THE COMPLETE WORKS. Second edition.
By William Shakespeare.
Edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery
1,344pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $40); paperback, £16.99.
0 19 926717 0

William Shakespeare remains Britain's best-selling author. One online bookseller offers nearly 20,000 titles bearing his name, and although they include much ephemera, probably more than a thousand separate editions are currently on offer.

Several established series compete for those wanting individual plays. The Arden Shakespeare is over halfway through its third series, while the Penguin and the New Cambridge are already issuing updated versions of editions published not long ago. In an age when less Shakespeare is taught at school, those who discover him later in life will need more help. It is timely to ask, what do the punters get for their money, and which edition should they choose?

Bearing the prestigious imprint of Oxford University Press, and beautifully produced, the second edition of The Complete Works, edited by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jarrett and William Montgomery, might seem an obvious recommendation.

First published in 1986, it entered the huge American text-book market in 1997 when Norton, unwilling to generate their own Shakespeare, bought in the Oxford text. That seemed a strange decision at the time, given the many substantial criticisms that the Wells-Taylor edition had received, criticisms which the intervening twenty years have only intensified. Its original appearance was ill-starred, for (apparently owing to financial constraints) the first edition appeared with no commentary, although one had been prepared. Users had to wait until 1988 for its Textual Companion to appear, a huge and expensive volume which contained the editors' justification for the many drastic changes they had made to the received text. For its second edition, the Oxford editors have made some welcome changes. It now includes the whole text of Sir Thomas More, to which Shakespeare contributed one scene and an additional speech, with helpful indication of the probable co-authors. It also adds the anonymously published Edward III, for which Shakespeare wrote three or four scenes. Now, at last, George Peele is acknowledged as the co-author of Titus Andronicus, although his contribution is understated. These are welcome additions, as are an excellent essay, "The Language of Shakespeare", by David Crystal, and helpful suggestions for "further reading" by Susan Brock.

But otherwise the volume has had minimum revision. A laughably brief "User's Guide" has been added, which still refers us to the Textual Companion (out of print) for "information" about the editors' decisions. No further explanations are provided. There are no notes, and the highly selective Glossary omits many difficult words. In the fluent and wide-ranging General Introduction by Wells, errors pointed out by reviewers have not been corrected: Shakespeare's mother is still said to have died in 1609 (for 1608), and Francis Meres supposedly never mentioned Shakespeare's narrative poems. In an interview, Wells admitted that he had written the introductions to individual plays in a morning, and it shows.

While they include good thumbnail descriptions, as on the "sophisticated erotic comedy" of Venus and Adonis, or Shylock as the "first great comic antagonist", Wells lapses too often into vapid appreciations, as on "the rapt wonder of the antiphon of recognition" in Twelfth Night, the "glorious celebration" of the imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream, "the rapt and impassioned poetry of the lovers" in Romeo and Juliet.

It is regrettable that the Oxford editors did not take this opportunity to make their Complete Works more helpful. Symptomatic of their rather aloof attitude to readers is their extraordinary decision not to add a Preface. Normally, in revising such a major enterprise as this, editors would be expected to describe any changes they have made, and reflect on the original edition's reception, perhaps responding to criticism, or at the very least printing a list of the major reviews it had received. But it seems as if Wells and Taylor would like to bury those reviews. In 1990, they contributed a rather peeved essay, "The Oxford Shakespeare Re-Viewed by the General Editors", to the now sadly defunct journal Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography. In it they complained that the first edition had "been characterized/caricatured in many reviews on the basis of one or two conspicuous features", confirming to them that "it is easier for reviewers to fume about a couple of conspicuous innovations than to work their way diligently through three long volumes". This condescending dismissal is transparently unjust to the scholars -some of the leading Shakespeare editors and textual critics of our time -who produced long and carefully considered estimates. They included two senior editors of rival Complete Works, David Bevington and G. B. Evans, and such vastly experienced scholars as R. A. Foakes, E. A. J. Honigmann, G. Walton Williams and Thomas Berger, among others.

(Details of these reviews can all be found in the excellent online World Shakespeare Bibliography.) The most notorious of the "conspicuous innovations" by the Oxford-Norton editors was a poem of seventy-two lines beginning "Shall I dye", which Taylor ascribed to Shakespeare amid much publicity.

Of the many peculiar features of this poem, the ambitious rhyme-scheme (in which six of the eight lines in each stanza have an internal rhyme, two of them ending with a double rhyme) is partly responsible for its jerky movement and banal poetic diction.

In a dreame, it did seeme but alas dreames doe passe / as doe shaddowes I did walke, I did talke with my love, with my dove / through faire meadowes.

This poet set himself a technical challenge which he was comically unable to fulfil. The only evidence connecting this feeble poem with Shakespeare is that the scribe of the Bodleian copy (made in the 1630s) wrote his name at the end; the other copy, at Yale, is unattributed. Taylor, however, at first view "felt it in my guts that it was Shakespeare", and was convinced that "I (had) found the literary equivalent of Sleeping Beauty, a nameless poem awakening from the ancient sheets in which it had lain undisturbed for centuries . . .".

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now