The Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare

I am currently serving as a General Editor of a new series of single-play editions of Shakespeare for the academic and general publishers Bloomsbury.

The ‘Arden Performance Editions of Shakespeare’ are designed to supply texts of Shakespeare plays carefully tailored to the requirements of actors and directors: they will use the authoritative texts of the plays prepared for the academic Arden series, but will provide only such supplementary information as theatre practitioners need (principally glosses of unfamiliar vocabulary, and notes on meter), together with plenty of blank space for annotations scribbled in rehearsal. 

This project harnesses my long-standing research interest in the relations between editing and performance, page and stage, and offers the added pleasure of working with two unusually gifted fellow general editors: my Institute colleague Abigail Rokison-Woodall, recovering former actress and specialist in verse-speaking, and the great Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale, a contributor to my collection Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today (2006), whose stage work I have admired from his Ward (in Middleton’s Women Beware Women) at the Royal Court in 1985 through to his Prospero (in The Tempest) in Stratford in 2016-17.

Professor Michael Dobson