interested in press variants and other uncertainties. A third volume in the set is an Authorship Companion (AC), edited by Gabriel Egan, with ‘cutting-edge’ essays using stylometric and other kinds of text-analysis to address Shakespeare’s collaborations with other writers.

I will address each volume in turn. I read them as digital texts, and will describe them as such — rather than assessing their editorial decisions. For that I defer to reviewers such as Brian Vickers on such editorial questions as the relative merits of the quarto or folio of Othello.[1] My core question: How does the New Oxford’s digital edition enable readers to read, search, annotate and interpret Shakespeare’s texts?

Another approach to that question is to ask whether this digital edition feels purpose-built for scholars analysing and students reading electronic texts. In my judgement, the answer is no. It feels more like a companion website produced as an afterthought to a print edition, that will not quite satisfy scholars or students. Yet the edition deserves credit for going further than any other to offer versions of Shakespeare’s texts that future digital scholars will need.

I began with the AC essay collection, to learn more about how the New Oxford has attributed so many plays (17 of 45) partly to Shakespeare as a collaborator. His familiar apocrypha and lost plays are here (Edward III, Cardenio, Sir Thomas More), but so are some notable additions (Arden of Faversham, Sejanus and The Spanish Tragedy). The AC essays quantify and reinforce recent scholarship on his collaborations with Kyd, Middleton, Jonson and others. The claim that Christopher Marlowe coauthored the Henry VI trilogy, for instance, provoked more media attention than new editions of Shakespeare tend to attract.

Although the AC offers detailed defences of these attributions, problems with its digital interface are endemic. Its home-page simply lists the essay titles (some of whom, such as ‘One-Horse Races,’ are unintuitive), without an introduction or abstracts. Essays are in categories (‘Methods’ and ‘Case Studies’) that feel arbitrary; Taylor and Doug Duhaime’s essay on the ‘Fly Scene’ in Titus, the best in the collection, seems misplaced. Explanatory notes should appear alongside the text, as in the MCE and CRE, but are relegated to the ends of their essays.

But the largest missed opportunity of the AC volume is in its datasets. They ought to be downloadable spreadsheets, cross-linked to their essays. Instead, they are tables — some in a separate appendix; others inserted into their essays, like those that interrupt Taylor and Rory Loughnane on ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works’ — that often lack headings or other details. If the purpose of a dataset is to allow others to reproduce your results, this will not do.

The digital edition’s features improve when we turn to the texts. Like most reviewers I sought the one I know best, Troilus and Cressida. In both the MCE and CRE, selecting a title counter-intuitively loads a blank page; it would be preferable to land on a page that excludes the volume’s full contents so readers would not need to select (once more) the one they want to read.

When they do, three panels appear: Main Text, Notes and Extras. Readers can isolate just one or two of them, using an icon in the page’s menubar (though +/- symbols on each panel would make more sense). The Extras are high-resolution images of quartos and folios and the Notes are glosses in categories that you can filter: lineation emendations, textual emendations and press variants.

I discovered some delightful features of the MCE interface once I began reading Troilus 2.2. For instance, clicking on symbols next to Notes or Extras briefly highlights the corresponding line of text. This feels intuitive and natural; when reading a line, you want to focus on it for no more than a moment. Line numbers increase by fives, but the intervening numbers appear when you hover over them; this is another delightful feature for anyone who has silently counted backward from (say) 280 to 277.

And yet the MCE digital text still feels like an adjunct to the print edition. For instance, it is intersected by line-breaks corresponding to the book’s pages, for anyone burning to know that Troilus 2.2.11 is at the top of page 1931 (for instance). Annotating the digital text is inconvenient. You can download each scene as a clumsy PDF that includes the needless page breaks and impractically prints the Notes as endnotes. (Trying the same procedure with the MCE’s Front Matter produces a document with paragraph tags and other encoding scattered through the text.) A very patient reader could circumvent the issue by using the Search interface to download the print volume’s professionally typeset PDF pages, but only by loading them sequentially as single pages. Instead, the designers ought to let users download whole scenes or texts.

It is surprising that in an edition designed to offer multiple versions of the same text, its digital interface makes it difficult to compare original with modernised texts. The lack of this function is one of many features that make this feel like a companion website rather than a digital edition; it would have been short work to cross-link the CRE and MCE texts, scene by scene. I should say that this is not a problem unique to the New Oxford Shakespeare; as Craig Berry noted in his recent review of the Cambridge Ben Jonson in these pages, ‘it does little to take advantage of the multiple versions of most texts”. [2] One might expect searching, at least, to be more granular; but when searching for any word you must select either the MCE or CRE, and you cannot specify whether the spelling is precise or ‘fuzzy’ (e.g. ‘heere’ and ‘heare’ and ‘hayre’ for ‘hair’).

But considering the reading experience of students, who infrequently search for spelling variants, the edition is equally uneven. Take the introductory apparatus: Taylor and Bourus offer an accessible, frank and thorough introduction to the value of studying Shakespeare’s works that raises hard questions about his cultural position — like ‘Why read dead white men?’ and ‘Why read anyone who is so hard to understand?’ I would assign this essay to every Shakespeare undergraduate as required reading. But the introductions to individual texts resist the ‘critical monologue’ model in favour of a ‘bricolage’ of quotations, each with a different perspective: on performance, on genre, on character. I can appreciate the need to rethink the critical-introduction genre, but compiling quotations in a random order shirks the editor’s duty to give students a conceptual menu for the coming feast.

Ultimately, this digital edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare offers a collection of Shakespeare’s texts, more widely expansive and in more varied formats than students and scholars will find anywhere else. For that I applaud its vision and achievement. It is an elegantly-conceived, ambitious edition that breaks important new collaborative ground. But the New Oxford Shakespeare is not a new digital edition; it is an editorial achievement that happens to be available in a digital form. They are not the forms that will satisfy students reading it or scholars analysing it. Read it, therefore, again and again — but in print.

Michael Ullyot

University of Calgary

Comments

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