Gallery Four: The Soldier

Discordance and dispute

Then, a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel

The nineteenth century saw conflicting approaches to Shakespeare’s works as editors strove to create authoritative text. Gradually they built upon the early variorum editions to the definitive Cambridge edition (1863-66) produced by William George Clark, John Glover and William Aldis Wright. Facsimiles made the seventeenth-century versions more widely available while the plays were simultaneously sanitised for family reading. Cheap editions for mass markets eschewed notes, while James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps produced the most copiously annotated edition yet produced. However, bitter controversy erupted as the search for a definitive canon of work produced discord amongst the ranks of scholars, with some suggesting that Shakespeare was not the author and proposing alternatives such as Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Christopher Marlowe and William Stanley.