The RSC Shakespeare. William Shakespeare Complete Works (review)

The first question about this new edition is bound to be, what need of another Complete Works? The answer, according to its publisher and editors, is its uniqueness: the only fully modernized edition of the 1623 Folio ever produced, and the first complete Shakespeare to be prepared under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). The blurb distributed with free copies at the 2007 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America made these points and promised extensive attention to performance issues, as a feature derived from the RSC connection. But one looks in vain for this promised attention. Aside from twenty-eight handsome photographs, all but one from RSC productions, there is nothing especially performance oriented about this text. In the general introduction, expertly written by Jonathan Bate, there are some fine insights into the resonances of Shakespeare for our world, with occasional references to famous productions. But there is no sustained attention to performance. There is the usual coverage of playhouses and acting companies that one finds in most modern Complete Works, handled very adroitly. But there is no stage history (unlike the Riverside or Norton editions), no discussion of the generation of meaning through performance, no analysis of the vexed relations between page and stage. Nor is there any serious attention to staging in the introductions to the individual plays, or anything in the “Key Facts” boxes that preface each play; there are some “directorial” stage directions printed in the margins, but these are sporadic, random, often obvious, and sometimes questionable. Besides the photographs, the only link to the RSC is a one-page foreword by Michael Boyd, the Company’s current artistic director, in which he offers a few familiar bromides: that the plays are scripts and not literature (that they could be both is never considered); that although the plays may be difficult to appreciate, the reader should not be put off by them but should trust the author and, most of all, trust this “Folio-based text.” (There is also a puff from Dame Judi Dench on the back cover.) So for those of us looking for perspectives on performance, this text offers less than it promises; and when one starts looking carefully at particular textual choices, especially those involving stage directions, one comes across what sometimes looks like performance amnesia.

I’ll come back to that in a moment. But first I want to examine the edition’s main claim to uniqueness—that it is the first modern edition of the Folio. In fact, the RSC Shakespeare contains several works not in the First Folio, including Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, the two narrative poems, the Sonnets, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and a short epilogue to a court performance entitled “To the Queen,” characterized as “beautifully turned” (2395) but with its attribution to Shakespeare not otherwise explained. Of course, the editors are perfectly aware of the discrepancy between the claim that this is an edition of F and the inclusion of these other texts—they indicate it by presenting the latter in two columns and a smaller typeface. But nowhere do they give a genuine justification for including works that are not in the book they claim to be editing; Bate states unequivocally that “our claim to originality is that we have edited a real book (the first Folio)” (lvii), but the book in my hands is not exactly what that statement implies. The reason, of course, is not hard to find—who wants to buy an “incomplete” Works?

More important is the justification given for taking on this project. The dust jacket offers the following rationale: “Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. . . . But starting with Nicholas Rowe in 1709, . . . Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, gradually corrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflated textual variations...