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My first reading of the plays, sonnets, and Venus and Adonis (maybe not Lucrece) was in the Kittredge edition; my professor, in the yearlong course in all the plays, was a student of Kittredge's.
When I came to teach the plays, I used Harrison until this one-volume edition appeared, and definitely improved students' access by modernizing some spelling and punctuation. Since there's evidence Shakespeare punctuated rarely, using the line ends as punctuation (the "D Hand" of the Book of Sir Thomas More) all punctuation proceeds from editors, be they Hemings and Condell, or possibly Florio, etc.
This edition includes clear renderings of the D Hand of Sir T.M, and photographs of Shakespeare's handwriting in that MS, in the most controversial passage. Shakespeare seems to have been given More's speech to the uprising, as the Bard was expert at not offending authorities ready to jail playwrights for public incitements. I used to tell my classes that one of Shakespeare's main accomplishments as a playwright was NOT to be jailed. Contrast Jonson (in his case, not for his writing, but killing a man in a duel), Marston and Chapman.
The D Hand also features many Shakespearean phrases, like :"ravenous fishes," and especially "this your mountainish inhumanity." Note that More addresses artisans uprising to defend poor London craftsmen against foreigners, "strangers" now working in England. (Shades of Brexit?)
In the sixties I first read about the D Hand in Samuel Tannenbaum's 1929 study, at the U Minnesota Library before it had moved across the Mississippi to the great brick pile it now occupies.
Perhaps it's a failure to fill my review of this major edition with such a detail, but it serves to illustrate how useful the volume is throughout, concise in scholarship (separate volume contains scholarly references) but pertinent and readable.
When I came to teach the plays, I used Harrison until this one-volume edition appeared, and definitely improved students' access by modernizing some spelling and punctuation. Since there's evidence Shakespeare punctuated rarely, using the line ends as punctuation (the "D Hand" of the Book of Sir Thomas More) all punctuation proceeds from editors, be they Hemings and Condell, or possibly Florio, etc.
This edition includes clear renderings of the D Hand of Sir T.M, and photographs of Shakespeare's handwriting in that MS, in the most controversial passage. Shakespeare seems to have been given More's speech to the uprising, as the Bard was expert at not offending authorities ready to jail playwrights for public incitements. I used to tell my classes that one of Shakespeare's main accomplishments as a playwright was NOT to be jailed. Contrast Jonson (in his case, not for his writing, but killing a man in a duel), Marston and Chapman.
The D Hand also features many Shakespearean phrases, like :"ravenous fishes," and especially "this your mountainish inhumanity." Note that More addresses artisans uprising to defend poor London craftsmen against foreigners, "strangers" now working in England. (Shades of Brexit?)
In the sixties I first read about the D Hand in Samuel Tannenbaum's 1929 study, at the U Minnesota Library before it had moved across the Mississippi to the great brick pile it now occupies.
Perhaps it's a failure to fill my review of this major edition with such a detail, but it serves to illustrate how useful the volume is throughout, concise in scholarship (separate volume contains scholarly references) but pertinent and readable.
