The New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Set: Modern Critical Edition, Critical Reference Edition, Authorship Companion

Cool )))

The New Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Set affords us the wonderful opportunity to examine the complete works (including a number of new additions) in light of 21st Century scholarship. It should be read in conjunction with other leading critical editions such as The Arden Shakespeare. The reader can then decide which editor makes a stronger argument for authorial authenticity. As a director and actor I have worked on all of Shakespeare's known plays; and, I have always consulted multiple editions (even the old Variorum editions by H. H. Furness) before deciding on my final cuts. This set is a terrific addition to my library!

The texts and the authorship companion are both unsatisfactory and disappointing given that they bear the Oxford name.For the last 30 years, Oxford Shakespeare texts have been plagued by perverse and "radical" editing choices that hurt the plays. David Bevington, in his excellent Oxford edition of Henry IV, Part 1, had to more or less reject the Oxford text and use his own.The mistakes continue in this edition. So be aware that you will be reading versions of the plays that are substantially different than from what most people have read over the last century, or indeed, the last few centuries. And, usually, substantially worse versions. The changes tend to damage the plays, not improve them.Oxford continues its irritating habit of dividing the plays by scene rather than Act, making it considerably harder to locate passages in this edition. All you get on most pages are scene numbers. Antony and Cleopatra's III.13 is here called "Scene 25."Many, many stage directions have been invented without note, with no justification. Some are even footnoted as if authoritative. (Othello 1.1.163.1, e.g.) Some of the most important lines of King Lear are not included--such as Lear's last words, "Look her lips, look there, look there" or the Fool's speech in 3.6. The editors write that this edition "does not contain chunks of text unique to the Folio version of Hamlet, or the quarto version of Othello." In other words, the New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works is not complete. The choice of Folio or Quarto editions is made arbitrarily on the basis of length alone. Why was the quarto Hamlet chosen, instead of the Folio? "Because [the quarto] is a significantly longer text." That's the only reason given.The atrocious "Shall I die," a poem for which there is no evidence of Shakespeare's authorship, is still included. So here is what you get instead of the missing bits of King Lear and Hamlet:Shall I die? Shall I flyLover's baits and deceitssorrow breeding?Shall I tend? Shall I send?Shall I sue, and not ruemy proceeding?Shakespeare, needless to say, did not write this. So these Complete Works are not complete: they have too little Shakespeare and too much non-Shakespeare simultaneously.The scholarship remains questionable. Titus Andronicus' fly scene has been credited to Thomas Middleton writing in 1623 (!), based on tendentious arguments seemingly designed to increase Middleton's reputation. Several plays have been co-credited to "Anonymous," as if this means anything. I do tend to think that George Wilkins more or less wrote the first two acts of Pericles and accept some of the other collaborations, so I don't have a problem with co-crediting other authors per se. But the Oxford editors have gone way too far with it, often based on scanty or nonexistent evidence. The Oxford editors tend to draw their own unjustified conclusions when it will produce exciting new results, but throw up their hands and say, "We can never know for sure!" when it comes to attacking other people's interpretations--even when those interpretations are more grounded in the available evidence.The Oxford editors have reversed some of their earlier bad calls, such as using different names for Falstaff/Oldcastle in the two parts of Henry IV. But while Pericles has been saved from the most extreme parts of its "reconstruction" in the last edition, such as having an entirely new scene "8a" created from non-Shakespearean material, the editors still have hypothetical readings like "the same may defend thee" at 2.1.117. The overall approach to editing, in a word, is unreliable.There are two areas in which the authorship companion falls down. One is in content, the other in methodology. The methodology is at the core of the book's untrustworthiness, so I deal with it first.METHODOLOGYNot all of the companion's methodology is suspect. MacDonald Jackson in particular seems rather cautious next to the damn-the-torpedoes attitudes of many of the other contributors. Here are two examples that are representative of the more problematic contributors.First, the chapter 'Using Compressibility as a Proxy for Shannon Entropy in the Analysis of Double Falsehood.' The problem here lies in the very title. It is one of the primary sins in information theory to treat data compression as an indicator of Shannon entropy (or Kolmogorov complexity), simply because it isn't. Any compression algorithm will compress some things well and other things less well, but this has no strict resemblance to entropy. Dmitry Khelev and William Teahan have severely criticized the BCL algorithm (based on LZ77 compression) that this chapter's analysis depends on, pointing out that Markov chains are vastly more appropriate and more accurate for this sort of work. The entirety of the chapter is invalid, methodologically. No one involved in the book's production seems to have noticed this, which is frankly embarrassing.Second, the scoring used to assign authorship of Arden of Faversham to Shakespeare. The authors of this article score frequencies of words and do pairwise comparisons of segments of Arden with other plays of the period. Using a couple methods, Shakespeare wins out as being "most similar" for most segments of Arden. They do not give results of how far short the runners-up fell, however, and summary graphs indicate it might have been quite close. In addition, the data only includes four Shakespeare plays, and opts for the later The Comedy of Errors rather than any of Henry VI or Titus Andronicus. Why not Love's Labour's Lost, for that matter? The authors had a duty to run the tests with the maximally available data, and they didn't. Worse, they then lump data into Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare corpuses, confounding their own data! Once you have combined multiple authors and plays into a single variable, the position of a segment on the graph no longer means anything determinate. This may be a good thing, as this method shows Arden NOT to cluster toward Shakespeare's work, something that the authors ignore as they attribute Arden to Shakespeare anyway. The authors fudge by finding that six segments of Arden are (ever so slightly!) on the Shakespearean side of the meaningless "bisector line," and gallingly use this evidence to support the attribution of those segments to Shakespeare.This may all sound very technical and in-the-weeds. The bottom line, however, is that these methods are not reliable, and certainly form no solid ground on which to base radically new attributions to Shakespeare. The book is fundamentally untrustworthy.CONTENTContent is more subjective, so I will only quote a few passages that to me seem like they have no business belonging in an authoritative companion, for reasons of irrelevance, speciousness, or extreme partiality. (The editors declare war on Shakespeare scholar Brian Vickers in the preface, and this bizarre grudge match suffuses the entire volume.)"The question then becomes, is it possible to construct a philosophical definition of authorship that avoids the Kantian dream of pure free individuality but also avoids the Foucauldian nightmare of pure subjected institutionality? Is it possible to construct a theory of authorship that more adequately accounts for the material history of ‘author’ as both a verb and a noun, both an agent and an object?""‘Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors’, Foucault asserted, ‘to the extent that authors became subject to punishment.’ In Foucault’s rewriting of Descartes, ‘I am punished, therefore I am’—or perhaps, I am spanked, therefore I think. The spanking began, according to Foucault, in ‘the seventeenth or eighteenth century.""The sociolinguistic concept of idiolect and the forensic concept of idiograph provide a coherent theoretical foundation for the editorial pragmatics of attribution.""As Dekker wrote, in The Magnificent Entertainment, ‘If there be any glorie to be won by writing these lynes [the speech of Zeal], I do freelie bestow it (as his due) on Tho. Meddleton...: Quae nos non fecimus ipsi, vix ea nostra voco [That which we do not ourselves make we will never call ours]’ (Taylor and Lavagnino 2007a, 264). Credit is due to Middleton, because the lines delivered by the actor were created, were first written down, by Middleton—or rather, as the Latin word fecimus implies, the lines were made by Middleton. Dekker may have copied Middleton’s lines into the manuscript that he then delivered to the printer, and readers ever since have been reading not Middleton’s or Dekker’s manuscript but the printed edition produced by the collaborative labour of workers in a printshop. But the lines were made by an author, Thomas Middleton, identified and credited by another author, Thomas Dekker.""We can escape from the competing sterilities of the old New Criticism and the old New Historicism by attending to the social, historical, and material complexity of artisanal poetics. The artisan is not a Kantian free intelligence: the artisan is a cyborg in the sense developed by Donna Harraway in ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (Harraway 1991, 149–82). A shifting assemblage of humans, tools, and raw materials inhabiting a specific environment, the artisan can survive only by manufacturing artificial objects desired by others.""Shakespeare made an honest living stealing other men’s work. He could repeatedly appropriate their labour precisely because he was not constrained by the definition of the author that Foucault attacked.""In the course of this work, the contributors necessarily respond, time and again, to the most widely read and influential voice in the field of Shakespearean authorship attribution, Brian Vickers. Their repeated disagreements with his conclusions are a sign of a healthy, growing subject-discipline forming a consensus as new knowledge is created by different methodologies.""On 7 May 1996, Dorothy Woods, a retired health worker, was found dead in her home in Huddersfield in the north of England. She had been smothered by a pillow, and signs of a break-in made local police pursue the theory of a burglary gone wrong. A window at the point of entry was found to hold the oily impression of a human ear pressed against it. Unfortunately for local burglar Mark Dallagher, Huddersfield police consulted a Dutch police officer, Cornelis van der Lugt, who although he had no forensics training had become convinced that ear-prints are as incriminating as fingerprints. Comparison of Dallagher’s ear with the print left at the crime scene led to his conviction for murder, followed six years later by his retrial and exoneration. The Court of Appeal found that the first trial judge misdirected the jury regarding the value of expert testimony and failed to identify fallacious reasoning about statistical probability."Yes, that last one is real.The editors haughtily claim not to have "impose[d] our own favourite theories, methods, or interpretations." This arrogant pretense to objectivity is what makes this edition an exercise in bad faith. The editors seem to have convinced themselves they've found a way not to introduce their own biases, and so they've blinded themselves to the damage their biased judgments have done throughout.