William Shakespeare. 1998. Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Eds. Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond. Cambridge University Press. 213pp. ISBN 0-521-22907-3. £32.50/$49.95 hb. ISBN 0-521-29710-9. £6.50/$11.95 pb.

1. Editors, like authors, generally appear in the singular, as if their own individual integrity reflects and bolsters the integrity of the texts with which they are associated. It is, therefore, intriguing to see two editors for the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of Pericles, a play long considered to be collaborative, and a play which the original editorial double-act, Heminges and Condell, left out of their Shakespearean canon altogether. For Doreen DelVecchio and Antony Hammond, however, joint editing does not yield special insight into joint composition. In pointed contrast to the disintegrationist stance towards Pericles taken by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor for the Oxford Shakespeare, DelVecchio and Hammond construct the play as 'the product of a single creative imagination' (15). Under the dark blue imprimatur of the New Cambridge Shakespeare, Pericles is decisively returned to the canon.

2. And yet Pericles' most recent editors manage to combine the assertion of Shakespearean authorship of their play with the assertion that the whole question of authorship is a 'fundamentally irrelevant aspect of the process of reading and comprehension' (15, italics theirs). This is, of course, true, and at the same time, manifestly false. Studies of Shakespeare and authorship have tended to lag behind theoretical discussions of the role of the author in the text, and the introduction to Pericles, and to King Edward III, could stand as usefully under-theorised complements for students reading Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' and Foucault's 'What is an author?'. While DelVecchio and Hammond's introduction to the volume stresses the absurdity of coupling a discussion of collaboration with an assessment of value, which would make the totally Shakespearean Pericles a better play than the Shakespeare/?Wilkins Pericles, the book's cover seems to contradict this. Arguing that the edition differs from others in that it rejects 'the critical orthodoxies: that the text is seriously corrupt and that the play is of divided authorship. Instead [the editors] show the play to be a unified aesthetic experience. The result is a view of Pericles far more enthusiastic than that of other editors'. The blurb thus conflates single authorship with an aesthetics of unity and with increased critical enthusiasm. The critical retreat from an idea of authorship is compromised by the pragmatics of its commercial assertion. Fewer people will buy a non-, or only part-Shakespearean play. Look at the number of editions of George Wilkins's (other) play The Miseries of Inforst Marriage.

3. But if Wilkins's play was 'discovered', by stylometrics or other linguistic analysis, or even by external evidence, to be by Shakespeare, publishers would be falling over themselves to publish it, as is demonstrated by the example of King Edward III, also published in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series. Cambridge is the first major Shakespearean publisher to include it, so they must have been piqued by the publicity generated by Arden's later decision to commission an edition (see The Sunday Times, 27 September 1998 for details.) When the authorship of Edward III was "?", its only recorded stage production since the 1590s by Theatr Clywd in 1987 attracted very little attention; now that it is by Shakespeare, the RSC have quickly scheduled a rehearsed reading of the play in this summer's programme, and it is reported that their associate director Greg Doran will produce the play in the next season. Authorship does make a difference, and the fact that its editor Gregori Melchiori is not claiming sole Shakespearean authorship for King Edward III matters less than the play's appearance in the standard uniform of the Cambridge Shakespearean canon. These editions of Pericles and King Edward III contrive to provide a full synthesis of debates about authorship and ultimately to stress Shakespearean provenance. At the same time, each introduction stresses that its play needs to be taken on its inherent merits – although this is by no means as easy as is suggested. DelVecchio and Hammond quote Wells and Taylor claiming Pericles as a 'masterpiece' (15), Melchiori describes King Edward III as 'a play of undoubted merit – whoever its author' (11) and concludes with the authority of the play in performance, quoting a reviewer: 'Shakespeare or not Shakespeare, Edward III is revealed…a gripping play' (51). Literary quality seems to occupy the evaluative space voided by the uncertainties of composition, but this criterion often collapses into the relieved assumption of Shakespeare's authorship.

4. Whether, four hundred years ago, the playwright William Shakespeare wrote these plays is one question which may or may not be considered relevant to reading and interpretation. What is clear, however, is that 'Shakespeare', the cultural and literary property as inherited and constructed by the late twentieth century, has authored Pericles and King Edward III in the forms produced by the New Cambridge series. Without the association of 'Shakespeare', King Edward III in particular, and Pericles to a lesser extent, would not be available in these scrupulous, scholarly and important editions. Perhaps, then, the more the merrier. Shakespeare's oeuvre is now nudging forty plays. It can't be long before Edmund Ironside is included in one of the series currently competing for the academic market. And since Shakespearean editing has always set the methodological and the bibliographic standard for the production of early modern dramatic texts, it is a great privilege to have more texts so made available.

5. So now that they are available, how do they look? Cambridge's volumes are handsomely produced and reasonably priced, with wide margins, readable collations, clear and extensive annotations. Pericles has an additional textual analysis section, King Edward III identifies relevant sources scene-by-scene. For many readers, Pericles is an already familiar play, although so far, neither Arden 3 nor Oxford's World Classics have got round to a new edition. In common with other volumes in the New Cambridge Shakespeare series, DelVecchio and Hammond's introduction and notes stress the play in performance, including photographs from more recent revivals. Most interestingly, they also offer an extended consideration of the role of Gower, arguing convincingly for his central importance in introducing and progressing the play's self-conscious concern with the figure of the artist and the uses of narrative language. The identification of image clusters, around the themes of conception and birth, and of feeding, satiation and regurgitation, contribute to the editors' sense of the play's essential aesthetic unity. The clarity of exposition and suggestion is exemplary: new readers will be introduced to a Pericles fully recuperated from its critical neglect. DelVecchio and Hammond's text manages to be both clear and minimally emended. They argue plausibly against the denigration of the 1609 quarto text, and discuss, in their Textual Analysis, how an a priori assumption that the text is corrupt has encouraged editors to ransack the entirely unreliable prose version of the play, the blackletter quarto published in 1608 as The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre. Their attack on the Oxford editors' treatment of the play is justly coruscating. All in all, Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a fine addition to the New Cambridge Shakespeare.

6. As a newcomer to the canon, King Edward III is less well-known, and therefore, there is no real benchmark against which to judge Melchiori's edition. Only Eric Sams's more partisanly Shakespearean edition, published in 1988, exists for comparison. Much of Melchiori's introduction is, inevitably, concerned with the play's authorship, and he argues that '[Shakespeare's] hand as collaborator can be detected in many scenes of the play, but his sole authorship of at least Act 2 is undeniable' (17). The strength of the discussion of authorship, however, is its interleaving with the play's manipulation of its sources in Holinshed and Froissart: Melchiori thus establishes a model of collaboration which extends fruitfully beyond the debates about who wrote which scene, into something more like the extensive web of allusions and influences characterised as intertextuality. Analysing the play as a prelude to Shakespeare's second historical cycle which begins with Richard II, Melchiori finds in King Edward III patterns of reunion, advice, reformation and victory recognisable from the Henry IV plays and Henry V, and the introduction is more concerned with Shakespearean parallels than with the wider genre of history. It is not to understate Melchiori's sound and scholarly achievement, however, to suggest that the primary significance of the edition is that the play now exists in this form: no edition can be an end in itself, and thus its ultimate success will only be judged by the quality of the teaching and research it inspires.