The New Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Ed. Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan. Vol. 1: Modern Critical Edition.

• Dieter Mehl

In 1998, the late Reginald Foakes (1923-2013) wrote a brilliant review essay of “Heavy weight Shakespeare”: Three new or revised one-volume editions of Shakespeare by Blakemore Evans (Riverside Shakespeare, 2^nd edition), David Bevington (updated 4^th edition) and Stephen Greenblatt (Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford edition [1986]) had appeared the previous year, and Foakes tried to give his opinion on what he supposed to be the intended customers: “students who lug one or other of them in dangerous back-packs into class. Teachers may like them because they can select any range of plays for study and because students who start using such an edition may be tempted to read more widely in Shakespeare’s plays.” Sadly, our much-loved friend did not live to see the next step in the race for improved and enlarged complete editions for the apparently lucrative student textbook market, though his review suggests that he may have suspected a similar development. It had for some time been expected that the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare (1986) and their Press would hardly be satisfied with a superficially revised reprint of their original edition; similar consultations must have taken place on the other side of the Atlantic. The result, a more or less simultaneous publication of the thoroughly “updated” Norton Shakespeare and New Oxford Shakespeare, requires a separate review.