Book 157

Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed around 1595 and published in 1600, in a quarto printed by Richard Bradock. This edition provides a photographic facsimile of this text taken from the Huntingdon Library copy, one of the eight which survive. In his introduction the editor, Thomas L. Berger, discusses the nature of the manuscript from which the printer worked, reconstructs the printing process, and assesses its impact on the text. Professor Berger also analyses the many interesting differences, in stage directions and the assignment of speeches, between the Quarto and Folio versions of the play, and considers the extent to which that may be the result of Shakespeare's own revisons. The text reproduced here includes both Quarto and Folio through-line-numbering in the margin , and a table is appended which matches the Quarto pages and line numbers with the act, scene,and line numbers of the Riverside Shakespeare.

Book 160

The anonymous comedy, The Taming of a Shrew, was printed by Peter Short in 1594, and is presumed to have been performed before that date. In his Introduction, Stephen Miller analyses the printing of the quarto and relates it to previous studies of Shakespeare quartos also printed by Short. He gives an account of the controversy surrounding the relation of A Shrew to the text of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, first printed in the First Folio of 1623, and supplies a table of scene-by-scene correspondences between the two texts. He lists known verbal borrowings in A Shrew from the plays of Marlowe and other sources and outlines his theory of the character and origins of the text. Through-line-numbers for the quarto text have been established for the first time in this edition.

Book 166

Titus Andronicus

by William Shakespeare

Published 1 April 1900
John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theories that had evolved under the 'New Bibliography'. Remarkably by today's standards, although it took the best part of half a century to produce, the New Shakespeare involved only a small band of editors besides Dover Wilson himself. As the volumes took shape, many of Dover Wilson's textual methods acquired general acceptance and became an established part of later editorial practice, for example in the Arden and New Cambridge Shakespeares.

Book 169

The Two Noble Kinsmen

by William Shakespeare

Published December 1966

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v.163

Romeo and Juliet, 1597

by William Shakespeare

Published 16 November 2000
Shakespeare's tragedy "Romeo and Juliet" was performed around 1595 and published in 1597 in a quarto claiming on its title page that it was printed by John Danter. The present volume is a photographic facsimile of this text. Evidence, discussed in the introduction, suggests that Danter printed only 40 per cent of the book and the remaining 60 per cent was printed by Edward Allde. The relationship of this First Quarto to the Second Quarto printed in 1599 is considered. The text reproduced here includes in the margins through-line numbering both for the Quarto and for the equivalent passages in the 1623 Folio, and a table is appended which matches the Quarto pages and line numbers with the act, scene, and line numbers of the Riverside Shakespeare.