The Oxford Shakespeare (old- and modern-spelling editions), and its bulky Textual Companion, both first published in 1988, have not yet been wholly accepted by the community of textual scholars, and The Norton Shakespeare takes issue with several of its predecessor’s decisions. For instance, it reverses Oxford’s substitution of the name “Oldcastle” for “Falstaff” in the two parts of Henry IV and inserts passages unique to Quarto Hamlet (marked as such) within the Folio text. Where Oxford includes both the Quarto and Folio texts of King Lear, Norton prints them on facing pages, adding (less justifiably) a third, conflated text, as well. The editors follow Oxford in including “Shall I die?” as Shakespeare’s, and add in an appendix the poem “A Funeral Elegy” (1612) with an introduction by Donald W. Foster, who argues for Shakespearean authorship (he might have included in his bibliography the debate on this question between Stanley Wells and Richard Abrams in the London Times Literary Supplement in January and February of 1996). However, they miss the chance to rectify an omission which the Oxford editors themselves reportedly regret, by leaving out Edward III. The reader who already possesses the Oxford edition will find little here, in textual terms, to justify further financial outlay. Moreover, the volume is atrociously produced, on wafer-thin, see-through paper, with illustrations which would be helpful if one could make out their details, and a typeface too small for comfortable reading. I am sure readers would have been more willing to pay for a usable edition in two or even three volumes.

The enterprise, then, stands or falls by its extensive introductions to individual plays, marginal glosses, explanatory footnotes, bibliographies, and supplementary matter. These are the responsibility of the editorial team of Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Andrew Gurr contributes a single, characteristically authoritative, essay on the Shakespearean stage). The general introduction, by Greenblatt, contains, as is to be expected from that address, firm denials of the “trans-historical” qualities of Shakespeare and of “a single, stable, continuous object” underlying all the adaptations, productions, and interpretations. It is always salutary to remember, when faced with such overstatements, the claim of the editors of the First Folio, Heminges and Condell, in their epistle “To the Great Variety of Readers,” to offer a text both correct where previous unauthorized editions were faulty, and authentic—“absolute in their numbers, as he [Shakespeare] conceived them”—where plays appear for the first time. They, clearly, share what Greenblatt dismissively (and politically incorrectly) calls “the dream of a master text.” Also, they treat the plays as literature, not scripts: “Read him, therefore; and again, and again” (italics mine). It was Jonson, not Shakespeare, who was ridiculed for daring to think of his plays as “works.” (To be fair, that is a description which the Folio title page avoids; and Shakespeare’s apparent unconcern for the fate of his plays remains baffling.) Of course, Heminges and Condell wished to persuade people to part with their money; and we know that their confidence in the purity of the text was sometimes misplaced. That does not detract from the fact that the amorphousness of the text and the provisional nature of theatrical representation, which Greenblatt and most other contemporary critics see as defining characteristics of Renaissance aesthetics, seem not to bulk very large in their minds.

There are other moments in the general introduction which make a reader wince; the frankly conjectural “reconstruction” of Shakespeare’s early years, or the insistence on “the fetishism of dress” (which quickly runs to a prurient fascination with what Renaissance critics always solemnly call “the body,” as though they had just looked down and noticed it), or the assumption, now beyond question in the academy, that Shakespeare must have been a political and religious radical, who never penned an unironic sentiment. Still, the sketch of the social and political history of Shakespeare’s lifetime is unexceptionable, and the account of his life uncontentious (although, as usual, the possibility of his having been a Catholic is scanted). At the other end of the volume there is a handy and generous section of documents: biographical notices of Shakespeare by his contemporaries, a transcription of his will, the preliminary matter to the First Folio (in facsimile), a year-by-year listing of events from 1558 to 1616 taken from Stow’s abridged Chronicle (1618), and a general bibliography to supplement those appended to introductions to the individual plays. The bibliographies are comprehensive, up-to-date, and generally fair-minded; the only real shock was the omission of John Kerrigan’s landmark edition of the Sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint” (1986).

Why should anyone nowadays want a single-volume Shakespeare? One reason is that, unlike multivolume editions, it allows us relatively uncluttered access to the texts —which are, after all, the things that matter. Another is that a single-volume edition offers us a way of seeing how a coherent editorial policy has or has not made sense of Shakespeare’s work as a whole. Most of all, perhaps, such an edition provides a way of pondering the implications of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated remark that “the whole of Shakespeare is one poem.” The Norton arrangement of texts follows their presumed order of composition, and it is instructive to compare this with the generic arrangement of the Folio. To read the plays in the Folio order provides its own kind of illumination. For example, to pass from Twelfth Night to The Winter’s Tale is to be made to reflect on how both plays have apparently miraculous transformations lying at their heart; Julius Caesar and Macbeth make a fruitful pairing, with Brutus in some ways a preliminary study for the later, more complex reluctant assassin. The Histories—placed by Heminges and Condell between the Comedies and Tragedies, as though to bridge the gap between Time as redeemer and Time as destroyer by showing its Janus-face—are more securely arranged, enabling us to follow the events of the tetralogies chronologically and placing King John and Henry VIII on either side. To the formalist perspective on Shakespeare’s evolution offered by the First Folio, Norton opposes its own, skimpily summarized by Greenblatt as “a kind of authorial plot, a progress from youthful exuberance and a heroic grappling with history, through psychological anguish and radical doubt, to a mature serenity built upon an understanding of loss. The ordering of Shakespeare’s ‘complete works’ in this way reconstitutes the figure of the author as the beloved hero of his own, lived romance.” This is surprisingly personal, not to say sentimental, coming from Greenblatt; there isn’t much self-fashioning about such a nakedly confessional Shakespeare. Why, in any case, should he “live” a “romance” rather than a comedy or a tragedy or a history? “There is a history in all men’s lives… .”

The introductions to the individual plays are by far the best feature of The Norton Shakespeare, and it is to be hoped that the publishers will reprint them as a separate volume. They are evenly distributed among the four editors. The number of questionable judgments is small. Katharine Eisaman Maus does not seem to have the measure of Christianity when she says, in her introduction to The Merchant of Venice, that “the central virtues in this religious system are not justice and scrupulous compliance with the law but charity, mercy, and a willingness to believe what seems incredible” (italics mine). Jean E. Howard on The Winter’s Tale goes oddly awry in her emphasis, making much of the speculation that “Leontes’ rage at Hermione seems to stem in part from his dependence on her to give him legitimate heirs,” and stressing the etymology of the name Mamillius from the Latin word for nipple: “In identifying with Mamillius, a boy so young his nurse’s milk is scarcely out of him, Leontes seems to feel both the vulnerability of the infant dependent on the lactating body of woman and the vulnerability of the adult husband dependent on the pregnant body and the chastity of his wife for legitimate offspring.” In positing a startlingly articulate baby, Howard offers a world of wonders indeed, but one, we may think, somewhat different from Shakespeare’s.

Elsewhere, however, there are plenty of fine insights, just the kind of thing to alert student readers to the qualities of each play. The editors are particularly good advocates of less celebrated plays, or those which are difficult of access. The comedies are notoriously apt to fall flat on uninstructed ears; Cohen teases out the guardedness with which Love’s Labour’s Lost plays its romantic games, stressing the tone of disenchantment which underlies, without undermining, its high spirits, while Greenblatt offers excellent links between Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Much Ado About Nothing, and responds vibrantly to the exuberance, shadowed by unease, of the play’s language and atmosphere. Maus writes brilliantly about Timon of Athens, one of the most underrated plays in the canon, placing it on the socio-economic fault line in early Jacobean England, in which the obligations of friendship or patronage were giving way to impersonal business transactions, and seeing it looking backward to The Merchant of Venice and forward to King Lear. (She is rightly attracted by the growing belief in Middleton’s part authorship of Timon, whose concerns resonate strongly with those of his citizen comedies.) Howard’s introduction to Cymbeline makes sense of its disparate elements by relating them to Shakespeare’s interest in imperialism and nationhood—although Philip Edwards’s fine discussion of the play from this viewpoint in Threshold of a Nation (1979) is unmentioned—and convinces us that, beneath the apparent pseudo-historical medley, a politically shrewd intelligence is operating.

When they are not performing for a student audience, and feeling obliged to live up to some sort of image, these four professors are just like any other intelligent readers of Shakespeare. Whatever they say about the nonexistence of fixed meanings, they are happy to provide explanatory notes on the vocabulary of the plays, and in their critical discussions they assume that the text means something coherent, and that we can find its meanings out by source study, structural analysis, characterization, attention to imagery, historical context, and other traditional matters. It is cheering to be reminded by The Norton Shakespeare that, provided the coast is clear, you can’t beat a radical when it comes to being old-fashioned.