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Title: Riverside Shakespeare by William Shakespeare, Frank Kermode, Michael E. Eliot Hurst ISBN: 0-395-04402-2 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: January, 1974 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $60.36 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (14 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The most complete edition of the Bard and a superb companion
Comment: This one-volume edition of Shakespeare's works is the most complete I found on the market: it includes "The Two Noble Kinsmen", Shakespeare's addition to "Sir Thomas More" (with photographical reproduction of the pages believed to be in his handwrite), the currently hot debated poem "A Funeral Elegy by W. S." and, above all, "The Reign of King Edward III", a new play recently accepted in the canon by many authoritative editors (Arden, Cambridge, Oxford). The text of each work is carefully edited and accompanied by helpful glossarial notes, a textual discussion with short bibliography, and an impressive collation which allows the reader to find variant readings and emendations. An exhaustive critical introduction precedes each play and poem, dealing with authorship, date, sources, textual differences between quarto and folio texts, and of course the principal thematic issues. What makes this a superb edition - and indeed a real "companion" to Shakespeare studies! - is the great amount of subsidiary material, including a general introduction - focusing on Shakespeare's life, art, language, style, and on the Elizabethan historical and theatrical background - and a series of useful essays on various themes: critical approaches to the plays and poems, philological issues, history of the plays on the stage, television and cinema. There are also many interesting documents, synoptic tables, glossaries, indexes, illustrated tables (both coloured and b&w) , the reproduction of the introductory pages of the First Folio of 1623, and a rich bibliography. I personally consider this book a must have for every teacher, scholar, or simply amateur of the greatest of all poets. Buy it!
Rating: 3
Summary: Lousy format spoils otherwise good edition
Comment: This book has useful (though not terribly complete) introductions to each of the plays, focusing mainly on comparing various Folio and Quarto editions of the plays. It also contains some nice pictures, though I wish the Latin in them were translated or shown at a legible size. It has very nice appendicies nothing the first appearances of all the characters in the plays, and a timeline showing what historical events were occuring in relation to works written by Shakespeare and events in his life, as well as to plays by other playwrights and other literature produced at that time. The pages are relatively thin and the print small. However (this referes to the '74 edition, maybe they have changed it since then) the plays are a royal pain to read. The pages are about a foot high and the notes are at the bottom. There is no marking to indicate whether a line has a note, so the reader must read a line or two, glance down at the notes, read another few lines, look at the notes again, and so on. Were it not for this major annoyance, this would be a very good (and very complete) edition of Shakespeare's works.
Rating: 2
Summary: As stated earlier, notation format nearly ruins this edition
Comment: I haven't read the other completed works extensively (although the Bevington and Norton editions seem to be the ones most highly praised), but the footnote format of the Riverside is so irritating that I'm selling the copy I bought last year for the first half of my 2nd-year Shakespeare survey course, and picking up either the Norton or the Bevington (although I have yet to personally see Bevington's footnote format). As was stated before, here are the problems with the annotation/footnotes:
The lines are numbered in a standard "every-fifth-line" format. This would be fine if we as readers weren't required to know exactly what line we're on at all times, but the footnotes demand this.
For example:
"Therefore thy threat'ning colors now wind up" is King John, V.ii.73. Unless you are counting the actual number of each line in your head as you read (impossible, it seems) you will only know we're on line 73 when you look over to the right, see lines 70 and 75 marked, and then quickly estimate/count the lines in between. The problem is the note at the bottom, which simply says:
73. wind: furl.
Like the earlier reviewer said, to figure out whether or not a footnote exists, you must read a line or two, determine what line number(s) you've just read through a line-counting process, and then go down to the footnotes to see if anything matches. Once you've matched the line number to the footnote, you have to go back to the line and find the word that's footnoted, because it's not marked in any way.
The Norton method (while some find it intrusive) is certainly easier for students, and the Bevington method sounds interesting (giving the line numbers in the margin only where there is a footnote existsing). The Riverside is just too irritating for most students to use.
Some say this method slows the reading process down, and forces one to go through the text more slowly, thus giving a closer reading. To this I'd say that the process of line-counting and stopping every 2-3 lines to "check" for footnotes that may not exist (besides the process of word-matching once a footnote is found) perverts the close reading just as much or moreso than any sort of footnotes condusive to easier, faster reading ever could.
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Title: Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary: A Complete Dictionary of All the English Words, Phrases, and Constructions in the Works of the Poet (Volume I) by Alexander Schmidt ISBN: 048622726X Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 June, 1971 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction With Documents by Russ McDonald ISBN: 0312248806 Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $22.75 |
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Title: A Shakespeare Glossary by Robert D. Eagleson, Charles T. Onions ISBN: 0198125216 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: January, 1986 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Playing Shakespeare : An Actor's Guide by John Barton ISBN: 0385720858 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 21 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare by Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells ISBN: 0198117353 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: October, 2001 List Price(USD): $60.00 |
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