Though some of the work was done by computers, the editors spent much of their time poring over the originals or facsimiles of the canon in Oxford University’s Bodleian library and painstakingly hand-editing printouts.Ī major problem with editing Shakespeare is that only about half of his plays were published during his lifetime, singly in thin books called quartos, and none of his manuscripts survive. It is the first Oxford University Press edition of Shakespeare’s works since 1891. Working full-time, the project took eight years and cost $1.7 million. (Taylor, 33, is now teaching at the Catholic University of America in Washington.) Wells later brought on two more whiz-kid Shakespeareans who were also in their 20s when the project began, American William Montgomery, now 33, who was a graduate student at the Shakespeare Institute, and Englishman John Jowett, also 33, who was doing graduate work at Liverpool University.

The Oxford University Press gave him complete freedom in editing and compiling the “Complete Works.” He hired Taylor, a bright young American scholar then in his 20s, whose work Wells saw and liked when Taylor was a Shakespeare student at Cambridge. Wells, 57, a gray-bearded man with a lined face and bright blue eyes, has supervised graduate studies in Shakespeare for 15 years at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, written articles and books on the works and edited three of the plays for Penguin Press. We’ve attempted to reflect the theatrical experience.” “Most of Shakespeare’s plays were originally acted without any intervals, without any actual scene breaks. Our edition places a greater emphasis on the theatrical than is custom.”įor instance, he explained, the book minimizes the act and scene divisions by printing them in small numbers in the margins. We’ve tried to think afresh about the plays. “We haven’t re-written Shakespeare, but we have thought hard about the text. The book “has its shock features, which are attracting attention,” Wells admitted. Many scholars question the authenticity of the 90-line poem “Shall I Die?” and all consider it bad poetry. The book also includes the controversial “new” poem, a long-overlooked work uncovered last year by Taylor during his research. The plays have less punctuation and more stage direction.

Other characters have undergone name changes and some play titles have been altered in the new edition. The episodes “turn ‘Macbeth’ into a musical comedy,” commented a disapproving George Walton Williams, a Shakespeare professor at Duke University, and one of the critics of the new work. In the new edition’s “Macbeth,” the witches sing incantations in two scenes not found in the traditional text.

Collection of shakespeare plays