William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition by William Shakespeare Page B

punctuation as their prerogative; thus, the 1600 quarto of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is far more precisely punctuated than any Shakespearian manuscript is likely to have been; and Ralph Crane clearly imposed his own system upon the texts he transcribed. So it is impossible to put much faith in the punctuation of the early texts. Additionally, their system is often ambiguous: the question mark could signal an exclamation, and parentheses were idiosyncratically employed. Modern editors, then, may justifiably replace the varying, often conflicting systems of the early texts by one which attempts to convey their sense to the modern reader. Working entirely from the early texts, we have tried to use comparatively light pointing which will not impose certain nuances upon the text at the expense of others. Readers interested in the punctuation of the original texts will find it reproduced with minimal alteration in our original-spelling edition.
    Theatre is an endlessly fluid medium. Each performance of a play is unique, differing from others in pace, movement, gesture, audience response, and even—because of the fallibility of human memory—in the words spoken. It is likely too that in Shakespeare’s time, as in ours, changes in the texts of plays were consciously made to suit varying circumstances: the characteristics of particular actors, the place in which the play was performed, the anticipated reactions of his audience, and so on. The circumstances by which Shakespeare’s plays have been transmitted to us mean that it is impossible to recover exactly the form in which they stood either in his own original manuscripts or in those manuscripts, or transcripts of them, after they had been prepared for use in the theatre. Still less can we hope to pinpoint the words spoken in any particular performance. Nevertheless, it is in performance that the plays lived and had their being. Performance is the end to which they were created, and in this edition we have devoted our efforts to recovering and presenting texts of Shakespeare’s plays as they were acted in the London playhouses which stood at the centre of his professional life.

A USER’S GUIDE TO THE COMPLETE WORKS
     
    Readers of this edition may find it helpful to have a note of some of its more distinctive features. Fuller discussion is to be found in the General Introduction, and in the Textual Companion ( 1987 ) .

Contents
     
    This volume includes all the writings believed by the editors to have been written, wholly or in part, by Shakespeare. Like all other editions, it also prints a few poems of uncertain authorship (see Various Poems, pp. 805-811). Information about reasons for inclusion and exclusion can be found in the Textual Companion , ‘The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare’s Plays’, pp. 69-144).

Introductions
     
    Each work is preceded by a brief introduction summarizing essential background information.

Order
     
    The works are printed in conjectured order of composition as determined by the editors. The simplest way to find any given work is to refer to the Alphabetical List of Contents (pp. xi-xii). (Short poems are listed under the general title of ‘Various Poems’.)

The Words
     
    Every new edition of Shakespeare differs to some extent from its predecessors. Because this edition represents a radical rethinking of the text, it departs from tradition more than most. New emendations of disputed readings have been introduced. At times we restore original readings that have traditionally been emended. Spelling and punctuation have been thoroughly reconsidered (see General Introduction, pp. xv-xlii). Our most radical departures from tradition relate to the plays that survive in more than one early text. In the belief that these texts are more likely to reflect unrevised and revised versions, rather than differently corrupted versions of a lost original (as has generally been supposed), we have abandoned the tradition of conflation. Passages