Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare)

"Shakespeare editing has gone through different phases. It’s had different projects at different points in its history. Is the aim trying to make a perfect text? Or is it trying to imagine the text as Shakespeare wrote it? Of course, the whole discipline is haunted by the fact that there are no manuscripts. We’ve only got these printed texts. Do we think Shakespeare might have revised his plays? Or do we think that if there are differences or problems in the text, it must be because somebody has copied it down wrong or misheard or transcribed it differently? Above all, what’s the role of the theater? In some ways, the whole project of editing a book of plays is contrary to the fluidity that those texts would have in the theater. What to do with theatre and drama as part of editing has long been a question. We haven’t decided yet. Editing continues and people make different choices. What Arden Three tries to do is to bring a sense of theater—both in the Shakespearean period and since—into questions of ongoing performance traditions. The series looks at how the text enables those and what the text of the play gains from that context. Theater is really important to Arden Three . The Arden Three series has also moved on slightly from previous editions, where the introduction started in quite a dry way, with a history of how we got the text. For most people, that’s just a turnoff. Arden Three editors have tried to set up why this play has mattered and then come to those sorts of questions later. So if you just want one play—a play that you’re studying or a play that you’re interested in—I would get the edition in the Arden Three series that you need. If you’re looking for the complete works of Shakespeare, there is a complete Arden which is absolutely fine, but it doesn’t have all the notes and all the material which I think makes the individual plays so valuable. The series is good because it acknowledges that shift in how we see Shakespeare that we talked about right at the beginning. The Shakespeare text isn’t just a product of what went before, in some interesting ways it’s the product of what comes afterward and that’s the point of interest. Absolutely. Why would you? They can seem really dry. I still think they’re not necessarily absolutely introductory texts. If I were recommending a Shakespeare series to someone at school, I might not choose these, because they’re quite serious and they’re quite hardcore. There are a lot of notes on the page, and you might sometimes open up the pages of the play and think there’s more commentary than there are actual Shakespearean lines. That can be exciting but can also be very off-putting. Sometimes I suggest to people who are maybe reading Shakespeare for the first time that they read without notes. In a funny way, it can build your confidence to think, ‘I don’t exactly know what that means, but I get the gist: this is angry, or this is romantic.’ That’s probably what you need if you’re reading Shakespeare for the first time. The play that came to define the series was Jonathan Bate’s edition of Titus Andronicus . That was a play that no one had really thought much of before and Bate did a really, really good, critical rehabilitation job on it. So, I think that’s a good example."