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The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Naus. With an essay on the Shakespearean Stage by Andrew Gurr. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997. Pp. xviii + 3,420. Illus. $44.95 cloth.

The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J.J.M. Tobin. Second Edition. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997. Pp. xxii + 2,057. Illus. $59.95 cloth.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Edited by David Bevington. Updated Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 1997. Pp. cvi + 1,867. Illus. $50.00 cloth.

Reviewed by Martha Tuck Rozett

        It is time to consign that well-worn, heavily annotated, taped-together Riverside or Bevington Complete Works (hereafter referred to as "the Bevington") to a bottom shelf, for both of these standard one-volume Shakespeares were reissued last spring in some¡what revised and augmented editions. And, with the arrival of a long-awaited and much-talked-about third entrant into the field, choosing which text to adopt becomes harder. The new Norton Shakespeare, similar in size and format to the Norton anthologies, has been widely distributed and may already have established a presence in college classrooms. For those still trying to decide which of these three texts to begin annotating for the next few years' use, here follows a review of their respective merits as teaching editions.

        Each reader of Shakespeare uses comprehensive teaching editions like these slightly differently. Hence editors cannot assume a linear reading: as they compose a note or an introduction or a glossary entry, they do not know which other parts of the volume the reader has already encountered. Recurring words and expressions are thus glossed repeatedly, and the editors must choose a middle ground between forever introducing their subject anew and presuming to build on concepts and information presented elsewhere in the edition. Imagining oneself into the frame of reference of an inexperienced (or less-experienced) reader is no easy task for scholars steeped in the period, and I expect that the participants in the creation and revision of these editions spent much time attempting to establish what their readers could and could not be assumed to know. All three volumes provide students with an abundance of information, from single-word glosses to lists of textual variants to historical material organized in various ways to essays that encapsulate the sprawling field of Shakespeare studies. It may be, however, that they contain more information dian students can actually use.

        Starting with general appearance and physical layout, the Bevington remains more readable than the Riverside, with speech prefixes spelling out the character's name in full in small caps and the glossed words or phrases set in bold at the bottom of the page, in larger and less-cluttered print than the Riverside or the Norton. The major physical change in the new Riverside was remarked on by everyone I consulted. Although the plays and their notes and introductions have been reproduced exacdy from the 1974 edition, the text is decentered on the page so that the outside margins are one quarter

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of an inch wider and the gutters correspondingly narrower. Consequently there is no space for annotation on the inside margins, and it is difficult to read ends of lines and line numbers. Happily, the publishers report that this problem has been corrected in subsequent printings. The smaller pages of the Norton (6 x 9% inches) contain significantly more white space for the inveterate annotator because the text is set in single rather than double columns. But single columns require more pages, which in turn necessitate thinner paper, and the Norton's cream-colored paper is so thin that a sweaty forefinger puckers the page. Unfortunately, the paper quality also creates a bleed-through effect, not only from the print on the reverse but even from the next page in many cases. (I have been told by a Norton representative that a new print run with thicker paper has been issued in response to numerous complaints. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on the weight and thickness of the volume.)

        The problem caused by the very thin paper is exacerbated by the wealth of black-and-white illustrations, some heavily inked, which are scattered throughout the introductions. Many are unusual and quite apt, such as the engraving of Sir John Falstaff and Mistress Quickly (from The Wits} in the introduction to 1 Henry IV and the image of Fame spreading rumors in the introduction to 2 Henry IV. Others, such as the familiar 1572 engraving of the City of London, are too detailed to reproduce well in such small space. The strategy of interspersing illustrations with blocks of text would be more effective if explicit connections were made to the plays in every instance. (All three volumes are inconsistent in this respect.) A wonderful engraving of the death of Phaethon from a 1606 edition of the Metamorphoses, for example, would make more sense if the Norton had quoted and explicated Richard II's lines beginning "Down, down I come like glist'ring Phaethon ..." (3.3.177). On a more positive note, a particularly useful feature of the Norton is the placement of the historical genealogies on the endpapers to make them readily accessible; this is one of many examples of how editors and designers have benefited from studying the much-tested work of their predecessors.

        The great advantage of the Norton format is the way unfamiliar words are marked with a small superscript circle and glossed on the right margin. These glosses are much easier to find than their counterparts in the Riverside and the Bevington. The Norton also provides longer footnotes for phrases marked with footnote numbers. Using the Riverside's footnotes, as an undergraduate who had taken my Shakespeare course explained, can involve a cumbersome series of transactions: you must first decide whether to go looking for help; then do some simple math to arrive at the line number; then look below for a note, which may or may not answer your question; and, finally, find your place in the text again. In the Riverside and Norton, the line numbers are given in increments of five; in the Bevington, line numbers serve as footnote numbers and so occur at irregular intervals, which makes it easier to find the note but harder to locate a passage, since twelve or more lines of text can be unnumbered if no notes are needed. On the strength of the marginal glosses alone, some teachers may choose the Norton.

        In doing so, however, they will be choosing a text that contains most of the controversial textual innovations introduced by the Oxford edition, first published in 1986 under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. The preface to the Norton points out the major differences between the two editions, alluding to the changes the Oxford editors have made in the years since 1986 as a result of "ongoing scholarly discussion" (xi) and pointing to further changes made by the Norton team with classroom teaching in mind. For example, the Oxford's use of the name "Sir John Oldcastle" for Falstaff has been abandoned. The most noticeable textual decision associated with the Oxford edition is the treatment of the quarto and Folio texts of King Lear. The Norton prints quarto and Folio texts (as emended by the Oxford editors) on facing pages so that the reader can see differences at a glance, and then provides a third, conflated King Lear, edited by Barbara K. Lewalski. This emphasis on alternative texts is likewise evident in the Norton's presentation of Hamlet and Measure for Measure: 200 lines from the second quarto of Hamlet are set apart by means of indentation, a different typeface, and special line-numbering, reflecting the Oxford editors' belief that these were lines Shakespeare himself cut, while an appendix offers the Oxford edition's

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alternative versions of two scenes in Measure for Measure, including a provocative reordering of the end of Act 3 and beginning of Act 4. In all three instances, students are given a sense of the instability of texts, though teachers should be aware that the versions given are as the Oxford editors emended them and are therefore often different from the quarto or Folio original.

        A section of Stephen Greenblatt's general introduction, entitled "The Dream of the Master Text," explains in some detail the philosophy that informs the Norton and Oxford editions. Greenblatt portrays Shakespeare as an inveterate reviser, a participant in a collaborative enterprise, where decisions about shifts of emphasis were made not by the solitary author but by the theater community: "many of the revisions seem to indicate that the scripts remained open texts, that the playwright and his company expected to add, cut, and rewrite as the occasion demanded" (67). He goes on to speculate that "whatever Shakespeare wrote was meant from the start to be supplemented by an invisible 'para-text' consisting of words spoken by Shakespeare to the actors and by the actors to each other" (72), and that the Oxford editors therefore turned to copy that they thought was based on promptbooks whenever possible in an effort to recover this para-text. So, for instance, in Act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Norton follows the Folio in having Theseus say "Call Egeus" (rather than "Call Philostrate") and assigns all of Philostrate's subsequent lines to Egeus. A note explains that the Folio substitution may be a "mistake" that serves as a clue to doubling, or it may be "an attempt to incorporate the angry father in the festive close" (851). Then, still following the Folio, the Norton has Lysander (rather than Theseus) read from the "brief " that lists the evening's entertainment. According to a footnote, "In Q, Theseus both reads the list and comments on it himself" (852). While such notes direct students to the differences between Folio and quarto, the Riverside remains the only one of the three editions to alert the reader to differences among texts by using brackets to mark words that do not appear in the copytext, thus showing students how conflation and emendation occur in hundreds of instances throughout an edited play. A good example is Othello's speech accusing Desdemona of being a whore. All three texts use the Folio Othello as copytext. Both the Riverside and the Bevington end the speech with the quarto half-line "Impudent strumpet!" (4.2.81 in Riverside; 4.2.83 in Bevington). The Riverside puts this in brackets to indicate that it is a variant; the Bevington includes it without any mark or notation within the text itself (listing it as an "adopted reading" in the textual notes); and the Norton omits it without comment. In the preceding speech (4.2.49-50) the Norton changes the Folio's "heaven" to "God" and "they" to "He" without brackets to mark these editorial interventions.

        All three editions attempt to help students envision the action by augmenting the original stage directions with added directions in brackets. This is a practice common to virtually all teaching editions, whose editors must weigh the advantages of stage directions that help students to understand who is being addressed and what is happening onstage against the distractions resulting from interruptions of the poetic line. The following well-intentioned but ultimately disruptive stage directions are characteristic of the Norton:

And she's obedient, as you say, obedient,
Very obedient. [To Desdemona] Proceed you in your tears.
[To Lodovico] Concerning this, sir -- [To Desdemona] O well painted passion!
[To Lodovico] I am commanded home. [To Desdemona] Get you away.
I'll send for you anon. [To Lodovico] Sir, I obey the mandate,
And will return to Venice. . . .
                                            (4.1.252-57)

The Bevington adds more directions than the Riverside, sometimes anticipating stage directions embedded in the characters' lines and advising readers of shifts of address, although not as extensively as in the example above. For teachers accustomed to the relatively spare Riverside text, both the Norton and the Bevington will take some getting used to.

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        There are other variations among the three editions that experienced readers will notice: the through-line-numbering at the top of the page in both the Riverside and the Bevington is missing from the Norton, and scene divisions are handled differently at times, so that, for instance, Act 5 of Macbeth has eight scenes in the Bevington, nine in the Riverside, and eleven in the Norton. As David Bevington points out in his detailed and rigorous Shakespeare Quarterly review of the Oxford edition, these discrepancies will make it difficult to use concordances or other research tools based on the act-and-scene divisions in the standard Globe text (See David Bevington, "Determining the Indeterminate: The Oxford Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 501-19, esp. 514-15.) Spelling is modernized to varying degrees in the three editions; expanded contractions give both the Bevington and the Norton a more modern appearance than the Riverside; and the Bevington's and Norton's use of accents as a guide to scansion is helpful (e.g., "circumcisèd dog").

        For students the most important feature of a teaching edition is likely to be the annotations that translate difficult or obsolete words, paraphrase convoluted syntax, explain references and allusions, and otherwise help to make sense of the language. I "tested" the three sets of notes with some especially challenging phrases in Measure for Measure brought to my attention by a graduate student. Isabella's lines to Angelo "Women? Help heaven! men their creation mar / In profiting by them" (2.4.127-28) received three rather different glosses:

Riverside, men . . . mar. Since it is women who create them

Bevington: Men . . . them men mar their creation in God's likeness by taking advantage of women

Norton: creation: origin.

The winner in this contest, I would say, is the Bevington, which is known for its ability to cut through difficult syntax with clear and helpful paraphrases. Some teachers might argue that they prefer students to do this kind of interpretive work on their own, but the more I teach Shakespeare, the more I feel that we need to help students to surmount the obstacles posed by Latinate word inversions and similar stumbling blocks.

        Because of its format, the Norton tries to keep glosses to a single-word equivalent or a very short phrase wherever possible. A cursory survey of these yielded mixed results; most are helpful, but once in a while the editors seem to nod. It is unlikely, for instance, that translating "want-wit" as "dullard" or "fantastical trick" as "egocentric caprice" will help the 1990s undergraduate very much. The longer footnotes, however, were given high marks by an undergraduate I consulted. Among the examples she gave were Hamlet's memorable line "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (1.5.166-67), the second line of which appears in the Norton as "Than are dreamt of in our philosophy" (1.5.169, emphasis added). The Riverside, not very helpfully, refers the reader back to the note at 1.1.138 for an explanation of your as "Colloquial and impersonal," with more cross-references to other lines; it then glosses philosophy as "natural philosophy, science." The Norton's note offers "Human speculative knowledge" and an explanation that the Folio's our "shows Hamlet himself still trying to reconcile his own understanding with the supernatural revelations." The student told me that she learned something about the significance of textual variants from this. Another interpretive note she liked was the Norton's explanation of the pun in the phrase flattering unction in Hamlet's speech to Gertrude (3.4.136), glossed in the Riverside as "soothing ointment" (3.4.145n) and in the Bevington as "ointment" (3.4.152n). The Norton paraphrases the line as "Do not apply an ointment that relieves pain but does not heal (contrasted to a sacramental unction that blesses the soul)."

        If only because the notes take up space and constitute a distraction to the conscientious reader, editors need to decide how much and what kinds of information their readers need. Although I could find no consistent pattern among the three sets of

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notes, the Riverside did seem to offer more scholarly detail in many instances. Here is an example from Richard III, taken from Richard's oration to his army in Act 5. Richard refers contemptuously to Richmond as "a paltry fellow, / Long kept in Britain at our mother's cost" (5.3.323-24). The hundred-word Riverside note begins with a phrase few students would understand: "In Holinshed's recension of Hall. ..." It goes on to explain, as do the notes in the other two editions, that mother's, to reflect history accurately, should have read brother's, because it was the duke of Burgundy, Richard's brother-in-law, who had supported Richmond in exile. The Bevington accomplishes this in about fifty words, the Norton in about twenty-five, with references to Holinshed but not Hall. What makes the Riverside note so much longer is its inclusion of a quotation from Hall, showing the word brother's in its original context, a spirited sentence that characterizes Richmond as a "Welsh mylkesoppe." When teaching source-study to graduate students, I am glad to have notes like this, but I can also imagine the frustration experienced by the undergraduate who goes looking for a translation of paltry and gets a long lecture on mother's instead.

        Roughly twenty percent of each volume is given over to the monograph-length general introductions; the various appendixes, ancillary essays, bibliographies, glossaries, and indices; and the individual introductions to each play. These introductions serve as critical essays and often make more sense after one has read the play. The four editors of the Norton -- Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus -- made good use of their opportunity to reflect the current state of Shakespeare studies, both in the individual introductory essays and in their accompanying half-page bibliographies. I wish I had the space to discuss several of them, but one example will have to suffice. Maus's introduction to The Merchant of Venice invites the reader into the play by addressing the issue of anti-Semitism directly, with references to Nazi genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the Lopez trial. With its arresting opening sentences ("Jew. Jew. Jew. The word echoes through The Merchant of Venice") and its subsequent string of provocative questions, this essay prompts the reader to think about conflicting interpretations, topical references, and such large ethical questions as "What are the obligations of majority cultures to minorities in their midst?" (1,081). The first page provides a thumbnail sketch of British, French, and Spanish intolerance toward Jews, in contrast to the relative tolerance and diversity of sixteenth-century Venice. As Maus begins referring to and quoting from the play, she continues to lead readers to make connections with contemporary social issues. Speaking of the "disconcerting racist tinge" to the Christians' remarks, she comments: "These people find it hard to deal with those different from themselves: their society is based as much on the exclusion of the alien as on the inclusion of the similar" (1,083).

        Some of the readers I consulted felt strongly that questions like those with which Maus's introduction begins not only provoke the reader's curiosity but also serve as models of the critical process. The Riverside introductions, by contrast, date from 1974 and frequently begin with accounts of the plays' sources; in her introduction to The Merchant of Venice, Anne Barton fills her first long paragraph with references to Il Pecorone, Stephen Gosson, Boccaccio, Gower, and the Gesta Romanorum, all unfamiliar and rather daunting to the undergraduate reader, who might decide not to read further. Barton devotes her second and third paragraphs to the Lopez trial and The Jew of Malta, further postponing discussion of The Merchant of Venice. Here and elsewhere the Riverside's assumptions about its readers reflect the changes that have taken place in the English curriculum since the introductions were written more than two decades ago. Frank Kermode's introduction to Hamlet, for example, makes casual references in the first three paragraphs to the Commedia, Faust, Granville-Barker, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge, Everyman, and Ernest Jones.

        The Bevington introductions seem, in certain respects, even more dated than the Riverside ones. The first paragraph of the Merchant of Venice introduction proclaims Shylock's usury to be "the very opposite of true commerce" and goes on to characterize the play as one in which "friendship and love triumph over faithlessness and hatred," with an "unquestionably sinister" Shylock taking the role of "the villain of a love

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comedy" (178, 180). This is light-years removed, both in terms of tone and in the way it "packages" the play, from the diction of Maus's psychologically realistic portrait of Shylock as a man "unable to trust to love and generosity[, who] relies instead on contractually enforceable promises." Her Shylock is an "isolated figure" whose "calculating, loveless existence seems to result from the way he manages his property," and whose Judaism "reveals itself. . . in his trust of literal meanings, [and] his respect for observable facts" (1,084).

        The three general introductions combine the writing strategies of a history textbook with those of a critical essay. The Riverside leaves unchanged Harry Levin's graceful general introduction, an essay written for a learned and experienced reader with a broad knowledge of the plays. Levin moves effortlessly from play to play: a short section on image clusters, for instance, traces garden references from Richard II to Henry V to 1 and 2 Henry VI to The Merchant of Venice to Hamlet to Othello to Romeo and Juliet to The Winter's Tale to King Lear in eight sentences! This essay is supplemented by the most substantial addition to the new Riverside, Heather Dubrow's 27-page essay on twentieth-century criticism, a third of which deals with criticism before 1970. Making her way cautiously across critical and theoretical minefields, Dubrow warns repeatedly against "-isms," chronological "pigeonholing," and "sweeping indictments" based on "historical demarcation" (28) -- indeed, the rhetoric of balancing and qualifying is pervasive. Some sections of this essay are as good as anything I have read in this genre; the section entitled "Cleanth Brooks and New Criticism," for instance, is especially lucid. Dubrow resists the temptation to provide more than one example of how New Criticism reformed Shakespeare criticism, sensing that a proliferation of names would confuse the student who is trying to make sense of all this history. The post-1970 sections mention more titles than the earlier ones, and my undergraduate consultant confirmed that it made for difficult reading, though she did say that it would be useful for someone embarking on a research paper. I would certainly recommend it to graduate students, many of whom could benefit from Dubrow's gentle advice regarding the need for "critical tact" in attaching importance to "dissonances in a culture or a particular text" (42) or her cautions against the loose deployment of the term ideology (44). The essay's overarching attention to postmodern assumptions shows up in large and small ways; for instance, after quoting a sentence from an essay by Jean Howard, Dubrow observes: "Notice how her passive voice ('are depicted') itself stages the transfer of agency away from the author" (45).

        Dubrow's essay is ultimately more effective and readable than the other major addition to the new Riverside, William T. Liston's appendix, "Shakespeare's Plays in Performance: From 1970." I recently assigned Charles Shattuck's original stage-history appendix to fourteen honors freshmen and wished it had extended past 1971, yet I doubt that an additional 18 pages was required, given that the period from 1660-1971 is covered in 27 pages. The problem with an essay like this in a volume designed to be a permanent addition to a student's library is that it becomes dated so quickly; a year from now Liston's survey will seem strangely incomplete, ending as it does with a reference to Branagh's "forthcoming" Hamlet. In contrast to Dubrow, Liston gives too much detail, including references to performances of no more than passing interest, and his essay ends with three dense columns of references, listed in no particular order and printed in one large paragraph block rather than as bibliographical entries.

        Bevington's prefatory note observes that the changes in the "updated fourth edition" are not extensive enough to merit the name "fifth edition" (the fourth edition appeared in 1992) but that the criticism section has been brought up to date. An added page-and-a-half section in the general introduction, called "On the Verge of the Twenty-first Century," mentions several books published in the early 1990s; otherwise the references in sections on feminist criticism, psychological criticism, new historicism and cultural materialism, etc., include no publications after 1986. In this era of up-to-the-minute information, such overviews are bound to seem truncated. The great strength of Bevington's introduction remains its emphasis on theater history, starting with the liturgical drama and including sections on early Tudor drama, Sir Philip Sidney

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as dramatic critic, Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries, the London theater companies, and so on, in short, readable blocks of print set off with inviting titles and illustrations.

        The Norton offers a general introduction of a kind rather different from its predecessors; as one might expect, Greenblatt puts a good deal of emphasis on economic matters and on social and cultural practices. For example, whereas the Riverside introduction refers in passing to the defeat of the Armada in connection with a reference to Don Armado in Love's Labor's Lost, Greenblatt quotes that play's "taffeta phrases" and "russet yeas, and honest kersey noes" in the course of two paragraphs on the fabric industry in England and Europe (4). A later reference to the Armada is accompanied by two sentences explaining its significance; here, as elsewhere, the Norton is thoughtful about what students need to be told. Greenblatt's own research interests are reflected in the introduction's treatment of anti-enclosure riots, charivaris, and attitudes toward "others," including Jews, Africans, and women. When he relates cultural context to text, he often provides good explanations: citing Macbeth's "They have tied me to a stake . . . / But bear-like I must fight the course" (5.7.1-2), Greenblatt includes act, scene, and line numbers and a clause on its context in the play in his brief discussion of bearbaiting as an "alternative entertainment" (34). The introduction's very readable prose employs a contemporary critical vocabulary (a section that in earlier times might have been titled "Disguise" is now "The Fetishism of Dress") but, happily, without assuming too sophisticated a reader. A separate essay on the Shakespearean stage by Andrew Gurr covers in an admirably small space some of the ground Gurr traverses in his books on the subject. Gurr's domain overlaps with Greenblatt's general introduction, which includes sections entitled "The Enemies of the Stage" and "Censorship and Regulation" and a very quick pass through post-Restoration "theatrical innovations" in lieu of the much longer stage-history appendixes in the other two texts. Gurr's essay focuses more directly on the physical attributes of the stage, with well-chosen examples from the plays to illustrate practical aspects of staging.

        All three editions provide still more information, presented in various ways. The Riverside contains a section on Shakespeare's text, another on chronology and sources, as well as the appendixes on stage history, a "Records, Documents, and Allusions" appendix, and annals of significant publications and events from 1552 to 1616. The Bevington's appendixes include one on canon, dates, and early texts; another on sources; and a third on Shakespeare in performance, with only one reference to a production since the 1970s. Both editions have bibliographies, which have been updated but only spottily; many readers will no doubt be struck by omissions (particularly of their own books). The Riverside, perhaps inspired by the Bevington, has added a "Selected Glossary" of about five hundred words. I have quibbles with both glossaries, neither of which seems complete enough for the student most likely to consult them.

        The appendixes in the Norton include a documents section and a section entitled "A Shakespearean Chronicle, 1558-1616," both of which differ in interesting ways from their Riverside counterparts. The "Chronicle," which quotes extensively from Stow's Chronicle, reflects Greenblatt's oft-mentioned love of anecdote but seems less useful, in terms of format, than the Riverside's four-column annals. Do students use such resources, with their plethora of unfamiliar names and telegraphic style? I wonder. The Norton lacks a general glossary but does contain a short glossary of stage and textual terms. These are helpful and would be even more so with the inclusion of such frequently used terms as alarum, divers, excursions, and exeunt.

        These three extraordinarily inclusive volumes are made longer yet by the addition of new texts. All three editions now include both the "Funeral Elegy for Master William Peter" and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the Riverside adds The Reign of King Edward the Third. Such inclusiveness inevitably makes for longer books; one cannot help noting that the Riverside, at 2,057 pages, is 130 pages longer than its predecessor, while the three Lears in the Norton occupy a total of 248 pages. With all of the extensively edited single-volume playtexts on the market, not to mention handbooks and companions and published criticism -- and, indeed, internet and CD-ROM resources -- the case could

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be made that a one-volume Shakespeare need not contain so much. Before the next round of revisions, I would suggest that the editors ask themselves how their books can become more portable and readable, and how much information students need to have between two covers. In the meantime, all three volumes are attractive from the teacher's point of view; the trick is to persuade the students to carry them to class.