With the publication, last January, of Measure for Measure, edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson, the Third Series of the Arden Shakespeare was finally complete. There have been several recent offshoots of this imprint, including Arden Early Modern Drama Guides and Arden Student Skills, both of which offer extended critical commentary on individual plays; there are also editions of non-Shakespearian Renaissance plays under the rubric Arden Early Modern Drama. Nonetheless, the core of the enterprise remains the editing of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Publication of Arden 3 has taken twenty-five years, which compares favorably with the thirty-one for the Second Series (“The New Arden” or Arden 2, 1951---82) and equals that for the original series (Arden 1, 1899---1924, interrupted by the Great War). The general editors for Arden 4 have already been announced, but this is a moment for retrospection, and for celebration of one of the landmark publishing ventures of our time. It also offers a unique perspective from which to examine changes in Shakespeare editing and scholarship as they have been reflected in the Ardens over the last hundred and twenty years.

The first Arden Measure for Measure, edited by H. C. Hart, appeared in 1905, and the second, edited by J. W. Lever, in 1964. Hart, who edited seven volumes in the first series, had been born in 1847 and was by profession a botanist. In one respect his task was easy: no textual expertise was needed for Arden 1, which simply reproduced W. G. Clark and John Glover’s “Globe” edition of Shakespeare (1864, revised 1891–93) for each volume. Later editions, following the extraordinary growth of our understanding of Renaissance printing and publishing practices, called for a high level of bibliographical skill: cultivated amateurs were no longer suitable. As it happens, there is no text of Measure for Measure before the Folio of 1623. A production of the play at court is recorded for December 26, 1604, which fixes the date of composition earlier in that year or perhaps late in 1603. So Hart concluded, and so his successors have broadly agreed. The play is unmistakably Jacobean, and Hart noted that the figure of the Duke may glance at certain characteristics of the new monarch; scholars are now wary of this, given that the proposed resemblances are not particularly flattering. Hart discussed the main sources, George Whetstone’s two-part play Promos and Cassandra (1578) and his later prose version of it in Heptameron (1582), and recorded Shakespeare’s departures from them. He passed to cursory character sketches, finding the Duke “hardly . . . a personage to delight in,” but rhapsodizing, as critics at that time tended to do, over the heroine: “How like a bright particular star Isabella shines out . . . her shining armour of chastity . . . the truth of her spirit.” Most of the other characters were not considered at all. In 1905 there was little criticism to cover. Hart quoted Johnson, Coleridge, F. J. Furnivall, the German scholar G. G. Gervinus, and, at length, William Hazlitt. His introduction occupies twenty-eight pages altogether. Turning to the play, the reader recognizes the familiar layout of a collation immediately below the text, recording textual variants, editorial emendations and conjectures (this has been relocated to the bottom of the page in Arden 3 editions), and annotations printed in double columns—all in smaller type.

Punctuation affects the movement, tempo, and weight of an actor’s delivery, and hence the color of an entire exchange or scene.

In many respects, the most radical changes from one edition to another occur where a reader least notices them: in the punctuation of the text. Punctuation marks were used differently in Shakespeare’s day from the way we use them, and the early printings reflect the punctuation of the compositors rather than that of the manuscript they were setting, which in any case may not have been Shakespeare’s. Punctuation affects the movement, tempo, and weight of an actor’s delivery, and hence the color of an entire exchange or scene. The “same” text in Arden 2 and Arden 3 may have completely different punctuation, which reflects the editor’s judgment of how the lines might be spoken. Thus, Claudio’s famous soliloquy on the terror of death (Measure for Measure, Act 3, scene 1) begins, in Arden 2: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;/ To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.” In Arden 3, we have, “Ay, but to die and go we know not where,/ To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.” The heavier punctuation in Arden 2 brings out the nervous hesitancy with which Claudio imagines the terrible experience, while that in Arden 3 suggests an element of headlong panic. The effect in performance would be quite different. (Arden 2 follows the Folio, except that it puts a semi-colon where the Folio puts a comma.)

In contrast to Hart’s twenty-eight pages, Lever’s introduction to Measure for Measure occupies ninety-eight, while Braunmuller and Watson take 148. This is typical of Arden 3 as a whole; the introductions have grown longer and longer. Certain topics remain compulsory—chronology, for example. The consensus about the date of Measure for Measure is not typical; for other plays, views have sometimes varied widely. (A prominent example is King John, which was dated 1590--91 in the Arden 2 of 1954, and 1595–96 in the Arden 3 of 2018). The approach to bibliographical matters, as noted above, had been completely transformed by the time of Arden 2. The Folio text of Measure for Measure is now thought to derive from a copy made by the professional scribe Ralph Crane, who can be identified by his idiosyncratic practices with punctuation, spelling, and stage directions; Lever used the work of Charlton Hinman, unavailable to Hart, to show that the text was set by four compositors in the printing-house. The transmission has led to numerous inconsistencies, corruptions, and loose ends, some of which Lever thought could be explained, while others have suggested a degree of subsequent revision, by Shakespeare himself or someone else. Lever rejected this idea, but, as we shall see, it has since been revived with a vengeance. “Shakespeare’s own rough draft, in reasonably good condition,” he concluded, underlies the Folio text.

On sources, Lever cited Whetstone, but also other authors not considered by Hart. Traditional tales of the corrupt magistrate, the disguised ruler, and the substitute bedmate shape much of the plot, and Lever examined these in great detail for twenty-nine pages. Eventually we arrive at a section headed “The Play,” subdivided into “Form” (eight pages) and “Themes” (twenty-eight pages) and rounded off by a brief conclusion. Of the play’s history on the stage since 1604, there is not a word. Admittedly, revivals had been few—Arden 3 notes only five productions which Lever could have mentioned—but this was an extreme example of a lack of interest in the theater which was a deliberate policy of Arden 2, reflecting general editor Harold Jenkins’s view that “You can’t edit a production.” The general editors of Arden 3 have taken a very different line. A contributing factor, of course, has been the huge increase in productions of the plays during the time Arden 3 has been appearing—and editors now feel impelled to refer to television and film versions as well as productions outside London, and indeed throughout the world. In the case of Richard III, for example, Arden 2 (1981) surveys the eighteenth-century adaptations and Henry Irving’s authentic but truncated staging of 1877 before homing in on the Laurence Olivier film of 1955 and dismissing all later, unspecified “modern productions” in one short paragraph. In Arden 3 (2009), the stage history fills forty-four pages (with photographs, as is now obligatory) and refers to sixteen post-Olivier Richards alone.

In the Arden 3 Measure for Measure, interpretation takes pride of place in the introduction, technical matters coming later. Perhaps surprisingly, themes and character study remain, despite much scorn for both in the heyday of literary theory. The stage history, in a return to earlier practice, takes a mere six pages (contrast the fifty allotted to this in the Arden 3 Twelfth Night, 2008). The most radical departure is the discussion of authorship: for Measure for Measure is now among the Shakespeare plays in which a share is claimed for Thomas Middleton (more on this shortly). Theories of multiple authorship, which were popular during the lifetime of Arden 1 but largely dismissed as “disintegrationist” in the years when Arden 2 was appearing, are now back in fashion. A major reason for this is the rise of computational analysis of the whole extant body of Renaissance drama, which has enabled more precise identification of the linguistic habits of individual playwrights than was possible before the 1990s or thereabouts. The reliability of the variety of “stylometric” tests on offer continues to be hotly disputed, rival experts frequently contradicting each other, but the tests can no longer simply be brushed aside—nor, for that matter, can all judgments of literary and aesthetic quality be simply disdained as “impressionistic,” as the linguistic semi-scientists tend to do. The Ardens, unlike some other available editions, try to maintain a balance here.

Arden 3 has seen the acceptance of the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are all, to a degree, “collaborative.”

No modern scholar disputes that Shakespeare collaborated on occasion; the question is when, with whom, and to what extent. The main arguments have concentrated on his early and late work. Act 1, at least, of Titus Andronicus was tentatively ascribed to George Peele in Arden 2 (1953), a position which has since been made a virtual certainty by Brian Vickers in Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002), as recognized by Jonathan Bate in his revised Arden 3 of Titus (2018). But Bate feels that we can’t speak of genuine collaboration here; Shakespeare is more likely to have worked independently on Peele’s draft or incomplete manuscript. The three parts of Henry VI have proved, appropriately, a battleground, as has their order of composition. Hart, in Arden 1 (1909, 1910), parceled out the trilogy among a number of dramatists besides Shakespeare, including Marlowe, Greene and Peele; A. S. Cairncross, in Arden 2 (1957, 1962, 1964), flatly stated that Shakespeare had written all three parts; Arden 3 (1999, 2000, 2001), in which each play in the trilogy was edited by different people, found that Thomas Nashe contributed to Part 1, and that other hands cannot be ruled out in Parts 2 and 3, but without making definite identifications. Recent editors have been influenced by theoretical skepticism about “the author” as a single entity, and while we need not follow Barthes too far, one major change during the lifetime of Arden 3 has been the acceptance of the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are all, to a degree, “collaborative,” emerging from the combined work of playwright, scribe, theater company, compositor, and printer—others would add modern directors, although to me they often seem more eager to destroy Shakespeare than to re-create him.

Turning to the other end of Shakespeare’s career, almost everybody would accept that he wrote Pericles jointly with George Wilkins—Arden 2 (1963) adds John Day, also, but Arden 3 (2004) showed that this was highly implausible and credits Shakespeare with the last three acts and possible retouching of the first two. Three plays were collaborations between Shakespeare and John Fletcher, his successor as principal dramatist for the King’s Men. The Arden 2 Henry VIII appeared in 1957, the Arden 3 in 2000. R. A. Foakes, who edited Arden 2, originally believed Shakespeare to be the sole author, although in a later revision he admitted that Fletcher might have made a contribution, whereas Gordon McMullan in Arden 3, buying into Foucault as well as Barthes, speaks of “a process of textual negotiation at a given historical moment” and simply records the scholarly consensus for each scene, which suggests an equal partnership for Acts 1 and 2 and Fletcher’s greater predominance thereafter. The Two Noble Kinsmen, on which Shakespeare again worked with Fletcher, did not feature in Arden 1 or 2; it was included in the Third Series in 1996 (since revised). In this case, the editor, Lois Potter, found that the dramatists worked concurrently, Fletcher overseeing the shape of the final draft. (For the third play, Cardenio, see below.)

Shakespeare’s most problematical relationship is that with Middleton. It is undisputed in the case of Timon of Athens. Although the matter was ignored by Arden 2 (1959), the title page of Arden 3 (2008) ascribes the play to “William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton” and provides ample justification, with appropriate acknowledgement to John Jowett’s Oxford edition of 2004. Jowett believes that a scene-by-scene ascription to one author or the other is possible, although the Arden 3 editors, Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton, are reluctant to be so definite. It is also widely accepted that our only text of Macbeth, that of 1623, owes something—at least in the Weird Sisters material, and perhaps elsewhere—to a later adaptation by Middleton. The last revision of Arden 2 (1984) admitted this possibility, and Arden 3 (2015) concurred, while rejecting the wild surmise of Gary Taylor that Middleton also cut Shakespeare’s original text by about a quarter. Middleton’s presence elsewhere in the canon remains controversial. Claims for his contribution to All’s Well That Ends Well, unknown to Arden 2 (1959), are canvassed in Arden 3 (2018); after reviewing one of those no-holds-barred spats between opposed authorities which disturb the unruffled lakes of English studies from time to time, the editors, Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox, conclude that the unique Folio text represents a version of the play made for a revival in the early 1620s, to which Middleton contributed some elements. (Collaboration between two editors has also tended to feature in Arden 3.) A similar argument is made in respect of Measure for Measure by the Arden 3 editors—Lever, writing before the widespread use of computers, never mentions the possibility in Arden 2—but in an appendix, Richard Proudfoot, the senior Arden general editor, who has remained in place throughout the project’s quarter-century, gently observes that “Middleton’s presence in the play should be seen as an intriguing hypothesis rather than a fully proven attribution.”

There is a small, separate group of plays in which Shakespeare is thought to have had a minor share of the writing, and these have been admitted into the Arden canon for the first time in the Third Series. They are Sir Thomas More (2011), Edward III (2017), and, for different reasons, Double Falsehood (2010). John Jowett’s edition of More is one of the triumphs of the series as a whole, elucidating a nightmarishly complex textual history with exemplary clarity. His title page gives some idea of the task: it reads, “Sir Thomas More, original text by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, revisions co-ordinated by Hand C, revised by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood and William Shakespeare.” The play was heavily censored and never staged, and its importance for Shakespeare is the existence of some pages in what is thought to be his handwriting, allowing us unique insight into his methods of composition, albeit only of a scene and a bit. More had appeared previously, of course, in both the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare series, but Jowett’s edition is likely to be definitive. The Arden 3 Edward III, edited by Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett, appeared in 2017. This is a notably accomplished history play of the early 1590s, aligning well with Shakespeare’s interests at that time. The editors concur with the long-established view which gives Shakespeare the scenes of wooing between Edward and the Countess of Salisbury and suggest that he also reworked other scenes for a possible revival in 1594, but they do not feel the other playwright can be identified as yet. Of those usually suggested, a tentative case can be made for Marlowe and Kyd, with Nashe a possibility and Peele unlikely. The inclusion of Double Falsehood in the Arden series was a bold decision by the general editors. This play of 1727, by Lewis Theobald, is thought to preserve some remnants of the lost Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher. It is, of course, excellent to have Brean Hammond’s edition for its own sake, although the echoes, if such they are, are faint and few. I am not certain they deserved the Arden imprimatur, but this is one of only two editions of the play available to students.

Are the quarto texts first drafts by Shakespeare, reconstructions by actors, or cut versions for touring?

Textual revision is another aspect of scholarship which has undergone a revolution during the lifetime of the Arden Shakespeare. Here again, we see the editorial tradition coming to terms with theory, this time with what constitutes a text, rather than an author. Problems arising from collaboration are relatively minor compared to those where we seem to be dealing with two—or, in the case of Hamlet, three—completely distinct versions. The quartos of Richard III (1597), Romeo and Juliet (1597), Henry V (1600), The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Hamlet (1603, 1604), King Lear (1608), Pericles (1609), and Othello (1622) fall into this category, with some differing from the Folio texts in hundreds of ways. Scholars continue to argue about the status of the quarto texts: are they first drafts by Shakespeare, reconstructions by actors, or cut versions made (by Shakespeare or someone else) for touring? Are the Folio versions the original first drafts, or revisions made by Shakespeare, and, if the latter, when and why? Did he intend, as vigorously argued by Lukas Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (2003, second edition 2013), to produce a reading text as well as a play script, since the Folio versions tend to expand considerably?

The Arden series have increasingly had to wrestle with all these issues. Solutions have varied: for the Arden 3 Henry V (1995, revised 1997), T. W. Craik decided that the quarto was a memorial reconstruction of a version of the play as originally performed, while Giorgio Melchiori (1999) carried out what was virtually an archaeological dig on the various strata that make up The Merry Wives. One extended example of changes in textual editing must suffice. Edward Dowden’s Hamlet was the first volume in Arden 1 to appear, in 1899. The same play was the last to appear in Arden 2, in 1982. Readers thus had to wait a record eighty-three years, but the general verdict was that patience had been rewarded. Arden 2 was the work of Harold Jenkins, one of the two general editors of the series along with Harold F. Brooks (whose own Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1979, was a notable achievement). Jenkins’s edition, on which he had labored for nearly thirty years, offered 159 pages of introduction and fifty of “Longer Notes” buttressing the annotated text, but, alas, no index (a deficiency which has been rectified for Arden 3 volumes). He concluded that Q1 was a memorial reconstruction by actors, Q2 the closest to what Shakespeare wrote—and F a copy of Q2 which had been revised (by Shakespeare?) and possibly re-transcribed. He therefore based his text on Q2 but admitted some passages from F; this practice, known as conflation, is now frowned upon, although a variant on it was adopted by R. A. Foakes for the Arden 3 King Lear (1997). Foakes printed all passages unique to Q and F, whether single words or whole speeches, with superscript markers where necessary to indicate which version was being followed.

Jenkins was aware, of course, that in the house of Shakespeare there are many mansions, and that some become liable to renovation from time to time, but he was startled, and indeed rather hurt, to learn that the approach to the text in the Arden 3 Hamlet would differ so radically from his own that it amounted to demolition. The edition, by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, appeared in two volumes, one containing Q1 and F (2006) and the other containing Q2 (2008, revised 2016). Interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum for The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups (2006), Jenkins remarked, prophetically, “I’m ninety now, I don’t imagine I shall live to see it. And that I shall not regret.” Thompson and Taylor adopt a view of the texts which is actually close to Jenkins’s, with Q1 a reconstruction of the F text by actors, Q2 based on Shakespeare’s manuscript, and F preserving Shakespeare’s revisions to Q2. Their difference from Jenkins is in their reluctance to emend readings which looked incorrect, on the grounds that each text should be granted its own authority. The reader, in fact, is virtually invited to do the editing by exercising his or her own judgment. This doctrine of “unediting,” as it’s been called, has been criticized by some commentators, and it’s by no means clear that Jenkins’s Hamlet has been superseded—certainly his notes remain a treasure trove of information and interpretation. The enhanced status of Q1, which he perhaps underestimated, is a significant by-product of Arden 3. The memorial reconstruction theory has come in for severe criticism, and it is valuable to have a text of Q1 edited in its own right.

Textual theories and critical fashions come and go, but annotation is probably the feature of the Ardens which students and actors have valued most highly. In this respect, too, there have been changes, notably in what earlier editors felt they could assume was general knowledge, and which they therefore left unremarked. More background information is found in the notes to Arden 3 history plays than in those to Arden 2, and the editor of the Arden 3 Merchant of Venice, in 2010, had to explain biblical references more fully than his Arden 2 predecessor of 1955. Notes on etymology, scansion, ambiguities, layers of imagery, usage elsewhere in Shakespeare, and contemporary literature, have all become more plentiful, and some editions incorporate production details in the notes.

So much for the factual and technical aspects of Arden editing; what of the critical? Here we have to recall the time span of the three series. When Arden 1 began in 1899, the major critical authorities were still Dryden, Johnson, Lamb, Coleridge, and Hazlitt, and of these, only Coleridge went much beyond thinking of Shakespeare in terms of character and morality, to consider dramatic structure and poetic texture. Keats’s insights in his letters are irreplaceable, but they are not systematic. Swinburne, and one or two German scholars such as Gervinus, represented (then) contemporary criticism. By 1924, when Arden 1 came to an end—with Much Ado About Nothing, rather delightfully—there was little to add to the belles-lettrists, apart from A. C. Bradley and T. S. Eliot. By contrast, Arden 2, appearing from 1951 to 1982, could profit from the work of a galaxy of distinguished names on both sides of the Atlantic, following the rise of the New Criticism, the proliferation of academic writing (and academic journals), and the first phase of literary theory imported from continental Europe. Arden 3 has had to take account of many more “isms,” not all equally profitable, as well as of the increasing overlap between literary and performance criticism—a strategy which shows how remote traditional literary analysis now seems to that fabled beast, the general reader. I feel it is not only sentiment, reaching back to my undergraduate days when essay deadlines loomed, which makes me admire so much of the criticism in Arden 2 introductions; many of them were original and influential. This was especially so for what used to be called the problem plays and the late plays—now more often labeled tragi-comedies and romances, respectively—where there was still scope for fresh thought about parts of the canon that were relatively neglected or misunderstood. G. K. Hunter’s analysis of the clash between different dramatic modes in All’s Well That Ends Well (1959), James Nosworthy on Cymbeline as an “experimental romance” (1955), J. H. P. Pafford’s teasing out of the balance between fable and realism in The Winter’s Tale (1963), F. D. Hoeniger’s tracing of certain aspects of Pericles to medieval drama (1963), Frank Kermode’s brilliant interpretation of The Tempest in the light of the pastoral tradition (1954, revised 1957)—all these are things to be grateful for (and to re-read). Then, too, A. R. Humphreys’s editions of Henry IV (Part 1, 1960; Part 2, 1966) summed up and extended the best thinking about Shakespeare’s historical masterpieces, with rich appreciation of their variety, tonality, and intellectual acuteness. One can forgive the odd failure to rise to the occasion—as in Henry V (1954), with its unsubtly hagiographic view of the king, or Antony and Cleopatra (1954), which largely reprinted the Arden 1 introduction from 1906—for successes like these.

The sheer proliferation of criticism has made it harder for Arden 3 editors to say anything really new and has created the temptation (not always resisted) to be ingenious or polemical rather than judicious and sensible. In some cases, a certain pugnacity has paid off, as in Jonathan Bate’s Titus Andronicus (1995, revised 2018), which would have none of the conventional dismissiveness about the play, championing it as powerful, effective, and imaginatively daring. Close analysis of the language of a particular play, in the annotation as much as in the introduction, is a continuing merit of the series; H. R. Woudhuysen on Love’s Labour’s Lost (1998) and Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason on Macbeth (2015) are notable examples. Recovery of the original political contexts of the plays has been illuminatingly deployed by David Daniell for Julius Caesar (1998) and by Peter Holland for Coriolanus (2013), both of whom demonstrate Shakespeare adapting ancient history to contemporary concerns. Also notable is the suggestion, in Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s Arden 3 edition of The Tempest (1999, revised 2011), that the play’s interest in alchemical terminology (which extends to its title) may be a response to Jonson’s The Alchemist, performed in the previous year. An almost obsessive interest in cross-dressing and the blurring of gender boundaries has left its mark on the comedies: if Juliet Dusinberre is moderate in her treatment of multiple gender fictions in As You Like It (2006), Keir Elam on castration in Twelfth Night (2008) can feel a bit eye-watering. Editors, as well as actors, sometimes like to play to the gallery.

It remains to say something of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic work. It was for this, after all, that he was first celebrated in his own day. The sonnets appeared in Arden 1 in 1918, but there was no Arden 2 edition. The Arden 3 sonnets (1997) were edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones, who was well-equipped to tackle the biographical conundrums posed by these poems, as she shortly afterwards proved with a boldly speculative biography of her own (Ungentle Shakespeare 2001, revised as Shakespeare: An Ungentle Life 2010). Her edition is sparing in annotation, but her introduction deals firmly with questions of date (a few sonnets composed before 1598, many during the early 1600s, especially 1603/4 when plague closed the theaters, with final additions and selections in 1608/9, again a plague season), first edition (1609, with Shakespeare’s approval—a view other editors have questioned), the identity of the dedicatee “Mr W. H.” (William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, rather than Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton), and of the “dark lady” (most likely an imaginary person). As for the sonnets being, in Wordsworth’s phrase, the key which unlocked Shakespeare’s heart, Duncan-Jones censures the timidity of editors to draw the implication of homosexual feeling for “Mr W. H.” in sonnets 1 to 126, noting that the editors have all been men, and that much of the major work on this topic has come from women. (In passing, we note how few Ardens have had female editors: Arden 1 and 2 had one each; Arden 3 has had fourteen, some working in tandem.) The sonnets are followed in the quarto by A Lover’s Complaint, written, as was customary for a “complaint” poem, in the voice of a female, seduced, in this case, by a young courtier strongly resembling the sonnets’ “fair youth,” herself recalling the speaker of those sonnets in her obsessive devotion.

The critical controversies produced by the sonnets seem mild beside those which rage around Shakespeare’s other poems, and it was Duncan-Jones again, this time in collaboration with H. R. Woudhuysen, who edited the Arden 3 Shakespeare’s Poems (2007). This cast its net wider than F. T. Prince had done for Arden 2 (1960), including not only Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and shorter poems such as “The Phoenix and Turtle”—with a new interpretation placing it in the context of the collection in which it appeared, Love’s Martyr (1601)—but also the collection The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), stated on the title page to be by Shakespeare but in fact containing only five poems definitely by him, together with others which show the influence of Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet. Prince ignored Pilgrim, and for that matter did not seem to think much of the two narrative poems, despite being a poet, as well as a professor, himself. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are winning advocates for the poems’ verbal attractiveness, formal sophistication, and intellectual dexterity. There is also a short section of attributed poems, most of which the editors rule either doubtful or impossible; among the latter is the lyric “Shall I die?,” about which a great to-do was made when it was claimed for Shakespeare in 1985, and A Funeral Elegy (1612) which is now believed to be by John Ford. None of these attributed poems, even if the attribution is correct, adds anything substantial to Shakespeare’s reputation.

The baton passes to a younger generation, in a hazardous future for the academic market.

The volumes of Arden 3 have been kept remarkably inexpensive for their size and quality; at a time when an edited scholarly text from a major publishing house can cost well over $125, the hardback edition of Measure for Measure is $110 and the paperback only $14.95. The series has survived several changes of publisher, and the general editors have had to contend with unforeseen delays in the production of some volumes, but they can look with quiet satisfaction on a labor of love emphatically not lost.

The baton passes to a younger generation, in a hazardous future for the academic market. Arden 4 may exist in book form: it will certainly exist online, digitized and searchable in a multitude of ways, and the need for a separate print copy may come to seem redundant. What will never be redundant, however, are the care for standards, and meticulous attention to detail, which have made the Arden Shakespeare one of the great achievements of modern literary scholarship.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 39 Number 1, on page 8
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