16
FEATURE SHAKESPEARE
13.04.16
www.thebookseller.com
We band of brothers
Roger Tagholm looks at publishers’ plans for celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death
I
s that a publishing glut I see before me? Well, when the subject in question is William Shakespeare and
it’s the 400th anniversary of his death, you wouldn’t expect anything less. There are, inevitably, dozens of “Shakespeare 400” titles either already published or on their way this year, and they present the familiar question: to be discovered or not to be discovered? Publishers have to figure out how
to ensure that it is their editions that are heard amid the sound and fury, as opposed to another publisher’s. Of course, it was ever thus—it’s just that this year, amid the anniversary hullabaloo, it is brought into sharper focus. With regard to the plays, Bloomsbury
believes it has a head start, one it acquired in 2009 when it bought the famous Arden list. As Margaret Bartley, publisher of the Arden Shakespeare, puts it: “The Arden Shakespeare has been at the heart of Shakespeare studies and performance for more than 100 years and our editions set the gold standard in edited, annotated texts.” Bloomsbury’s challenge is to maintain that reputation in a world full of the “slings and arrows” from competing publishers. “It is a crowded market and Shakespeare isn’t going to write any more plays for us,” says Bloomsbury’s marketing manager for drama and literature studies, Shereen Muhyedeen. “We work hard to ensure that Arden is at the centre of Shakespeare studies. We make sure that we commission the right editors for each play, who can provide the high quality of scholarship that students require. I think there was a
shift in Shakespeare studies from the 1980s onwards, a shift towards taking performance as a way of understanding the plays, a shift from page to stage. Actors and directors like to use Arden because of the annotations.” Publishers keep the Bard brand
fresh through add-ons to the text and endless ways of repackaging and slicing the material so that it appears new. Thus, Penguin has just rejacketed its Shakespeare editions with the black Penguin Classics livery for the first time, and it has also extracted the most
PUBLISHER
1 Wordsworth 2 3 4 5
OUP
Penguin CUP
Arden
VOLUME 255,614
207,040 174,849 128,913 84,256
VALUE £608,542
£1,277,750 £1,034,007 £820,019 £689,540
*% of TCM 5,000 Drama and kids drama/study guides categories. Sales from January 2010–February 2016.
VAL %* 10.9%
23.0% 18.6% 14.8% 12.4%
VOL %* 26.7%
21.6% 18.2% 13.5% 8.8%
famous soliloquies and compiled them in one of its Little Black Classics, the 80p range the publisher released last year to celebrate its 80th anniversary. Penguin Classics editor Jessica Harrison refers to this need to make editions relevant and visible as “the perennial classics problem”. Once again, it is about the extras and the seal of approval the right scholar can provide. “We make sure that our Shakespeare editions are based on reliable, accurate texts; include excellent introductions by leading scholars; have attractive covers; and are competitively priced,” Harrison says.
ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE Shakespeare is, obviously, out of copyright, making it a publishing stage
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