Kittredge Shakespeare is a series of scholarly edited volumes of individual plays by William Shakespeare. The original series were edited by noted Shakespeare scholar George Lyman Kittredge of Harvard University. The series has been revised and updated twice in more recent years.
George Kittredge born in 1860, was nearly 80 years old when the first volumes of Kittredge Shakespeare were published in 1939. The original series included text and analysis of sixteen of Shakespeare's Plays. [1] Kittredge, who had taught Harvard undergraduates an introductory course on Shakespeare called English 2, had written very little on the subject, other than an address in 1916 at the Sanders Theater, before publishing his Complete Works in 1936 (see below) and the individual play series, starting in 1939. [2] The original series included an introduction to each play, text of the play, copious literary notes following the text, textual notes, and a glossary. [3] The original series included the following volumes:
Released 1939: As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth , and The Tempest .
Released 1940: Henry IV, part 1, King Lear , and Romeo and Juliet
Released 1941: Antony and Cleopatra, Othello , Richard The Second, and Twelfth Night .
Also released between 1939 and 1941: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing
Released posthumously: Henry V, The Merchant of Venice [2]
Kittredge died in July 1941 at age 81, and was working on the original series of these books until shortly before he passed. [4] In 1945, Arthur Colby Sprague, of Bryn Mawr College, edited volumes for Henry V and The Merchant of Venice from Kittredge's explanatory notes. [5]
Sixteen Plays of Shakespeare, with a preface by Arthur Colby Sprague, was released as a single volume in 1946. [6] This collection includes the full introductions and all of the notes, textural notes and play glossaries found in each individual volume. [7]
Between 1966 and 1969, all of Shakespeare's plays re reissued, revised by Irving Ribner. [8] A new introduction by Prodessor Ribner replaced Kittredge's original introductions, and the notes were set out as footnotes to the text, rather than following the text, as was the case in the original series. [9]
Starting in 2006 with Hamlet , a new series of single volume Shakespeare plays was released under the name The New Kitteridge. [10] Under the general editorship of James H. Lake, the new Kittredge includes an edited version of Kittredge's original introductions, new introductions by the editors of each volume, two sets of footnotes below the text (one of literary notes, mostly from Kittredge, and a second set with a running commentary of performance and film treatments), followed by segments on ""How to Read 'the Play' as Performance", "Topics for Discussion and Further Study"; a bibliography; and a filmography. [8]
Prior to publishing the individual plays in the individual series, Professor Kittredge issued a volume of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1936. As part of the Revised Series, The Complete Works was revised by Irving Ribner and reissued in 1971
King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It tells the tale of a king who bequeaths his power and land to two of his three daughters, after they declare their love for him in a fawning and obsequious manner. His third daughter gets nothing, because she will not flatter him as her sisters had done. When he feels he has been treated with disrespect by the two daughters who now have his wealth and power, he becomes furious to the point of madness. He eventually becomes tenderly reconciled to his third daughter, just before tragedy strikes her and then the king.
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
Arthur William Symons, was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.
This article presents a possible chronological listing of the composition of the plays of William Shakespeare.
Thomas Rymer was an English poet, critic, antiquary and historian. His most lasting contribution was to compile and publish 16 volumes of the first edition of Foedera, a work in 20 volumes containing agreements made between The Crown of England and foreign powers since 1101. He held the office of English Historiographer Royal from 1692 to 1714. He is credited with coining the phrase "poetic justice".
The Mermaid Series was a major collection of reprints of texts from English Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration drama. It was launched in 1887 by the British publisher Henry Vizetelly and under the general editorship of Havelock Ellis. Around 1894 the series was taken over by the London firm of T. Fisher Unwin. Many well-known literary figures edited or introduced the texts. Some of the plays published had not been reprinted in recent editions, and most had dropped out of the stage repertoire.
Complete Works of William Shakespeare is the standard name given to any volume containing all the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Some editions include several works which were not completely of Shakespeare's authorship, such as The Two Noble Kinsmen, which was a collaboration with John Fletcher; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, the first two acts of which were likely written by George Wilkins; or Edward III, whose authorship is disputed.
David Martin Bevington was an American literary scholar. He was the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, and the College at the University of Chicago, where he taught since 1967, as well as chair of Theatre and Performance Studies. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specialized in British drama of the Renaissance, and edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition. After accomplishing this feat, Bevington was often cited as the only living scholar to have personally edited Shakespeare's complete corpus.
Shakespeare's plays are a canon of approximately 39 dramatic works written by English poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare. The exact number of plays—as well as their classifications as tragedy, history, or comedy—is a matter of scholarly debate. Shakespeare's plays are widely regarded as being among the greatest in the English language and are continually performed around the world. The plays have been translated into every major living language.
George Lyman Kittredge was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England.
A bad quarto, in Shakespearean scholarship, is a quarto-sized printed edition of one of Shakespeare's plays that is considered to be unauthorised, and is theorised to have been pirated from a theatrical performance without permission by someone in the audience writing it down as it was spoken or, alternatively, written down later from memory by an actor or group of actors in the cast – the latter process has been termed "memorial reconstruction". Since the quarto derives from a performance, hence lacks a direct link to the author's original manuscript, the text would be expected to be "bad", i.e. to contain corruptions, abridgements and paraphrasings.
Shakespeare's editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.
The Conan books are sword and sorcery fantasies featuring the character of Conan the Cimmerian originally created by Robert E. Howard. Written by numerous authors and issued by numerous publishers, they include both novels and short stories, the latter assembled in various combinations over the years by the several publishers. The character has proven durably popular, resulting in Conan stories being produced after Howard's death by such later writers as Poul Anderson, Leonard Carpenter, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Roland J. Green, John C. Hocking, Robert Jordan, Sean A. Moore, Björn Nyberg, Andrew J. Offutt, Steve Perry, John Maddox Roberts, Harry Turtledove, and Karl Edward Wagner. Some of these writers finished incomplete Conan manuscripts by Howard, or rewrote Howard stories which originally featured different characters. Most post-Howard Conan stories, however, are completely original works. In total, more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories featuring the Conan character have been written by authors other than Howard. This article describes and discusses notable book editions of the Conan stories.
The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt is an omnibus collection of seven fantasy stories by American science fiction and fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, gathering material previously published in three volumes as The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), The Castle of Iron (1950), and Wall of Serpents (1960) together with additional material from The Enchanter Reborn (1992) and The Exotic Enchanter (1995). It represents an expansion of the earlier omnibuses The Compleat Enchanter, which contained only the material in the first two volumes, and The Complete Compleat Enchanter, which contained only the material in the first three volumes. The expanded version also differs from the previous omnibuses in its selection of supplementary material. The Mathematics of Magic is the first edition of the authors' Harold Shea series to include every one of their contributions to it in one volume. Contributions to the series of other authors from the collections of the 1990s are omitted.
The Oxford Shakespeare is the range of editions of William Shakespeare's works produced by Oxford University Press. The Oxford Shakespeare is produced under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
The History of King Lear is an adaptation by Nahum Tate of William Shakespeare's King Lear. It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838.
The Arden Shakespeare is a long-running series of scholarly editions of the works of William Shakespeare. It presents fully edited modern-spelling editions of the plays and poems, with lengthy introductions and full commentaries. There have been three distinct series of the Arden Shakespeare over the past century, with the third series commencing in 1995 and concluding in January 2020. Arden was the maiden name of Shakespeare's mother, Mary, but the primary reference of the enterprise's title is named after the Forest of Arden, in which Shakespeare's As You Like It is set.
History is one of the three main genres in Western theatre alongside tragedy and comedy, although it originated, in its modern form, thousands of years later than the other primary genres. For this reason, it is often treated as a subset of tragedy. A play in this genre is known as a history play and is based on a historical narrative, often set in the medieval or early modern past. History emerged as a distinct genre from tragedy in Renaissance England. The best known examples of the genre are the history plays written by William Shakespeare, whose plays still serve to define the genre. History plays also appear elsewhere in British and Western literature, such as Thomas Heywood's Edward IV, Schiller's Mary Stuart or the Dutch genre Gijsbrecht van Aemstel.
The Cambridge Shakespeare is a long-running series of critical editions of William Shakespeare's works published by Cambridge University Press. The name encompasses three distinct series: The Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–1866), The New Shakespeare (1921–1969), and The New Cambridge Shakespeare (1984–).
The Family Shakespeare is a collection of expurgated Shakespeare plays, edited by Thomas Bowdler and his sister Henrietta ("Harriet"), intended to remove any material deemed too racy, blasphemous, or otherwise sensitive for young or female audiences, with the ultimate goal of creating a family-friendly rendition of Shakespeare's plays. However, despite this mission, The Family Shakespeare is most often cited in modern times as a negative example of literary censorship, despite its original family-friendly intentions. The Bowdler name is also the origin of the term "bowdlerize", meaning to omit parts of a work on moral grounds.