Passing Judgement

Works of textual scholarship rarely make the news. For several days in the Spring of 2016, however, the New Oxford Shakespeare did just that. The press was abuzz with the exciting new fact that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare—at least, that he did not write quite so much of it as had previously been thought. The night before the edition was released, general editor Gary Taylor (a veteran of the old Oxford Shakespeare) was quizzed about his team's discoveries on national radio. 'So', inquired the BBC's Rhod Sharp, 'once the Oxford Shakespeare's actually passed judgement, is that it, do you think, is the matter settled?'.¹ Taylor could only chuckle. The idea that Sir Brian Vickers might give up and go home now that the Oxford Shakespeare had 'passed judgement' seems to have tickled him. But Sharp's question is revealing as well as naïve. It would not have been asked of Stephen Greenblatt about the Norton Shakespeare or of Jonathan Bate about the RSC edition. Like much of the British public, Sharp is under the impression that the Oxford Shakespeare has a special authority—that it is the Shakespearean equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary or the Book of Common Prayer. This is not the case. But the fact that people believe it to be the case is of crucial importance—not only to how the Oxford Shakespeare is read and marketed, but to how it has been edited and conceived.

A relative latecomer to the textual scene, the first Oxford Shakespeare was published in 1986 under the general editorship of Taylor and Stanley Wells. Had Rhod Sharp purchased a copy of that edition, he would probably have been in for a surprise. Dipping into it to look for a quotation from King Lear, for example, Sharp would have found himself confronted by two competing versions of that play. He would have found a character called 'Oldcastle' in place of Falstaff in 1 Henry IV, and a character called 'Innogen'—rather than Imogen—in Cymbeline. He would have found Hamlet's 'How all occasions do inform against me' soliloquy, not towards the beginning of act 4, but in an appendix. As Taylor declared proudly in 1989, the Oxford Shakespeare 'repeatedly shocks its readers, and knows that it will'.² But not all of these shocks are of a type that Sharp is likely to have felt. He could have breezed through Pericles, for example, unaware that chunks of what he read were lifted from George Wilkins' prose version of the story and cut up into verse by the editors. What characterised the first Oxford Shakespeare was this odd mixture of institutional prestige and textual radicalism—a mixture that makes it a fascinating document for the student of editing, but a potentially confusing one for the general public. This was no accident, as Taylor would later explain:

OUP's 1986 edition confronts the Shakespeare-loving public with a full-frontal challenge to its sense of propriety. [. . .] Like [Terry] Eagleton, the Oxford editors belong to an age that permits—even encourages—shockingly deviant behaviour. Eagleton can get away with saying outrageous things because his outrages are legitimated by Oxford University. So too with the Oxford Shakespeare. [. . .] The Oxford editors can afford to experiment because they know the global power and prestige of OUP will be mobilized in support of their experiments.³

To Taylor the edition was a glorious triumph. He had delivered a blow to the establishment from within its own ranks. To his detractors it felt like an imposture—selling the public one thing under the guise of another. Whether Rhod Sharp would have been pleased or appalled to learn that his Oxford Shakespeare was not, as he had reasonably supposed, a standard work of reference, but a series of bold editorial experiments, only he can say.

Thirty years later we have a New Oxford Shakespeare, and the first thing to stress is that it is genuinely new. Rather than...