A Minor Ooops

[faustus]

Between some Kenny Loving (or at least some Kenny Lunching)* and the viewing of a naked Clanger at the exhibition, I popped into various charity shops (all safe) and the library - where I had an accident. Not, fortunately, a catastrophe, merely an accident. The library was selling its 1960s editions of Henry VI I-III and Henry VIII, which, as I rightly judged, I did not have in Arden editions. I suspect we are up to Arden 3 or 4 by now - and from memory the later Ardens were stripping out some of the aparatus for a cleaner reading text and more on performance history. These will do me.

In the unlikely event of needing textual scholarship that is thirty years younger, I can turn to my Norton/Oxford edition and its toilet paper pages. To my surprise, I only have 17, including The Poems (I lent a dear friend The Tempest in 1988. I will not see that again). I don't, it appears, have Richard III, so I don't have all the histories, and I have consistently failed to buy Hamlet. The gaps are mostly comedies and problem plays, some of which I have in Penguin editions. That puts me halfway, and it might be a good set to collect under the £2 rule.


* A vain attempt to appear interesting by means of a private joke.

Comments

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

I still want the Riverside Shakespeare. I love my Riverside Chaucer. Cumbersome to take along when you only want one play to stuff in a pocket, though.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I have a love hate relationship with my R Chaucer - the first copy I bought has a signature repeated and one missing. It's felt discombobulated ever since.

There's the Kermode edition of the Riverside Shakespeare for a couple of quid, versus the much more expensive later hardback. I note Amazon use the same reviews for both, which doesn't help. Summat must have changed in thirty years. Besides gaining eighty pages.

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Don't think I'd want a softcover of something with that many pages. One accident and you might tear it in half. I want a definite binding on something that massive.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

I am boggling at the idea of a naked clanger. I hope you didn't mean *that* clanger?

The £2 rule sounds sensible. We have mostly New Cambridge Shakespeares due to bookzombie's stint at CUP, but I do love our handful of Ardens.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Which clanger? I couldn't take a photo, but on the same principle as, say:




I thought I had more of the Arden. I never liked the CUPs (red with Picasso covers) because the general editor J. Dover Wilson (?) saw a need to pep up the stage directions a la Bernard Shaw stylee as opposed to Another part of the Castle. I never moved onto the later, blue, versions.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Aha! You have put my mind at rest (I confess I was *not* thinking of major_clanger. Honest.

We have a couple of pale blue, mostly dark blue CUPs. And the 2 I have picked at random off the shelf were edited by Russell Fraser (All's Well That Ends Well - pale blue) and MM Mahood (The Merchant of Venice - dark blue).