Cymbeline by William Shakespeare, and: Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cymbeline by William Shakespeare, and: Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare Arlynda Boyer William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Hannah C. Wojciehowski, The New Kittredge Shakespeare Series (Indianapolis: Focus/Hackett Publishing 2015) xxvi + 154 pp. William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Jane Wells, The New Kittredge Shakespeare Series (Indianapolis: Focus/Hackett Publishing 2015) xxv + 103 pp. To borrow a phrase Shakespeare would have recognized, the New Kittredge Shakespeare falls between two stools. Trying to wed the philological and editorial-history interests of early twentieth-century scholar George Lyman Kittredge to the performance-studies turn of a century later, the series serves neither master very well, and in the process seems confused about its primary audience. Cymbeline’s introduction, by editor Hannah C. Wojciehowski, asserts that, “The goal of the performance notes—one of the unique features of the New Kittredge Shakespeare series—is to help readers who are new to Shakespeare …” (xxv). But performance notes are a standard feature of most new Shakespeare editions—the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has both a Collected Works and also single-play editions devoted to including performance images and footnotes. The Bedford Collected Works is heavily indebted to performance, including with every play interviews and sidebars from actors and directors. The entire Shakespeare in Production series, long predating the New Kittredge, gathers performance notes from as broadly and widely as possible, covering centuries’ worth of Shakespeare performance. Kittredge’s own original series in the 1930s featured photos from stage productions of the time, but the modern series bearing his name does not include any of those pictures and only contains his decidedly non-performance-based commentary. But the larger problem is that if the primary audience is intended to be “readers who are new to Shakespeare,” then it is inexplicable why the book opens with Kittredge’s original editorial notes. The first sentences these new readers see are the following: For the text of Cymbeline, the First Folio (1623) is the only authority. The Second Folio (1632) corrects a good many misprints. ‘Rocks’ for ‘Oakes’ is Seward’s emendation (3.1.20); ‘bribe’ for ‘Babe’ is Hanmer’s (3.3.23); ‘afore’t’ for ‘a-foot’ is Rowe’s (3.4.78); ‘crare’ for ‘care’ is Sympson’s (4.2.205). ‘Th’ unnumber’d beach,’ Theobald’s correction for ‘the number’d beach’ (1.6.36) seems compulsive: cf. ‘th’ unnumb’red idle pebble (King Lear, 4.6.21). (vii) Not a single historical editor is ever further identified, nor are the emendations further explained. Without a fair grounding in Shakespearean editorial history, a number of literature graduate students would be lost. The new reader’s case is hopeless. Both books reproduce Kittredge’s erudite notes first, followed by the modern editor’s introduction (for readers new to Shakespeare, even simply reversing this order might help matters). The modern introduction aims rather lower than did Kittredge, seemingly at first-year undergrads or even high-school students, with shallow analysis such as, “Shakespeare coined many new [End Page 341] words, while also using old and familiar ones in novel ways” (xvi). I must say that this is the first Shakespeare edition I have ever seen that included a spoiler alert in a footnote: “In order to preserve some of the surprises of the play, this Introduction does not describe all the twists and turns of the plot of Cymbeline. Readers who wish to find out for themselves what happens may want to skip the performance history sections of this Introduction …” (xiii). Both editions suffer from the fact that the plays covered have only slender production histories. Cymbeline discusses four productions, although the text reproduces stills from only two: a 1982 BBC production, and Michael Almereyda’s 2014 film. Merry Wives is further hampered, having only a 1982 BBC production to serve as reference. It is telling that the actors in it are identified in the introduction by the roles several of them played decades later in the Harry Potter franchise—a television film from 1982 is closing in on thirty-five years old; it is unlikely that undergraduate readers will ever have seen, or ever will see, the BBC’s Merry Wives film...