Marjorie Garber - Shakespeare After All

T HERE ARE MANY excellent modern editions of Shakespeare's plays. In the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this book I list several of the best-known, most reliable, and most available recent editions, with the expectation that a reader of this book may already own a copy of the collected works of Shakespeare or individual editions of the plays. The act, scene, and line numbers cited in the chapters that follow refer to The Norton Shakespeare (1997), itself based on the text of The Oxford Shakespeare (1986), but readers who own or have access to other editions will be able to find the quoted passages without difficulty. Line numbers may vary slightly, since lines of prose will be of differing lengths depending upon the width of the printed page or column. For textual variants and alternative readings from Quarto or Folio texts, readers should consult the textual notes in any good modern edition. When citing the names of characters in the plays, I have occasionally departed from the choices made by the Norton editors, preferring, for example, the more familiar Brabantio to Brabanzio in Othello, Gratiano to Graziano in The Merchant of Venice, Ancient Pistol to Ensign Pistol in Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, and Imogen to Innogen in Cymbeline. I have also chosen to quote from the 1623 Folio edition of King Lear instead of the Norton Shakespeare's conflated version. All biblical citations, unless noted otherwise, are from the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible.

Although it is not possible to know with certainty the chronology of composition of the playsor even, sometimes, of their performancethe sequence given here follows the order suggested by The Norton Shakespeare with the exception of a few minor changes. For the convenience of the general reader Henry VI Part 1 is discussed before Part 2 and Part 3, even though it was written after them. The Norton editors place The Merry Wives of Windsor between Henry IV Part 1 and Henry IV Part 2, but I have elected, again for reasons of readerly convenience, to discuss the two history plays in adjacent chapters. In this case the plays in questionMerry Wives and 2 Henry IV-are dated in the same years, so there is no significant disruption of chronology. With Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, two plays thought to have been written in the same time period, I have reversed the Norton's order, choosing to discuss Shakespeare's love tragedy before moving on to his great comic send-up of tragical love. Likewise, I discuss Cymbeline before The Winter's Tale. Modern scholars differ about which of these two plays was written first; each was performed in 1611. But such changes are a matter of editorial discretion and do not affect the argument for a generally historical sequence. Readers should bear in mind that the dating of the plays is in many cases still highly speculative and controversial, and that it is therefore difficult to draw firm conclusions about Shakespeare's development as a playwright from this, or any, order of the plays. The presentation of plays in this volume follows the practice of the Norton, Oxford, and other recent editions in grouping the plays by approximate chronology rather than according to genres like comedy, history, tragedy, and romance, with the intent of allowing the reader to observe the use of images, staging, and language across genres in the course of Shakespeare's theatrical career.