The texts in this volume were edited for the second and third series of the Arden Shakespeare. The second series (Arden 2; General Editors: Una Ellis-Fermor, Harold F. Brooks, Harold Jenkins and Brian Morris) was published in thirty-eight volumes between 1951 and 1982. The third series (Arden 3; General Editors: Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan) began publication in 1995. We decided to include both Arden 2 and Arden 3 texts in this volume, despite some changes in editorial convention and the minor inconsistencies resulting from them. The other possible courses, to reissue Arden 2 texts which had been replaced, or to wait many years for completion of Arden 3, had less to recommend them.
The first edition of this volume included the seven Arden 3 texts published to date, five of which replaced early Arden 2 editions: Antony and Cleopatra, King Henry V, King Lear, Othello and Titus Andronicus; together with two, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which Arden 2 did not include. This revised edition includes a further eight Arden 3 texts: Julius Caesar, King Henry VI, Part 1, King Henry VI, Part 2, King Henry VIII, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest and Troilus and Cressida.
Some conventions of presentation and layout newly introduced for Arden 3 have been adopted throughout this volume. These include: the use of arabic numerals for act and scene numbers and the reduced prominence of those numbers on the page; the adoption of unabbreviated names for use as speech prefixes; removal of all editorial notes of location of action (most of which were the inventions of eighteenth-century editors and relate to the theatre of that period); substitution of ‘List of Roles’ for ‘Dramatis Personae’; and translation of Latin stage directions with the exception of the familiar Exit. ([s]he goes out) and Exeunt. (they go out). Where conventional scene divisions have been altered, the rejected scene and line numbers are recorded in square brackets for purposes of reference.
Minor inconsistency will be found in the Arden 3 texts in respect of (a) treatment of elided syllables; (b) spelling; (c) forms of stage directions.
(a) No elisions are marked in Arden 3 texts unless they indicate pronunciation differing from late twentieth-century English usage. For metrical reasons, the ‘-ed’ ending of past participles was sometimes sounded in verse passages, contrary to normal pronunciation. After his earliest plays Shakespeare made sparing use of this licence, and Arden 3, accordingly, does not adopt the familiar practice of drawing attention to such usage in the text. The convention used by Arden 2 was to print non-syllabic ‘-ed’ as ‘-’d’, which usually indicates normal modern pronunciation by use of an obsolete spelling form.
(b) Arden 2 editors were encouraged to retain obsolete spellings from the early editions if they believed that they might indicate the Elizabethan pronunciation of a word. Arden 3 adopts the practice of thorough modernization, on the grounds that the relation of spelling to pronunciation is imperfectly understood and was certainly variable and erratic. What has been clearly demonstrated is that, in the period before modern English spelling was stabilized, printers were already understood to be responsible for the spelling of books they printed – and also for punctuation (as they still are today). Consequently, few authorial spellings are likely to be present in the early editions, and those few are impossible to identify, in the absence of surviving manuscripts in Shakespeare’s hand which might identify them. Variations in spelling are included in the glossary where they might otherwise cause confusion.
(c) Where stage directions have been added by editors (as very many have), Arden 3 prefers active verbs to present participles: e.g. [Reads.], not [reading]. The exact wording of stage directions throughout should be regarded as editorial, though in substance they most frequently derive from the source texts.
More radical differences of convention relate to King Lear. Instead of following the recent practice of presenting the 1608 Quarto and 1623 First Folio texts as two separate plays, the Arden 3 editor presents a single edited text, based on the First Folio, which incorporates all further words and passages present only in the Quarto. The conventions used to signal the differences between the two texts are explained in the note on the text on p. 631. Similar conventions are used for three passages in Titus Andronicus (see p. 1123) which are taken from sources other than the First Quarto of 1594. The Arden 3 editors of Henry V and Othello have chosen the more conventional course of not indicating readings and passages unique to the earlier Quartos incorporated into their Folio-based edited texts of those plays.
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1 Title-page, with a portrait of Shakespeare engraved by Droeshout, from the First Folio, printed by Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount, 1623.