From the Editor: All the Workes

The True is the whole.

—Hegel

I want it all I want it all I don't know what it is But I want it all

—Annie Lennox¹

As this issue goes to press, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is winding down an unprecedented year of theatrical and editorial activities devoted to the complete works of Shakespeare. The RSC gave over most of its 2006–7 season to a "Complete Works Festival," in which every text in the whole canon—all the plays and all the poems—received some sort of public performance in Stratford-upon-Avon. Appropriately enough, its finale was marked by the publication of The RSC Shakespeare (2007), a major new edition of the complete works, published by Palgrave Macmillan and prepared by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen in collaboration with the RSC. According to Macmillan's promotional materials, this is "the first and only Complete Works edition to be commissioned by The Royal Shakespeare Company"² (who not only endorse its use in future productions but appear to own its copyright); more remarkably, it is the first one to be based on a modern-spelling version of the 1623 First Folio, "the first and original Complete Works lovingly assembled by Shakespeare's fellow-actors."³

While the RSC finishes its most ambitious season and launches its first official edition, we at Shakespeare Quarterly thought it would be an opportune moment to offer some historical and critical perspectives on the very idea of a "complete Shakespeare." We enlisted some of our most compleat Shakespeareans to help us address the following questions:

• • Given that the Oxford English Dictionary defines "to complete" as "to finish, to make whole, to make perfect,"⁴ can Shakespeare ever be complete?

• • When did we start wanting our Shakespeare to be complete? Is there any evidence that Shakespeare himself shared our desire, living as he did in a culture that prized the incomplete and dying some seven years before the first publication of his collected works?

• • Why might we want a complete Shakespeare in the first place? Are we looking for a Hegelian truth delivered by a Shakespearean whole? Do we want to be able to trace the entire arc of Shakespeare's career as a writer and to place the individual parts within it? Is it a matter of wanting as much as possible of a good thing, or a simple case of expecting (as with all purchases) that, when we take it out of the box, our Shakespeare won't be missing any of its pieces?

• • Which texts, then, need to be included for a collection to be considered complete? Why did it take so long for the poems to join the plays in editions of Shakespeare's works, and even longer for them to appear in the form given to them by Shakespeare? Why do we not include his extant letters or his will, both of which are closer to the hand of Shakespeare than any of his surviving plays?

• • What place—if any—do other authors' hands have in a "Complete Works" of Shakespeare? Where does recent work on authorship (and, especially, coauthorship) leave us?

• • In what senses was, and wasn't, the RSC's festival complete? Did its yearlong program give theatergoers a more complete Shakespeare than the popular Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr performed by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in just under two hours? And does the fact that more than half of the productions featured companies other than the RSC imply that a complete theatrical Shakespeare cannot (for either cultural or logistical reasons) be produced by one company alone?

Taking his title and his cue from Aristophanes' speech on love in Plato's Symposium, Stephen Orgel, in "The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole," offers a concise history of Shakespearean completeness on page and stage. In surveying the forms and fortunes of Shakespeare's works—as the beloved young man in the sonnets becomes a woman and then a man again; as Pericles shuttles in and out of the canon; and as Hamlet acquires the trappings of eighteenth...