The Oxford Shakespeare

• 1. Introduction

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  The Oxford Shakespeare carries a name that promises authority. When Oxford University Press released its landmark Complete Works in 1986, edited by John Jowett, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells, it did not simply reprint familiar texts. It made a series of choices so controversial that they reshaped how scholars and directors think about plays they thought they knew. Hamlet lost famous speeches. Falstaff lost his name. King Lear split into two separate plays.

  This documentary follows how a publishing project under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor became one of the most argued-over editions in the four-century history of Shakespeare scholarship. What compelled its editors to present the text as it was first performed rather than as it was first printed? Why did those choices provoke such friction? And what does it mean for a publication to insist that what we have always read is not quite what Shakespeare wrote?

• 2. A Fresh Start in 1891

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  Oxford University Press entered the Shakespeare publishing business in 1891 with a single-volume modern-spelling edition called The Complete Works, edited by William James Craig. That edition established the press as a credible voice in Shakespeare studies. The editors behind the 1986 project were emphatic on one point, though: Craig's 1891 text has no direct relationship to what became known as the Oxford Shakespeare. The later project was freshly re-edited from scratch, not inherited from or revised out of the older volume.

  That clean break matters because it signals the ambition behind the 1986 edition. Oxford was not updating a house text or polishing an inherited version. Gary Taylor and his colleagues were returning to primary sources and asking a question that most editions had quietly dodged: which version of a Shakespeare play is actually the right one to print?

• 3. The Performance Text Principle

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  The founding editorial principle of the 1986 Complete Works was that the text should reflect how a play was first performed, not how it first appeared in print. That distinction sounds technical until you see what it costs. Hamlet, one of the most quoted works in the English language, arrived in the Oxford edition with several of its celebrated speeches moved out of the main text and into appendices. The editors' argument was that Shakespeare added those passages after the original performances, making them later additions rather than the core play.

  King Lear presented an even starker problem. The differences between the two surviving early texts of the play were so extensive that the Oxford edition presented them as two separate works rather than one play in two imperfect copies. This was not a minor annotation; it was a structural claim that readers had, for generations, been reading a composite that Shakespeare never wrote.

  The name Falstaff in Henry IV Part One also fell under scrutiny. Historical evidence pointed to the character having been called Oldcastle in the earliest performances, a name that never made it into print. The Oxford text restored Oldcastle. David Bevington, editing the individual Oxford volume of the same play in 1987, exercised the latitude the series permits individual editors and kept Falstaff.

• 4. Collaboration and Chronology

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  Shakespeare's reputation as a solitary genius received a quiet challenge from the 1986 Complete Works. The edition was the first to place collaborative authorship at the center of how it described several major plays. Macbeth, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens were identified as either collaborations with Thomas Middleton or plays that Middleton revised. Pericles was credited to Shakespeare and George Wilkins together. Henry VI Part One was attributed to Shakespeare and several unnamed other dramatists. Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen were described as collaborations with John Fletcher.

  The edition also broke with the convention of organizing Shakespeare's works by genre. Rather than grouping comedies, histories, and tragedies, the Oxford Complete Works presented the plays in chronological order of composition. That structural choice encoded an argument: that Shakespeare's development as a writer mattered more than the genre categories his first collected editors had assigned in 1623.

• 5. Companion Volumes and the Second Edition

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  The main Complete Works volume did not travel alone. Two companion books addressed what the single-volume format could not carry. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion supplied comprehensive data on every editorial decision for scholars who needed to trace the reasoning behind the choices. William Shakespeare: An Old-Spelling Edition presented the plays in their original spelling, meeting the needs of researchers who wanted access to texts as close as possible to the surviving manuscripts and early printed books.

  In 2005, a second edition of the Complete Works appeared. It added two plays that the first edition had left out. Sir Thomas More, edited by John Jowett, entered the volume because it may contain passages in Shakespeare's own handwriting. Edward III, edited by William Montgomery, joined it as another play believed to be at least partly by Shakespeare. The Norton Shakespeare, published by W. W. Norton, drew heavily on the Oxford text for its first two editions, though its editors departed from some of the Oxford decisions.

• 6. The Individual Play Editions

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  Alongside the Complete Works, the Oxford Shakespeare label covers a long series of individual editions of plays and poems, each in its own volume. These editions follow the same editorial principles as the Complete Works, but their editors retain the right to break with the main edition's choices where they feel the evidence warrants it. The Bevington Falstaff decision is the clearest example of that flexibility in practice.

  Hardback volumes in the series carry distinctive purple dustjackets. Paperback versions follow the design conventions of the Oxford World's Classics line. Publication began in 1982 with Henry V, edited by Gary Taylor, and The Taming of the Shrew, edited by H. J. Oliver, both in the same year. Troilus and Cressida, also edited in 1982 by Kenneth Muir, completed that first wave. The series then extended across nearly three decades, adding plays at an irregular pace through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

  With Richard II, edited by Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin and published in August 2011, the canonical plays reached completion in the one-play-per-volume format. At that point, the two remaining plays not yet given individual volumes were Edward III and Sir Thomas More, the same two plays that the 2005 second edition of the Complete Works had only recently added to the Oxford canon.