The Works of William Shakespeare

This nine-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works by a literary scholar (William George Clark) and two successive librarians of Trinity College Cambridge – home to eighteenth-century editor Edward Capell’s Shakespearean collection -- was the central text of the second half of the nineteenth century and well beyond: partly as it stands, partly through the one-volume Globe edition (1864) which was a spin-off from it. The text follows above all early quartos and the First Folio, with later folios and later editions being consulted where relevant and conjectural emendations made conservatively where necessary. The editors adopted nineteenth-century spelling, arguing that it was impossible to recover Shakespeare’s orthography, and followed the practice of eighteenth- and earlier nineteenth-century editors for punctuation. They did not, however, amend Shakespeare’s grammar or metre. Variants were noted in footnotes, with longer or explanatory notes at the end of each play, and line numbers for each scene facilitated reference.