Old Timey Announcement

[RiverNotch]

I hope to be releasing, as soon as possible,

The Plays of William Shakespeare

in twelve digital (pdf) volumes,

edited and annotated by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens,

with illustrations from the Boydell Folio.

The Plays shall be arranged, not by their traditional categories,

but in chronological order, according to modern scholarship.

The contents of the volumes being prepared shall be as follows,

although I may revise them according to volume length

or the demands of the public (you!):

Volume 1. Prefatory Materials.

Volume 2. The Early Plays. 

The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

The Taming of the Shrew,

and The First Part of Henry VI.

Volume 3. The Earlier Henriad.

The Second Part of Henry VI,

The Third Part of Henry VI,

Titus Andronicus,

and Richard III.

Volume 4. The Lyrical Plays.

The Comedy of Errors,

Love's Labour's Lost,

and Richard II.

Volume 5. The Lyrical Plays.
Romeo and Juliet,
A Midsummer-Night's Dream,
and King John.
Volume 6. The Later Henriad.
The Merchant of Venice,
The First Part of Henry IV,
and The Second Part of Henry IV.
Volume 7. The Later Henriad.
Much Ado About Nothing,
The Merry Wives of Windsor,
and Henry V.
Volume 8. The Central Plays.
Julius Caesar,
As You Like It,
Twelfth-Night,
and Hamlet.
Volume 9. The Problem Plays.
Troilus and Cressida,
Measure for Measure,
and All's Well that Ends Well.
Volume 10. The Jacobean Tragedies.
Othello,
King Lear,
and Timon of Athens.
Volume 11. The Jacobean Tragedies.
Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra,
and Coriolanus.
Volume 12. The Late Romances.
Cymbeline,
The Winter's Tale,
The Tempest,
and Henry VIII.
Appendices and Indices.

---

I promised something like this before, but I lost those copies soon enough, when my computer broke down. But now I'm committed! I'm a little torn with the way the plays are arranged, though: I fear the arrangement might be unwieldy, since sections like "The Later Henriad" don't contain all the plays traditionally considered to be part of that cycle, as well as plays that are unrelated (although were released at the same time).

There are a few thematic concessions already, I will note: 1 Henry VI, according to most of my sources, was written after 3 Henry VI as a prequel; Much Ado About Nothing here precedes The Merry Wives of Windsor, when my sources relate that the latter was probably finished and released while the author was in the middle of writing 2 Henry IV; and Twelfth Night is often considered to have been finished and released after Hamlet. I will also note that, before, I would have released the first edition of Johnson's Plays of Shakespeare, but the second edition incorporates many of his notes relegated to the former's appendix, as well as some new, important observations.

---

As for why this is worth getting, and whether this is all legal:

Yes, this is all legal. The copy of Johnson-Steevens-Shakespeare, I got from Wikimedia Commons, and my copies of both these plays and an incomplete reprint of the Boydell Folio all have lapsed copyrights.

This is only the canonical plays -- ie, the plays in the first folio -- without the poems or plays like Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen. At first, I wondered whether to get this, or the later edition of the annotated plays as compiled by Edmond Malone, another contemporary of Samuel Johnson, but that later edition was so full of annotations, largely from Malone or from other respondents to Johnson, that I figured it would deter from the plays too much, even if Malone is the more reliable scholar. And really, that's why I'm releasing these plays: not for the scholarship, but for the criticism.

Not that Dr. Johnson's scholarship wasn't any good. The principles that Dr. Johnson outlined in his Preface are, many of them, considered the founding principles of modern textual scholarship, in particular his respect for available early editions, and his reluctance to emend for purely stylistic reasons, the opposite of which was in vogue among all of the editors Dr. Johnson followed. But it's such observations on style and value as in his Preface, or his notes to Macbeth, Hamlet, and the Later Henriad -- his criticism -- that makes Dr. Johnson the most respected literary critic of his day, in fact one of the most respected literary critics of all time, and this edition one worth perusing.

[RiverNotch]

THE ORDER HAS BEEN REVISED

to make each document closer in length to each other,

although the chronological arrangement, by necessity,

is less traditional, instead conforming to more statistical

and technological analyses of Shakespeare's works.

Volume One. Prefaces.

Volume Two. The Early Plays.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona,

The First Part of Henry VI,

The Second Part of Henry VI,

and The Third Part of Henry VI.

Volume Three. The Early Plays.

The Life and Death of Richard III

Titus Andronicus,

The Taming of the Shrew,

and The Comedy of Errors.

Volume Four. The Lyrical Plays.

Love's Labour's Lost,

Romeo and Juliet,

A Midsummer-Night's Dream,

and The Life and Death of Richard II.

Volume Five. The Central Plays.

The Life and Death of King John,

The Merchant of Venice,

Much Ado About Nothing,

and As You Like It.

Volume Six. Falstaff and Hamlet.

The First Part of Henry IV,

The Second Part of Henry IV,

Julius Caesar,

and Hamlet.

Volume Seven. The Central Plays.

The Merry Wives of Windsor,

The Life of Henry V,

Twelfth-Night,

and Troilus and Cressida.

Volume Eight. The Later Plays.

Measure for Measure,

All's Well That Ends Well,

Othello,

and King Lear.

Volume Nine. The Later Plays.

Timon of Athens,

Macbeth,

Antony and Cleopatra,

and Coriolanus.

Volume Ten. The Late Romances.

Cymbeline, 

The Winter's Tale,

The Tempest,

and Henry VIII.
Appendices and Indices.

---

What I did this time was to compile word and line counts of Shakespeare's plays, put them next to a list of ranks (from earliest to latest) based on what sources I could find -- Chambers, Brainerd, three Oxford releases, and Bruster-Smith -- form an aggregate ranking based on the averages of all the ranks, then compare all of the ranks with the word and line counts to create nine or eleven -- ultimately I went with nine, because the differences in word and line counts were less outrageous -- volumes which had the least amount of deviation from the mean number of words and lines per book. Ultimately, I found the 1987 Oxford Chronology to be the most precise in terms of word and line count, but the Bruster-Smith one I found to be the most thematically interesting, so I sort-of fused those two together with the aggregate ranking to form this chronology. Science and art perfectly misapplied.

---

Oh, and progress report: I've finished chopping up, bookmarking, and inserting the pictures to 7 1/2 of the 10 original volumes. Hopefully I finish all these by this weekend.

[RiverNotch]

It is finished!

....or is it? If the point of what I shall soon be uploading here -- hopefully tomorrow -- were just the notes, I would consider the product finished, but aside from finding a more consistent copy of more of Boydell's plates, I also find that some of the editorial choices here made -- expanding words like "th'offertory" to "the offertory", for example, thus ruining the meter -- as well as some obvious mistakes to be inexcusable. I want both Johnson's commentary and Shakespeare's text to be equally intelligible, even if there are better editions of the latter out there.

Hence, consider what shall soon be posted as a proof of concept, or perhaps a first draft, although what shall follow is a slight reversion, since I have no copy of the 1778 edition, and I refuse to turn to Malone's rather bloated 1790 version. The proper version shall be Johnson's first, which I hope is as clean as when I first considered it: I must admit it's the copy I've actually worked with before starting on this project.

---

Oh, an additional consideration: throughout the process of working on this first draft, I have found it hard, in many places, to insert an illustration without ruining a passage, whether of commentary or of speech, since scene breaks -- the most natural place to insert them -- so rarely happen at the end of pages, and the illustrations themselves lose much of their value (as they would not, were they simply printed out) too far divorced from their scenes. The new version might not have the pictures inserted -- instead, I might deliver them through a separate folder.

[RiverNotch]

Here we go: the link to my "first draft".

https://mega.nz/#F!GR5yBagI!7AR5D-FR0fwbSeKQyboc9Q

[RiverNotch]

I've sort of changed my mind, as I want to move on to other projects. I'll stick with the Johnson-Steevens 1773 version, for now, but below, I've uploaded a slightly different version, one without Boydell's plates, and the Prefaces and Appendices files combined.

https://mega.nz/#F!fZZXzAjL!zQvnqHe1Xi8WStzQLthfZw

[RiverNotch]

I'm likely to add to this project another critical standard, in lieu of the missing pictures: Hazlitt's "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays".

[RiverNotch]

Added to the upload Hazlitt's Characters of the Plays of Shakespeare, with the pages rearranged to follow the arrangement of plays in my version of the Johnson-Steevens Shakespeare; Titus Andronicus, by Hazlitt's estimation, was a Doubtful Play. I'll also add an edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets as soon as I am able, just for completion's sake (Eleven is such an ugly number!). The sonnets themselves don't need as much annotation, I think, but either way I don't know of any major and thorough considerations of those poems during Johnson's or Hazlitt's time, which is kind of the whole point of this exercise -- perhaps, in this case, I'll steal from the Malone? I'll definitely not include Venus and Adonis nor The Rape of Lucrece, as they are rough and relatively unnecessary, nor any of the plays not considered by Johnson and Steevens.

[RiverNotch]

Hello, anyone who might be following! I'll be cleaning up this thread sometime soon, as I'm expanding the scope of this little project, to better reflect the larger library I am assembling -- a library I can't really share, since some of its books aren't free.

For now, here are the list of the books I will be assembling and here presenting:

The Plays of William Shakespeare, edited and annotated by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens
The intersection between poet and critic, which I hope would be of great use to the poets and critics of this site.

Characters of Shakespeare's Plays by William Hazlitt
Where Johnson's mode is neoclassical, Hazlitt's mode is romantic; having this particular critic's work on show would be an enlightening response, both to our poet and our critic. I might expand this project a bit to include more of Hazlitt's work, as he touches on some of the works here to be included specifically, but for now....

Shakespeare's Sonnets
Not touched on by Dr. Johnson but discussed, positively if briefly, by Mr. Hazlitt, I like this collection of poems a lot, so I'm including these here.

Sir Phillip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella
An important model for the sonnets. Already included in the download link.

Plays of Christopher Marlowe
I don't know which edition I'll use, but par for the course, it must be antiquated. An important model for Shakespeare's earlier tragedies and histories.

Select Plays of Ben Jonson
I'm not sure which edition I'll use for these either, but certainly not the folio -- I want to keep this collection as brief as my current purpose would allow it to be. Some of Shakespeare's plays respond to these.

The Essays of Montaigne. Done into English by John Florio
The only reference work used by Shakespeare to be included here, largely because this is more readable than the Apuleius or the Chronicles that could be included here, but also because I have heard the translation itself is of some intrinsic value.

A Dictionary of the English Language
A possible aide to understanding some of the works here. Though, really, with Google and the like, this isn't so important for being an aide as it is for being Dr. Johnson's other masterpiece and, with some of its selections and quirks, for being wildly entertaining.

The Idler
A periodical written by Doctor Johnson between the first edition of his dictionary and the first edition of his Shakespeare, which is the period of Doctor Johnson's copious amount of writing to which we shall limit ourselves.

Rasselas
A philosophical novella written by the same critic during the same period.

Possible additions to this list are:
Boswell's Life of Johnson
Addison and Steele's The Spectator, an important influence on the many periodicals Dr. Johnson wrote
Steele's The Tatler, itself influential on the preceding work
more works by Hazlitt: perhaps his lectures on the dramatists contemporary to Shakespeare, as well as his Political Essays, Table-Talk, Liber Amoris, The Spirit of the Age, and The Plain Speaker

[rowens]

I'm planning a magical retirement next spring wherein I only include the glamor of the greeks romans and elizabethans. So this Shakespeare stuff might come in handy. I wonder how useful Marlowe can be, and then coming back to Shakespeare as if you never knew his plays and things. I'm going to do an experiment herein where I have the parts of my brain removed that know or have had any effect of Shakespeare having existed in the world done on them, and then come back with fresh guidelines. I n th e mean time, I might be reading limited bits of David Hume. And some Daniel . . . I mean, Laurence Sterne. . . .

[RiverNotch]

Well, Shakespeare follows Marlowe a lot in his early plays, and parodies Ben Jonson a lot in his later plays. I'd include Fletcher and Beaumont, too, because Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher towards the end of his career, and maybe John Webster, just because, but ehhhh. Oh, the glamor!

[rowens]

I forget, when I need to remember. I base so much on the ability to improvise in the moment. I wonder if Shakespeare was a jazzman. Do you think he filled papers with revisions or gushed a lot spontaneously?

---

I read Dr. Johnson and Hazlitt, and the few critics of today that are read. Sometimes reading critics influence me more than the poets themselves. Some people take criticism and use it constructively to try to do better. Some get angry and say the critic's wrong. I take criticism and use it constructively to try to prove the critic is wrong. I think we're living in an age of sophisticated readers. That might be why I find criticism so much more substantial. Also, the last girl I was in love with stuck an icepick in the poetic, imaginitive hemisphere of my brain. So I'm stuck with the egotistical, rational side.

---

I think Shakespeare had no moral qualms, literary-wise. He indulged in magpiety worshiply and made the most of everything around him. Like W. Blake said about Jesus, he made use of rules as much as he did any and everything else, and just did. But I have, as I think I said, been trying to forget Shakespeare just to remember his words, after a lifetime of him always being around. Like Uesheba said, Learn and forget! . . . I'm natural at that.