#informative stuff

Hi there @orestes-fasted! Glad you’re finding my blog useful, and the editions guide too.

You’re right I didn’t really do justice to the New Cambridge Shakespeare in that post. The main reason being that I don’t own as many of them as I do Arden and Oxford editions so I don’t have as much experience using them. But from the seven volumes I do own, I can tell you that New Cambridge Shakespeare is just as scholarly as the Arden and Oxford editions, with a comprehensive set of notes and well-written introductions. The only reason I own more of the others is because those are the texts I’ve tended to use in teaching (partly because some of my colleagues are editors of those editions, and partly because my institutions have online access to them).

Although this depends on the editor of each edition, I think the key thing that stands out about the Cambridge editions is their focus on the ways the play might be and have been realised on stage. That is, they’re textual editions, but are very conscious of the plays as plays, to be staged. So, for instance, they contain some lovely illustrated reconstructions of what Elizabethan stagings may have looked like (by C. Walter Hodges) and notes about performance. Although the Arden and Oxford also cover performance history, the Cambridge editions give that aspect a lot of space in the introduction. 

Otherwise, much the same as the other editions, the New Cambridge Shakespeare contains expert notes, textual variations, suggested reading, and textual interpretations. I hope that helps!

‘Ye’ is the same as ‘you’ but only in certain circumstances. It’s the nominative personal pronoun for the plural ‘you’ or formal single person ‘you’. Here’s the table of conjugations which is probably easier to understand: 

Nominative means that it’s the pronoun that is the subject of the sentence. So if we take the example sentence ‘I like Shakespeare’, ‘I’ is the nominative pronoun. All of the following would be correct:

We like Shakespeare

Thou likest Shakespeare

He/she/it likes Shakespeare

They like Shakespeare

But also

You like Shakespeare

Ye like Shakespeare

Both of which can refer to either a single person (formal in early modern English) or multiple people.

There are also sentences like ‘I’m pedantic, aren’t I?’ where the nominative pronoun can come (again) at the end of a sentence. It would be correct to use ye in this context too: ‘Ye are pedantic, aren’t ye?’

If you’re an advanced or a native speaker of English you probably know that 

Me like Shakespeare

Us like Shakespeare

Him/her/it like Shakespeare

Them like Shakespeare

Are all incorrect. These are the oblique pronouns and can only be used in sentences where the pronoun is not the subject but is being affected by a subject and a verb. So in the sentence ‘Hamlet wants me to go to a nunnery’, ‘me’ is the oblique pronoun being affected by the subject (Hamlet) and the verb (to go). The following sentences would be correct:

Hamlet wants you to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants us to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants thee to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants him/her/it to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants them to go to a nunnery

In this instance, you cannot use ‘ye’.

It’s worth mentioning that the use of ‘ye’ in phrases like ‘Ye olde shoppe’ is actually a kind of mistake based on the fact that printing presses didn’t have a thorn (Þ) symbol and (confusingly) ended up replacing them with a y. It’s not wrong to write it as such, but the pronunciation should actually be a ‘th’ sound, not a ‘y’, so it should sound like ‘The olde shoppe’

Thank you, friend! I’m delighted that this blog has been useful to you! 

I would just like to clarify that I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for a casual reader to think of the characters as real people. It has the benefit of evoking sympathy and interest in a story, and for creating a personal significance, which is a valid and important part of the love of literature. It’s also often useful for modern actors, especially that school of actors who try and find a believable motivation for their characters. 

The thing is, when we think of characters as real people, we tend to attribute motives, thoughts and feelings to their speech and actions: in other words, we make stuff up. This is entirely natural, and for many avid readers, this element of personal imagination is part of what makes literature enjoyable. So don’t feel compelled to give up one way of reading for another just because you feel one is more ‘proper’ than the other! 

But reading characters as real people only really works while it remains personal. Complications arise when you take highly personal responses to a text and try to make them public or convince others to agree with your view. After all, you might imagine a very different motivation and backstory for a character to someone else’s equally valid version. It becomes difficult to achieve a level of objectivity that would render discussion and argument relevant. That’s why it’s invalid to talk about characters like they’re real people in rigorous disciplines like literary analysis (and even there it’s only in the last 100 years that this rule has really come into place. Older critics like Charles Lamb or Coleridge tend to speak of character like they’re real people). If you’re going to say your opinion is something that should convince others, you need objective evidence. While literary critics also come up with reasons and motivations, the difference is that all the observations we make have to be (or should be) grounded in textual evidence. The only things we can make assertions about are what it says in the text, so every argument has to be based on something explicitly stated by a character/narrator or in the wording of these statements. Textual analysis involves a clear awareness of the text as a deliberately crafted piece of work that achieves a rhetorical effect through poetic and literary techniques. In this model, characters are entities created out of the combination of particular words and that have been designed to appear in certain ways. It’s not simple with a masterful writer like Shakespeare though, not least because he writes poetically. The interpretations are manifold, which is why there are so many accounts of everything.

It really depends on what you’re reading for: personal response will let you experience the effects of a text as an audience, and textual analysis can give you an appreciation of the text as an artistic creation. Analysis doesn’t preclude the possibility of a personal response, so it’s not at the sacrifice of a simpler way of reading, but it is often this required shift in reading methods that puts people off studying literature, especially in the transition to university-level literary studies. It doesn’t feel good to be told our personal responses are invalid, and if that’s what you enjoy, it can feel like it takes the joy out of reading. 

If you really want to analyse a character like a textual critic, the key thing is to stick to the text. Look closely at the words a character uses, think about why the author has chosen these words, these particular rhetorical devices, and how that shapes your understanding of the work/character. Be constantly aware that the character and the story are something created to achieve certain effects. Question whether your perceptions of a character is based on what it says in the text, or on your imagination; a good test is to see whether you can back up your assertions with actual quotations. It might be hard to begin with, and it might even feel unnatural, but if you get into it, it can be really rewarding.

Fantastic! Great to hear you’re getting a collection together. 

When choosing good editions of Shakespeare, you have the choice of getting either an edition that contains the complete works, or individual copies. 

The complete works has the benefit of being much cheaper than collecting 40 or so books (including poetry) of Shakespeare’s works. But the writing tends to be tiny, and the book extremely heavy. It’s also true that you will get less content in a collected edition than in individual editions, because of the necessary space constraints of stuffing everything into one book.

If you do go for the complete edition option, I hear the Riverside Shakespeare (now the Wadsworth Shakespeare) is extremely popular in the US, but my go-to recommendation is the Norton Shakespeare:

The most current version of the Norton Shakespeare also has the added benefit of coming with a code that gives you access to a full digital edition you can download onto an app called Bookshelf. The digital edition is complete with clickable links to folio facsimiles and music snippets for the songs:

When it comes to individual editions of the plays and poems, there are three main notable scholarly editions: The Oxford Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare, and the New Cambridge Shakespeare.

What distinguishes a scholarly edition from a non-scholarly edition is mainly the quality and length of the introductions, the detail of the annotations, and the list of textual variations (also known as barbed wire, or the ‘band of terror’ – charming, isn’t it?) at the bottom of the pages that inform you what editorial decisions have been made. This is one of the things that complete works often don’t have. Most scholarly editions will have their notes on the same page as the text, rather than at the back, so that you don’t have to keep flicking back and forth. Some say these editions are a little overkill for the average reader, but it’s indispensable to any serious reader or student of Shakespeare. If you want a serious scholarly edition of Shakespeare, avoid anything that doesn’t have extensive notes. This is what they look like inside:

As a general rule, the New Cambridge ones tend to be thinnest, followed by the Oxford editions, and the Arden editions are fat, with big introductions. But the Cambridge editions are also slightly taller than the average paperback:

The Arden editions receive a little more love than the other two mainly from reputation, but none of these editions is less good quality than the other (I have a full collection of the Arden and the Oxford, but not the Cambridge) If you’re just looking for a series to roll with, then you can choose one and go with it. If you’re thinking aesthetically, then the Arden edition gives you a rainbow-coloured bookshelf, the Oxford a tasteful white and red, the Cambridge a thinner rainbow (older editions are all navy blue):

BUT, if you’re being extremely serious with your edition buying, then there are a couple of extra warnings. All editions are based on the folio and quartos published around Shakespeare’s time, and when there are major textual variations between the versions we have, the editors make very big choices. For instance, the longest version of Hamlet is the second quarto. The Oxford edition is mainly based on the folio, with some textual amalgamation, the New Cambridge version is based on the second quarto, and Arden decided to base their main Hamlet on the second quarto and publish an extra volume containing the first quarto text and the folio text: 

Another example is my favourite edition of King Lear by Arden, that combines the Quarto and Folio versions but puts little superscript Fs and Qs to indicate which text is only found in particular versions. Some find this extremely confusing and too much information:

Basically, if you start getting serious, then you might need to buy some from one series, others from another series so that you get the version of the text you want.

I hope I haven’t confused you unnecessarily in trying to help, but this is the basic guide to buying scholarly editions of Shakespeare. 

Glad to hear you’re enjoying Shakespeare! That makes me happy.

You mean to suggest that Romeo’s love might be relatively superficial because it’s based on Juliet’s looks rather than her personality? Well, it’s important not to underestimate the place that initial physical attraction plays in love; even a love that ultimately goes beyond that… But you’re right to pick up on it. It’s quite a crucial point.

One significant thing is that Romeo uses the word ‘beauty’ to refer to Rosaline far more than he does for Juliet. He always talks about Rosaline in formulaic and hackneyed ways. But Romeo only talks about Juliet in terms of beauty when he first sees her and when he says her ‘beauty hath made me effeminate’ (3.1.114) in the lead-up to his fight with Tybalt, when he chooses to subscribe to the toxic masculinity of his society and talks in a very clichéd way. After that, he only talks about Juliet’s beauty during his monologue in the Capulet crypt, where, given that she’s dead (as far as he knows), that’s the only thing left about her.

But believe it or not, there’s also a very complex question about early modern theories of cognition involved in the idea of perceiving others.

This is because in the early modern period there was a much closer connection between the physical and the mental. For them, in the right circumstances, it was theoretically possible for one to ‘see’ the soul of another person, to gain an understanding of one’s inner virtue and beauty (or the opposite) just by looking at the person. For this reason, vision was considered the most reliable of the senses. Still, it requires a little more than sight to achieve understanding. To put it very simply, they believed that in an ideal situation, the perception of physical objects was converted into mental images by the faculty of imagination, which then allowed the rational faculties to comprehend and judge what was being seen. In other words, the physical gets converted into the spiritual, and this then becomes knowledge and understanding in the memory. But in a less ideal situation, say when one’s emotions are unregulated, one is unhealthy, or one is drunk, this process fails to occur, and the perceptions goes straight to the passions, causing irrational and animalistic action.

One way of understanding Romeo’s ‘Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight, / For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night’ (1.4.165-6) is that what he thought of as love until this moment was not love from the ‘heart’ (remember rationality was not necessarily ascribed to the brains in those days). Romeo recognises that what he understood before was merely based on the eyes, the basic perception of physicality, and not true understanding. This is probably the reason why he makes the distinction between ‘beauty’ and ‘true beauty’. After all, beauty can refer to more than one’s looks; one can have a beautiful soul, and his suggestion is that he has seen past physical beauty into true beauty.

This actually fits in very well with what Friar Lawrence says, because when he says ‘Young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes’ (2.2.66-7), he’s talking about Rosaline: ‘Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear, / So soon forsaken?’ (2.2.65-6). He’s repeating what Romeo has suggested in saying that it’s clear now that his previous love was based on the eyes and not in the heart. The Friar isn’t saying that what Romeo is now experiencing is the same thing, or that visual attraction is the only way one can love, hence the Friar's qualification that he is speaking about ‘young men’s love’, which he calls ‘doting, not loving’ (2.2.82). He’s just saying that there is a difference between loving with the eyes and loving with the heart, and that Romeo’s love for Rosaline was evidently the former. It’s not clear whether Friar Lawrence accepts this new love of Romeo’s as being the real thing immediately; he goes along with it because he sees the good it could lead to. But then Friar Lawrence shouldn’t be taken for the wise arbiter of truth in the play… nobody can fulfil that function. What’s clear is that Romeo sees a clear difference between his two experiences of love, and that his attitude and actions when in love with Juliet are completely different to his ways when he was ‘doting’ on Rosaline.

It was only this year (last April, when my mania for Horrible Histories began) that I even knew these 'history' plays existed!!!

Though I have known about Shakespeare forever...