Collected editions of Shakespeare

The First Folio

The first collected edition of Shakespeare is customarily called the First Folio, after its printing format. The actual title was Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. It was edited by his colleagues John Hemings and Henry Condell, and published in 1623, some years after his death. The editors claim that it includes all his plays. They make no mention one way or the other of collaborations with other writers, or of works other than plays. It contains 36 plays, arranged as follows.

Comedies:

• The Tempest
• The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Measure for Measure
• The Comedy of Errors
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Love's Labour's Lost
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Merchant of Venice
• As You Like It
• The Taming of the Shrew
• All's Well That Ends Well
• Twelfth Night
• The Winter's Tale

Histories:

• King John
• Richard II
• Henry IV, Part 1
• Henry IV, Part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI, Part 1
• Henry VI, Part 2
• Henry VI, Part 3
• Richard III
• Henry VIII

Tragedies:

• Troilus and Cressida
• Coriolanus
• Titus Andronicus
• Romeo and Juliet
• Timon of Athens
• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth
• Hamlet
• King Lear
• Othello
• Anthony and Cleopatra
• Cymbeline

The titles listed above are the short forms by which the plays are commonly referred to. Some of them have fuller titles in the First Folio, and in some the title given in the table of contents is different from that given at the head of the play itself. Titles of histories and tragedies all include names of characters appearing in them; titles of comedies never do. (Some earlier editions of individual plays do not observe this practice.) The histories are arranged in historical order of the events depicted. The basis for the order of the other plays has not been established.

About half the plays had been previously published in separate editions (mostly quartos): some anonymously, others under Shakespeare's name or initials.

Historical evolution

A number of editions were published later in the 17th century. Their editors emended what they believed to be misprints. They simply used their personal judgment, not having any other sources to refer to. A major change took place in 1664, when 7 more plays were added. All of these had been separately published in Shakespeare's lifetime, and under his name or initials (which were shared with a minor writer named Wentworth Smith).

In the 18th century, editors started comparing the Folio with the quartos. They discovered substantial differences in some plays. Passages, even whole scenes, were found in one version but not the other. They dealt with this by creating a conflated text including the passages from both versions. This remained standard practice until recently.

They also considered whether the 7 added plays were by Shakespeare. They eventually concluded that only 1 was. Pericles, Prince of Tyre, had been published under Shakespeare's name in 1609. A "novelization" had appeared the previous year under the name of George Wilkins.

These editors also added non-dramatic poems they believed to be by Shakespeare. At first there was substantial disagreement on which should be included, but eventually a consensus was arrived at, producing a "canon" of Shakespeare's works including the following poems:

• Venus and Adonis
• the Rape of Lucrece
• the Passionate Pilgrim (the later part of this bears the heading Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, and this is sometimes listed separately in tables of contents)
• the Phoenix and the Turtle (this title was not used until 1801)
• a sequence of 154 sonnets
• a Lover's Complaint

These 18th-century editions were multi-volume ones. They established the basic tradition of collected editions, down to the spelling, which was much more varied in 1623. Most editions until recently closely resemble the end-product of their work.

The 19th century returned to 1-volume editions. These usually followed the First Folio arrangement, with Pericles added to the tragedies and the poems collected at the end. An 1877 edition was arranged in what its editor believed to be the order Shakespeare actually wrote. A number of more recent editions have followed this practice, with some disagreements on the order.

In the 20th century, scholarship progressed to minutely detailed studies of the handwriting and printing of Shakespeare's time, so as to get more exact ideas of what misprints were likely. Most famously, Charlton Hinman spent 20 years on a large 2-volume study of the printing and proofreading of the First Folio. He concluded that there were five different compositors involved at the printing house, and identified their individual styles and which passages they set. Such work was taken into account in updating the text.

More recently, detailed stylistic studies have reopened the question of the "canon" of Shakespeare. There is no longer an agreed canon followed in most editions. Editors make their own decisions. Most scholars now agree that a number of plays, both inside and outside the traditional canon, and The Passionate Pilgrim, are partly by Shakespeare and partly by other writers. Editors have to decide whether to include all, part or none of each such work. The authenticity of A Lover's Complaint has been questioned, and a number of other works have been suggested as candidates for inclusion.

One widely agreed change is the inclusion in most recent editions of a 38th play. The Two Noble Kinsmen was first published in 1634, under the names of John Fletcher and William Shakespeare, both dead by then. Only a few editions included this until recently.

A further recent development is the questioning of the tradition of conflated texts. Editors now have to decide whether to follow Folio, quarto or conflated text for each relevant play.

Current editions

A facsimile edition of the First Folio is published by Norton.

The Stratford Lane edition, originally published in 10 volumes between 1904 and 1907, was reissued as the 1-volume Shakespeare Head edition in 1934. This is currently available in the Wordsworth Classics series. It is arranged in the order its editors thought Shakespeare wrote.

Peter Alexander's edition (1951) is available from Collins. It is arranged traditionally.

The Pelican Shakespeare was originally published over many years, starting in 1956, with each play in a separate volume. The 1-volume edition (2002) is arranged by genres, as traditional, but with some changes: the poems are at the beginning; each genre is arranged chronologically; and Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline and Pericles are reclassified from tragedy into comedy.

David Bevington's edition (6th edition 2009) rearranges somewhat more. A new genre, called romances, is added, comprising The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. This edition is distinctive among recent editions in being the work of a single editor.

The Riverside Shakespeare (not to be confused with an 1883 edition with the same name) was first published in 1974. A 2nd edition appeared in 1997. It is arranged similarly to Bevington's edition.

The 2nd Arden edition was published in 38 volumes over the period 1951-82. A 3rd edition was started in 1995. The most recent 1-volume edition (2011), which is about half each 2nd edition and 3rd, arranges the plays alphabetically for ease of finding. Individual editors were allowed to decide for each play which text to follow.

The Royal Shakespeare Company's edition (2007) takes the return to the First Folio further. It describes itself as the first new edition of it in about three centuries. The 36 plays are arranged as in the original. The editors correct what they believe to be misprints, modernize spelling and punctuation, tidy up the headings, and add material not in the First Folio in smaller (though not too small) type. This edition follows the Oxford's example of using joint authorship headings, but only for Pericles, by Shakespeare and Wilkins, and The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Shakespeare and Fletcher. (In 2013 this edition was supplemented by a separate volume of 10 plays the editors believe contain, or may contain, comparatively small contributions by Shakespeare.)

The New Cambridge Shakespeare is in 48 volumes, including alternative editions of some plays.

The current edition of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17) seems quite different from the previous editions bearing the same title (1st edition 1986; 2nd edition 2005; the new edition does not seem to call itself the 3rd edition). It is in three parts, available separately. The Modern Critical Edition (2016) contains one text of each work included (some works are only partially included); in deciding between quarto and folio texts, it simply chooses the longer (as a whole, not a conflated text with the longer version of every passage). The works are arranged in order of writing. The Critical Reference Edition (2017) is in two volumes, and includes alternative versions in full (including those works only partially included in the MCE), arranged in order of publication, with the separate editions published in Shakespeare's lifetime in the first volume and the First Folio and other posthumous editions in the second. The third part, the Authorship Companion (2017) discusses questions of authorship in more detail. This edition introduces headings to indicate various degrees of shared authorship, which most editions leave to notes.

There seems to be no maximal one-volume edition, with the Arden and the Oxford MCE each including material not in the other. The two-volume Oxford CRE seems to be the most compact maximal edition (though it omits some works in the RSC Collaborative Plays).