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Special Edition
 Last
week a friend dropped
by with a big gift: the opulent new Modern Library edition of the
works of Shakespeare, more than 2,000 pages long, produced in conjunction
with the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose excellent
Coriolanus my friend, his father, and I had just seen at the
Kennedy Center two weeks earlier.
 As
if I needed another Shakespeare book! I’ve collected editions of Shakespeare since high
school, and I already owned dozens, dating back over generations: Yale,
Riverside, Pelican I and II, Oxford I and II, Arden, Cambridge, Norton, and on
and on. Editors include G.B. Harrison, Hardin Craig, G.L. Kittredge, John Dover
Wilson, Stephen Greenblatt, David Bevington, and the team of Stanley Wells
and Gary Taylor. (If you know all the plays almost by heart, you too may be
qualified to edit Shakespeare.)
These are just some of the single-volume editions in my
personal Shakespeare library (roughly 3,000 books); I also have the Signet,
Penguin, Washington Square Press (I and II), and other series in individual
paperbacks. Plus collections of such marginal and apocryphal plays as
The Two Noble Kinsmen, Edward III, and
Sir Thomas More, which I’m sure bear
Shakespeare’s hand but which aren’t usually included in
“complete” volumes of his works. And lots of duplicates too.
So when a new edition of Shakespeare comes out, I’m
not the man to pass it up. And I was delighted with my friend’s
splendid gift.
I
understand there are some literate people who have only one edition of
Shakespeare and are content with that. I regard them with the sort of
mystified pity a Saudi sheik might feel for a poor Idaho monogamist. How can
these folks bear to live in such deprivation?
But the editor of this hefty new volume is a man I thought I
had a score to settle with, Jonathan Bate of Warwick University. Ten years
ago, Bate gave my own book, Alias Shakespeare, a blistering
and, I thought, unfair review. He scornfully rejected the very possibility that
“Shakespeare” was a pen name for the real author. Now was my
chance to get even.
![[Breaker quote for
Special Edition: A score to settle]](2007breakers/070522.gif) In that spirit, I spent a long evening
studying his edition, at first in the hope of catching his errors. And I did find
a few; Bate is still a little shaky on the Sonnets and of course the whole
authorship question. He still calls alternative authorship views
“conspiracy theories,” which is silly, especially for a man as
intelligent as he is. (Using a pen name requires very little conspiring.
It’s done every day. I’ve done it myself several times.)
But setting these points aside, the more I read, the clearer it
became that Bate’s edition is incomparably superior to all the rest.
His knowledge of textual problems and previous commentary seems to me
prodigious in its detail and thoroughness; see, for example, what he says
about successive early texts of Richard III. And his comments
on individual plays are unfailingly perceptive. He’s about equally fine as
scholar and critic; few excel in both roles, with their very different
requirements. Bate is like an all-star shortstop who can also serve as an
outstanding relief pitcher.
I’ve never learned so much about Shakespeare in one
night. I’d read hundreds of books about him, one of which Bate himself
wrote some years back, and I figured I pretty much knew all there was to
know, except for the most arcane lore, of interest only to pedants.
No other edition has ever impressed me so much. Its virtues
far outweigh its flaws; I think those flaws are serious enough to mention, but
by the time I went to bed they hardly seemed to matter. I wanted to thank
the man I’d started out wanting to cut down to size.
I
felt I could afford to throw away several hundred books I’ve been
hoarding for decades. Oh, I’ll keep them, but mostly out of habit; I no
longer really need them. But if you want just one Shakespeare, Bate’s
is the one to get, a bargain at $65. Its format is also handsome and readable.
What about that lousy review of my book? I can’t let
that pass. But if Hamlet could delay his revenge, I guess I can let mine wait a
while.
Just watch your back, Professor Bate.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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