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BOOK: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
 
© Oxford University Press 1986, 2005
 
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
 
Hardback first published 1986
Hardback compact edition 1988
Paperback compact edition 1994
Second edition published 2005
 
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ISBN 0-19-926717-O (hbk)
ISBN 0-19-926718-9 (pbk)
 
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Italy by Legoprint
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
 
THE COMPLETE WORKS
 
with a General Introduction, and Introductions to individual works, by
STANLEY WELLS
 
The Complete Works
has been edited collaboratively under the General Editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Each editor has undertaken prime responsibility for certain works, as follows:
 
STANLEY WELLS
The Two Gentlemen of Verona; The Taming of the Shrew; Titus Andronicus; Venus and Adonis; The Rape of Lucrece; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night;
The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’; Various Poems (printed);
Othello; Macbeth; Antony and Cleopatra; The Winter’s Tale
 
GARY TAYLOR
I Henry VI; Richard III; The Comedy of Errors; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Henry V; Hamlet; Troilus and Cressida
; Various Poems (manuscript);
All’s Well That Ends Well; King Lear
;
Pericles; Cymbeline
 
JOHN JOWETT
Richard II; Romeo and Juliet; King John; I Henry IV; The Merry Wives of Windsor; 2 Henry IV; Julius Caesar; Sir Thomas More; Measure for Measure; Timon of Athens; Coriolanus; The Tempest
 
WILLIAM MONTGOMERY
The First Part of the Contention; Richard Duke of York; Edward III; The Merchant of Venice; All Is True; The Two Noble Kinsmen
 
 
American Advisory Editor · S. Schoenbaum
Textual Adviser · G. R. Proudfoot
Music Adviser · F. W. Sternfeld
Editorial Assistant · Christine Avern-
Carr
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
 
THE preparation of a volume such as this would be impossible without the generosity that scholars can count on receiving from their colleagues, at home and overseas. Among those to whom we are particularly grateful are: R. E. Alton; John P. Andrews; Peter Beal; Thomas L. Berger; David Bevington; J. W. Binns; Peter W. M. Blayney; Fredson Bowers; A. W. Braunmuller; Alan Brissenden; Susan Brock; J. P. Brockbank; Robert Burchfield; Lou Burnard; Lesley Burnett; John Carey; Janet Clare; Thomas Clayton; T. W. Craik; Norman Davis; Alan Dessen; E. E. Duncan-Jones; K. Duncan-Jones; R. D. Eagleson; Philip Edwards; G. Blakemore Evans; Jean Fuzier; Hans Walter Gabler; Philip Gaskell; A. J. Gurr; Antony Hammond; Richard Hardin; G. R. Hibbard; Myra Hinman; R. V. Holdsworth; E. A. J. Honigmann; T. H. Howard-Hill; MacD. P. Jackson; Harold Jenkins; Charles Johnston; John Kerrigan; Randall McLeod; Nancy Maguire; Giorgio Melchiori; Peter Milward; Kenneth Muir; Stephen Orgel; Kenneth Palmer; John Pitcher; Eleanor Prosser; S. W. Reid; Marvin Spevack; R. K. Turner; E. M. Waith; Michael Warren; R. J. C. Watt; Paul Werstine; G. Walton Williams; Laetitia Yeandle.
We are conscious also of a great debt to the past: to our predecessors R. B. McKerrow and Alice Walker, who did not live to complete an Oxford Shakespeare but whose papers have been of invaluable assistance, and to the long line of editors and other scholars, from Nicholas Rowe onwards, whose work is acknowledged in
William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion
.
We gratefully acknowledge assistance from the staff of the following libraries and institutions: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Birmingham Shakespeare Library; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the British Library; the English Faculty Library, Oxford; the Folger Shakespeare Library; Lambeth Palace Library; St. John’s College, Cambridge; the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon; the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; Trinity College, Cambridge; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Westminster Abbey Library.
Many debts of gratitude have also been incurred to persons employed in a variety of capacities by Oxford University Press. Among those with whom we have worked especially closely are Linda Agerbak, Sue Dommett, Oonagh Ferrier, Paul Luna, Jamie Mackay, Louise Pengelley, Graham Roberts, Maria Tsoutsos, and Patricia Wilkie. John Bell started it all, Kim Scott Walwyn made sure we finished it, and from beginning to end Christine Avern-Carr’s meticulous standards of accuracy have been exemplary.
 
S.W.W. G.T.
J.J. W.L.M.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
 
THIS volume contains all the known plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a writer, actor, and man of the theatre who lived from 1564 to 1616. He was successful and admired in his own time; major literary figures of the subsequent century, such as John Milton, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, paid tribute to him, and some of his plays continued to be acted during the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries; but not until the dawn of Romanticism, in the later part of the eighteenth century, did he come to be looked upon as a universal genius who outshone all his fellows and even, some said, partook of the divine. Since then, no other secular imaginative writer has exerted so great an influence over so large a proportion of the world’s population. Yet Shakespeare’s work is firmly rooted in the circumstances of its conception and development. Its initial success depended entirely on its capacity to please the theatre-goers (and, to a far lesser extent, the readers) of its time; and its later, profound impact is due in great part to that in-built need for constant renewal and adaptation that belongs especially to those works of art that reach full realization only in performance. Shakespeare’s power over generations later than his own has been transmitted in part by artists who have drawn on, interpreted, and restructured his texts as others have drawn on the myths of antiquity; but it is the texts as they were originally performed that are the sources of his power, and that we attempt here to present with as much fidelity to his intentions as the circumstances in which they have been preserved will allow.
Shakespeare’s Life: Stratford-upon-Avon and London
 
Shakespeare’s background was commonplace. His father, John, was a glover and wool-dealer in the small Midlands market-town of Stratford-upon-Avon who had married Mary Arden, daughter of a prosperous farmer, in or about 1557. During Shakespeare’s childhood his father played a prominent part in local affairs, becoming bailiff (mayor) and justice of the peace in 1568; later his fortunes declined. Of his eight children, four sons and one daughter survived childhood. William, his third child and eldest son, was baptized in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, on 26 April 1564; his birthday is traditionally celebrated on 23 April—St. George’s Day. The only other member of his family to take up the theatre as a profession was his youngest brother, Edmund, born sixteen years after William. He became an actor and died at the age of twenty-seven: on the last day of 1607 the sexton of St. Saviour‘s, Southwark, noted ‘Edmund Shakspeare A player Buried in y
e
Church w
th
a forenoone knell of y
e
great bell, xxs.’ The high cost of the funeral suggests that it may have been paid for by his prosperous brother.
John Shakespeare’s position in Stratford-upon-Avon would have brought certain privileges to his family. When young William was four years old he could have had the excitement of seeing his father, dressed in furred scarlet robes and wearing the alderman’s official thumb-ring, regularly accompanied by two mace-bearing sergeants in buff, presiding at fairs and markets. A little later, he would have begun to attend a ‘petty school’ to acquire the rudiments of an education that would be continued at the King’s New School, an established grammar school with a well-qualified master, assisted by an usher to help with the younger pupils. We have no lists of the school’s pupils in Shakespeare’s time, but his father’s position would have qualified him to attend, and the school offered the kind of education that lies behind the plays and poems. Its boy pupils, aged from about eight to fifteen, endured an arduous routine. Classes began early in the morning: at six, normally; hours were long, holidays infrequent. Education was centred on Latin; in the upper forms, the speaking of English was forbidden. A scene (4.1) in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
showing a schoolmaster taking a boy named William through his Latin grammar draws on the officially approved textbook, William Lily’s
Short Introduction of Grammar
, and, no doubt, on Shakespeare’s memories of his youth.
From grammar the boys progressed to studying works of classical and neo-classical literature. They might read anthologies of Latin sayings and Aesop’s
Fables,
followed by the fairly easy plays of Terence and Plautus (on whose
Menaechmi
Shakespeare was to base
The Comedy of Errors
). They might even act scenes from Latin plays. As they progressed, they would improve their command of language by translating from Latin into English and back, by imitating approved models of style, and by studying manuals of composition, the ancient rules of rhetoric, and modern rules of letter-writing. Putting their training into practice, they would compose formal epistles, orations, and declamations. Their efforts at composition would be stimulated, too, by their reading of the most admired authors. Works that Shakespeare wrote throughout his career show the abiding influence of Virgil’s
Aeneid
and of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
(both in the original and in Arthur Golding’s translation of 1567). Certainly he developed a taste for books, both classical and modern: his plays show that he continued to read seriously and imaginatively for the whole of his working life.
After Shakespeare died, Ben Jonson accused him of knowing ‘small Latin and less Greek’; but Jonson took pride in his classical knowledge: a boy educated at an Elizabethan grammar school would be more thoroughly trained in classical rhetoric and Roman (if not Greek) literature than most present-day holders of a university degree in classics. Modern languages would not normally be on the curriculum. Somehow Shakespeare seems to have picked up a working knowledge of French—which he expected audiences of
Henry V
to understand—and of Italian (the source of
Othello
, for instance, is an Italian tale that had not been published in translation when he wrote his play). We do not know whether he ever travelled outside England.
Shakespeare must have worked hard at school, but there was a life beyond the classroom. He lived in a beautiful and fertile part of the country, with rivers and fields at hand. He had the company of brothers and sisters. Each Sunday the family would go to Stratford’s splendid parish church, as the law required; his father, by virtue of his dignified status, would sit in the front pew. There Shakespeare’s receptive mind would be impressed by the sonorous phrases of the Bible, in either the Bishops’ or the Geneva version, the Homilies, and the Book of Common Prayer. From time to time travelling players would visit Stratford. Shakespeare’s father would have the duty of licensing them to perform; probably his son first saw plays professionally acted in the Guildhall below his schoolroom.
Shakespeare would have left school when he was about fifteen. What he did then is not known. One of the earliest legends about him, recorded by John Aubrey around 1681, is that ‘he had been in his younger years a schoolmaster in the country’. John Cottom, who was master of the Stratford school between 1579 and 1581 or 1582, and may have taught Shakespeare, was a Lancashire man whose family home was close to that of a landowner, Alexander Houghton. Both Cottom and Houghton were Roman Catholics, and there is some reason to believe that John Shakespeare may have retained loyalties to the old religion. When Houghton died, in 1581, he mentioned in his will one William Shakeshafte, possibly a player. The name is a possible variant of Shakespeare; conceivably Cottom found employment in Lancashire again for his talented pupil as a tutor who also acted. On the other hand, the name ‘Shakeshaft’, common in Lancashire, is not found in Warwickshire. If Shakespeare did leave Stratford, he was soon back home. On 28 November 1582 a bond was issued permitting him to marry Anne Hathaway of Shottery, a village close to Stratford. She was eight years his senior, and pregnant. Their daughter, Susanna, was baptized on 26 May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, on 2 February 1585. Though Shakespeare’s professional career (described in the next section of this Introduction) was to centre on London, his family remained in Stratford, and he maintained his links with his birthplace till he died and was buried there.

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