The New Cambridge Shakespeare King Richard III (review)

The New Cambridge Shakespeare King Richard III.Edited by Janis Lull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 226. Illus. $44.95 cloth, $11.95 paper.

A recent addition to the intensive editorial effort directed at Shakespeare's texts in the individual-edition category is the New Cambridge Shakespeare King Richard III. The series, under the current general editorship of Brian Gibbons and A. R. Braunmuller, has, since 1984, produced editions of thirty-five plays, as well as editions of the poems and Sonnets and five First-Quarto texts, King Lear, Richard III, Hamlet,The Taming of a Shrew,and Henry V. Remaining to be published are editions of The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline,The Winter's Tale,Love's Labor's Lost,and, perhaps, The Two Noble Kinsmen,depending on the general editors' view of this play written in collaboration with John Fletcher. The series' editors appear to be very aware of the competition and have, it seems to me, consequently attempted to claim something like the middle ground. Indeed, the physical or material format of the New Cambridge volumes suggests a desire to have it both ways. At 224 pages, the edition of Richard III.under review here is half as thick as some of the often formidable-looking Arden editions. Yet, at 6(breve)9 inches, the Cambridge volumes are substantially larger books than, for example, the Arden, which measure 5(breve)7flinches. Their apparent brevity, combined with their larger paperback format, makes New Cambridge editions look and feel more user-friendly than Ardens, which can appear somewhat forbidding to all but the most serious student or scholar of Shakespeare.

Between the covers, however, New Cambridge editions look a great deal like Ardens. Both series average about a half a page of playtext, the bottom half of each page being reserved for what Thomas L. Berger has called the "band of terror": a list of variants that appear in extant early modern versions of a play not chosen as the edition's copy-text, as well as word, phrase, and line glosses and other commentaries. Indeed, the only readily observable difference between a given page from the two series is the placement of the textual variants: New Cambridge puts them above the notes and glosses, Arden3 puts them beneath. Furthermore, both series feature scholarly introductions that not only provide information about a play's sources, historical and cultural context, major themes, and performance history but also engage with past and present critical debates. In the case of the recent New Cambridge edition of Pericles,for example (astutely reviewed by Laurie E. Maguire in this journal), the editors, Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, offer an eighty-page introductory essay characterized by Maguire as "irritatingly polemical." ¹

In contrast, Janis Lull's introduction to her New Cambridge edition of Richard III.is half as long (forty-one pages) and somewhat short on polemics. Regarding the long-standing debate over whether Shakespeare relied on the anonymous play The true Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke.(1595) as he wrote his, Lull cautiously asserts: "a reasonable supposition might be" that he did (3). As for recent critical debates over the status of Richard III.as Tudor propaganda, she dutifully reports: "Disagreement continues over whether Shakespeare's plays generally tended to support or undermine the Tudor-Stuart political order" (6). On Richard III.s relation to the Resurrection play tradition, however, especially "the motif of the three Marys" (9), Lull is more willing to take a stand. Observing that "the three Marys were associated with solemnity and the central mystery of Christianity" (9), and recognizing in the play two analogous triads of women--"the Duchess, Elizabeth and Anne" (10) and "Margaret, the Duchess and Elizabeth" (11)--she argues that "Shakespeare ma[de] use of these conventions to direct the audience's sympathy away from Richard in the second part of the play" (9). Lull is also quite taken by the "correspondences large and...