EDITIONS

Stephen Orgel’s Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Winter’s Tale is a pleasure to read. His introduction shows critical sophistication and a commitment to historical scholarship that both delights and instructs. In a play as editorially straightforward as The Winter’s Tale Orgel can afford to treat the text conservatively. He is often stoutly resistant to editorial ‘improvement’ of what he calls ‘Shakespeare’s sense’, and his textual discussion affirms that ‘the complexity and obscurity of the verse can only be authorial’ (p. 83). The claim in itself sounds transparent and straightforward, but the position of the author within editorial configurations of the text continues to be debated in many of the studies reviewed below.

Orgel edits undeflected by these theoretical complications, elegantly interweaving text and commentary, commentary and introduction. In just one case Orgel makes a strikingly innovative change to the text where a commentary note might have been more diplomatic. A couple of lines before Antigonus exits pursued by a bear we read the bracketed direction 'Storm, with a sound of dogs barking and hunting horns' (3.3.55). Here Orgel's strong sense of Winter's Tale as a precursor of The Tempest seems to spill over into the text. The call for a storm, or, as the Mariner anticipated some lines before, 'loud weather', is, admittedly, a constructive addition. Dogs and horns, however, are doubtful. Their justification lies partly in a literal reading of the Shepherd's reference a few lines later to 'these boiled-brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty' who 'hunt this weather', and partly on reading Antigonus' response to whatever he sees or hears, 'This is the chase', to mean that the bear is being hunted. Shakespeare does not elsewhere use 'chase' to mean a hunted animal.