Marlowe, Shakespeare: The Harvard Classics Deluxe Edition

by Charles William Eliot (Editor), William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe

1910. Contents: Edward the Second by Christopher Marlowe. The Tragedy of Hamlet prince of Denmark; The Tragedy of King Lear; The Tragedy of Macbeth; The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

Genres: Classics, Drama, Shakespeare, Fiction, Anthologies, Reference, Plays

463 pages, Leather Bound

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

Charles William Eliot was an American academic who was selected as Harvard's president in 1869. He transformed the provincial college into the preeminent American research university. Eliot served the longest term as president in the university's history.

Reviews

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 3 out of 5]

The editing for this edition is not the best. For example, on the righthand side of the page, one comes upon the word [ Aside ], but often this fails to denote just what it is meant to be added to--thus forcing the reader to use context-clues to figure out just what was said to others and what was said to oneself. Some of the notes are also superfluous, but--because these texts are from so long ago--sometimes it is best to be rather on the safer side than otherwise, so I don't really have a problem with them; if anything, more might be in order. In the first play contained herein (Edward II), for example, one character uses a previously common phrase "marry" to express agreement, something not (often) used now.

I don't feel the need to review the plays individually here; this review is solely for what they are published into.

[Mario · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is only a review of the physical book, not of the individual plays, which were as good as ever. The collection, though, and this might only be my edition, was disorganized and unnecessarily difficult to read. The character names were always abbreviated (Seb, Mir, Y. Mor, etc.) presumably to save space, which is a step I haven't seen other editions find necessary. There were footnotes, but they didn't add much; if you are going to distract from the text you should do a little more than define an archaic word or phrase. I guess it looks nice on a shelf, but I wouldn't recommend buying something like this unless I didn't plan to read it. You get a lot more from one of the cheap paperback versions.

[Jennifer Lee]

+2

[Nullifidian · Rating 5 out of 5]

To respond to the comment below, it is true that there aren't many or very detailed notes in this edition, but this is fairly typical of the time. There was only once when I felt this was a serious disadvantage: in Act II, scene 1 of The Tempest, when Antonio and Sebastian were doing their Statler-and-Waldorf-esque commentary on the speeches of Gonzalo and Adrian. There were a lot of puns and wordplay that could potentially be misconstrued or not understood. I'll also concede that on one occasion a note was extremely inane: when Hamlet described the pirates as dealing with him like "thieves of mercy", the note helpfully explained that Hamlet meant they were "merciful thieves". However, on the whole, this is a perfectly adequate edition for understanding the words of Shakespeare (and Marlowe), and if you feel like there aren't enough notes then there are more fully annotated editions available. I'd recommend The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works or the Folger Shakespeare or Arden Shakespeare individual editions of the plays (the latter being the most detailed in terms of the number and length of their annotations and the depth of the scholarly apparatus). There are also resources such as C. T. Onions' A Shakespeare Glossary (in the public domain and available at Internet Archive) and Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary & Language Companion by David Crystal and Ben Crystal (my personal favorite). Still, this work is in the public domain and a free resource isn't to be despised, regardless of what more recent editions are like.