Chapter 9 - Nineteenth-Century Scholarly Editions

Summary

The various strands of Shakespeare scholarly publishing are explored in this chapter. The emergence of techniques for producing increasingly accurate facsimiles of early modern editions led to the appearance of multiple facsimile editions of the First Folio and of the early quartos. But the period was also marked by significant controversy, most particularly in the instance of John Payne Collier's claim to have uncovered an edition of the 1632 second folio with annotations in the hand of a seventeenth-century theatre functionary. The eventual debunking of Collier's claims destroyed his reputation. Of key importance in the period was the production of the Cambridge Shakespeare, under the primary editorship of William Aldis Wright. This was the first edition produced by university scholars and it offered the definitive scholarly text of its era (in addition to being spun off, commercially, into the Globe Shakespeare). The chapter closes by considering the launch of the Arden Shakespeare, initially under the general editorship of Edward Dowden. The Arden set the model for academic editions produced by a range of editors under the stewardship of a general editor; it has survived through a number of iterations over the course of more than a century.