As Shakespeare wrote for a company of actors and as the First Folio was the product of the work of many hands, so this edition is a product of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s principle of ensemble. Jonathan Bate’s role has been akin to that of a theater company’s artistic director: he devised the guiding principles, wrote almost all the introductory materials, and was final arbiter for every editorial decision. He gladly takes responsibility for all the edition’s failings. Eric Rasmussen has been like a stage director overseeing the performance of the complete works: line by line, through nearly a million words of Shakespeare, he has made choices about modernization, punctuation, emendations, and stage directions. He has edited thirty of the thirty-eight plays in this edition and checked the remaining eight, for which primary credit belongs to Eleanor Lowe (King John, 1 and 2 Henry VI, Henry VIII, Coriolanus), Dee Anna Phares (Macbeth and Othello), and Lucy Munro (Pericles). Jonathan Bate edited the poems and sonnets, with assistance from Jan Sewell, Penelope Freedman, and James Gibson.
Héloïse Sénéchal was chief commentary editor, researching and writing the explanatory notes for about half the plays herself and revising the initial work on the other half, which was undertaken by Eleanor Lowe, Jan Sewell, Charlotte Scott, Esme Miskimmin, Penelope Freedman, Christopher Campbell, Takashi Kozuka, and Erin Sullivan. “First pass” edits, establishing the core of the play texts, were undertaken by Sophie Holroyd, Trey Jansen, Dee Anna Phares, and Will Sharpe. Ayako Kawanami and Paul Prescott assisted with text preparation early in the project, and Oliver Phillips with tabular material. Jan Sewell and Trey Jansen played the hugely important role of checking, improving, and proofreading every work. Equally indispensable was our eagle-eyed copy editor, Tracey Day. Over fifteen person-years of editorial labor have gone into the project and every word of Shakespeare has been scrutinized by five or six pairs of editorial eyes—but still, as in every previous edition, there are bound to be errors, and we would like to express our gratitude in advance to any readers who may draw our attention to them via the edition’s website, www.therscshakespeare.com. Every effort will be made to incorporate corrections in later reprints and our forthcoming editions of individual works. Also to be found at the website are an array of supporting materials, including hints on Shakespearean verse speaking with audio examples, a bibliography (readily updatable online as it could not be in print), a more detailed account of our editorial procedures than that provided in the general introduction, and RSC production histories of all the plays.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of our many predecessors in bringing Shakespeare from script to print. We have been especially influenced by the following: John Hemings, Henry Condell, Ralph Crane, Isaac Jaggard, Edward Blount, and their collaborators for the production of the First Folio; Nicholas Rowe and his successors for establishing the modern editorial tradition; Samuel Johnson for principles that helped to shape this edition; the select company of editors—Charles Knight, Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke, Herbert Farjeon—who stayed loyal to the Folio in the centuries dominated by conflations and Quartos; successive generations of editors for Oxford, Cambridge, and the Arden series; the example of David Bevington; Stanley Wells and his collaborators on the 1986 Oxford edition for a new paradigm against which to measure ourselves.
The theoretical and practical work of many scholars has helped to shape our editorial principles, but special notice should be given to the work of Peter Blayney, Lukas Erne, John Jowett, and Paul Werstine. Our explanatory notes owe an immense debt not only to the commentaries of previous editions, but also to the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary Online, Early English Books Online, and Literature Online, the editors of Athlone Shakespeare Dictionaries, and the work of David and Ben Crystal (Shakespeare’s Words), Ian Lancashire (Early Modern English Dictionary Database and Lexicons of Early Modern English), and Gordon Williams (Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature and A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language).
We have always been conscious of standing on the shoulders of giants, while being aware that our predecessors will disagree with several of our key principles and hundreds of our local decisions. Such is the process of Shakespearean editing, which will continue so long as the plays are read and performed.
Jonathan Bate, University of Warwick
Eric Rasmussen, University of Nevada, Reno
The forms of Elizabethan secretary hand: the variant strokes suggest how difficult it would have been to read the original manuscripts, which is one reason why the early printed texts are prone to error and the modern editorial process remains so laborious and speculative.