The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works [Paperback]

It's easy to pick up a copy of 'The complete works of Shakespeare' from any bookshop; many are less than a tenner. So why pay more for this one?

Well, let's start with the overall look and feel of the book. In size and construction it feels more like something that could ask about twice the price and feel worthwhile (and no, that page count isn't a misprint). Fair enough - as one who lives just outside Stratford, I can tell you that Shakespeare is big business in the town, and one could hardly imagine the RSC being prepared to put their name to anything less than the best.

But the real story is inside. It would have been very easy to produce 'just another' complete works with a fancy binding and nothing special on the inside, but that hasn't happened here. As well as the complete text, the book includes a long review of each play placing it in historical and dramatic context. In addition to that there are extensive notes on each page, explaining the more abstruse language and adding explanations of historical or plot points. This means that the plays can be read as literature - not always easy if one only has the basic text, or if one has to keep flipping to the back for a list of notes. Plus, as you'd expect, the poems and sonnets are given just as thorough a treatment.

All in all, I'd give it more than five stars if I could. It's a gorgeous book, both to look at and to read, and should be part of the collection of anyone who's ever enjoyed, or thought they might enjoy, Shakespeare. Possibly the only Shakepeare volume you'll ever need?

In his foreword to this magnificent edition, Michael Boyd reminds us that Shakespeare's plays were originally scripts for companies of actors and "not written as literature" to be read in an armchair at home. Performance is what matters, and the reading of the text is always going to be an incomplete experience in comparison. So why bother? For me, that incompleteness is still going to be more rewarding than reading most books ever published, but the real payoff comes next time I see the play performed, when I'm that little bit more prepared, that little bit less confused by the language, and that little bit more ready to appreciate a great performance, whether it's by a star actor on a national stage or a complete unknown at a fringe venue. This edition works in so many ways to make our experience of Shakespeare more complete.

The General Introduction by Jonathan Bate covers a lot of familiar territory - Shakespeare's life in Stratford, his early reputation as the "upstart crow", his rise to preeminence as scriptwriter for and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and so on, and the problem for any writer on Shakespeare is how to stitch our patchwork knowledge into a finer garment, how to find a new angle without resorting to arcane questions that are of scholarly interest only. Bate's command of the material and his choice of detail, his straightforward style that never fakes meaning with jargon, and the consistent perspective that emphasizes performance, all work towards opening up these million or so words. There is a refreshing emphasis on just how much we do know, contradicting the common view trotted out even in the RSC's own programmes that "very little is known" of his life. Bate acknowledges that we "will never know what drove his ambition" but Shakespeare is far from being the cipher so beloved of anti-Stratfordians.

The brief introductory essays to each play continue in this elegant way by avoiding stale opinion on the one hand and abstruse academic innovation on the other. They are a model of clarity and lucidity, as though he instinctively realizes that since reading the plays itself involves dealing with multiply-layered words he won't add to your burden. Much Ado, for example, begins "with the end of a war" and moves from combat to courtship. The change of mood is abrupt with the interruption of Hero and Claudio's wedding, and Bate captures this in language we can all understand: "Its atmosphere has been all holiday. No more." There is a crispness that makes me feel I'm learning something new even when it comes to the more familiar plays. As for a less well known play like Timon, he has the knack of drawing you in with a surprising fact: it's unique in that no one in the play "has a blood relationship to anyone else". A detail like this is a fascinating bit of fuel to get you up and running (or at least walking with determination!).

Like the Bible, the plays present textual problems in that no original manuscripts survive and there are different versions of many passages. Decisions have to be made, the key one for this edition being to base it on the 1623 First Folio. This "solves" at a stroke the difficult problem of how best to combine the different versions into one. Textual questions (often fascinating in their own right) over Quarto and Folio readings are gathered together at the end of each play, in contrast to, for example, the Arden editions, which can often have such long footnotes that there is only space for a couple of lines of the play, which is always to get the balance wrong. There is no such intrusion here: on any given page it is clear what takes precedence, the play itself, laid out in single column with all the elements working efficiently around it.

Notes are handled in small type at the foot of the page, each word or phrase repeated in bold following the line number (so avoiding markers in the text). These usually give one or more meanings, the majority of which are helpful. Only rarely is there a sign of dumbing down, as when "Florentine" is glossed as a "person from the city of Florence, in north-west Italy". More fascinating and subversive of polite society is the anti-Bowdlerization at work. Lewd meanings are unashamedly (and in surprising numbers) laid bare. Mistress Quickly's complaint that her "case is open to the world" causes no titters from most audiences, who are innocent in their ignorance of Shakespeare's appetite for filth. Parents and teachers be warned: keep this out of reach of your children - it's full of sex and knife crime and should on no account be allowed in the classroom!

Hamlet admires the travelling players who have returned to Elsinore as "the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time". For anyone who's sat through a seemingly interminable production of Shakespeare, it may seem incredible that there's anything brief about his plays, but for most of the original audience, wanting to be told stories of their nation's history, Holinshed's massive volumes were never an option and an afternoon on the South Bank was a no-brainer. Unlike that original theatre-going public, we're lucky to have his plays to read and study outside the playhouse, but we should not forget where it all started.

I've read enough of the two thousand pages to give it five stars, which is not a judgement on Shakespeare (he hardly needs my endorsement) but on how he's been packaged. Most wrappers get ripped off and thrown away: this one is made of finer material and will serve anyone with even a smattering of interest in our greatest writer. Just don't expect to read it on the bus.

Although the size would make you think this is forbidding, the layout of the text is tremendously clear and you can coast through your reading fairly easily. Shakespeare went from being someone I had a duty to admire, to beng a worthwile, accessible author. I would never have thought presentation was so impoortant to enjoying him; but, I was surprised.

The footnotes are superb, easy to check as you read - so they don't spoil the experience but add to it.

Pages are nice and light too; makes you feel very special.

This review's getting a bit weird now...