Macbeth
- Audiences:
- "students, teachers, and theater professionals" (as quoted from the back cover)
- Tactics:
- Price it cheaply, use cheap paper, keep it relatively thin
- Directly state their audience on the back cover
- Make it part of an established Shakespeare series: increases ethos
- Updated the spelling and clarify many words or phrases in footnotes
- Contains meaty essays on "The Theatrical World," the texts, and the contents of the play itself which are not as long or in-depth as those in the Arden edition of AYL.
The Tempest
- Audiences:
- The audience for the Graff-Phelan edition of The Tempest seems to be somewhere between the more "for the people" Orgel edition of Macbeth we've looked at and the "for people who eat-live-breathe As You Like It" Dusinberre edition. The audience is definitely still academic, but it feels more like a "general use" type of academic audience.
- Tactics:
- The editors, Gerald Graff and James Phelan are known for producing critical editions of a variety of literary texts, not just Shakespeare plays.
- The introductory material is far less detailed and play-specific than the material for As You Like It, focusing more on Shakespeare as a person and his plays in general, not just on The Tempest (in fact, The Tempest is only mentioned by name about half a dozen times).
- On page nine of the introduction, the editors state that the most important question to consider for this edition and reading of the text is "Was [Shakespeare] a man of the middle class with aspirations toward gentility or an aristocrat?"
- The supplementary materials in the post-text address questions about The Tempest, but in contexts that apply more readily to the broader literary conversation, such as colonialism and feminism.
- There is a preface to the scholarly articles entitled "Why Study Critical Controversies about The Tempest." The editors take the time to explain why there is literary debate and why it matters for students who may be new to literary studies, versus Dusinberre, who assumes the reader is already well-versed and participating in the literary debate.
Richard III
- Audiences:
- The audience that this edition of Richard III is aiming at seems to be those interested in joining the conversations already going on about Shakespeare, specifically Richard III. That being said, the audience would likely include scholars, researchers, and the occasional college student. Much of the Preface alone talks about different editions, adaptations, and interpretations of Richard III that are later mentioned in the "Contexts" portion of the edition we are using. Also, in the back of the book, there are various critical essays written about a variety of aspects of the play.
- Tactics:
- The editors connect with their audience simply by consolidating a variety of essays, critiques, and various other options of adaptations of Richard III in one place.
- The academic conversations that the reader would want to be aware of and join are already there and ready to go. Or even as an inspiration for starting a new conversation.
Measure for Measure
- Audiences:
- Students studying and approaching Shakespeare through a variety of different ways, particularly those who are concerned with the history of the culture during the time the play was written
- Tactics:
- Provides headnotes and a glossary for all supplementary material to help the reader better understand the context of materials.
- Provides a variety of supplementary material that would likely draw the attention of students with differing interests.
- Includes proclamations, court records, sermons, and much more
- Audiences:
- Shakespeare scholars, other scholars, theater professionals (particularly those interested in re-creating historical performances of the play), professors and their students
- Tactics:
- Overall quality: edition thickness, white paper (as opposed to the grey-looking, recycled paper in the Macbeth edition), clean design
- Extremely in-depth essays to connect with and participate in many, many critical conversations about the play and its history
- Many, many footnotes to help the reader catch all the nuances this experienced editor sees; even Shakespeare scholars should be able to find new things, or be reminded of things they've forgotten.
For our own edition, our group is interested in the up-and-coming generation of students and their relationship and interactions with Shakespeare. In other words, teenagers who only know that Shakespeare wrote stuff and is now dead. Why? Because teenagers are interestingly awkward, and we want to show them that there are (in our somewhat bitter opinion) bigger and better things about Shakespeare than Romeo and Juliet.
