Final Point 2

Summary of Editions

Orgel's Pelican Macbeth: A high school or general reader audience

It’s annotated very lightly, mostly defining words and clarifying some turns of phrase.

Advantage: It’s reader friendly and appropriate for the audience in that it doesn’t overwhelm the reader with information or intimidate through lengthy annotation.

Disadvantage: The annotations are at the bottom and high school students are less likely to look up what it actually means. It would be more helpful if the annotations were columned off to the side to make it more reader friendly.

Arden's As You Like It: A Shakespearean scholarly audience

This edition is heavily annotated, oftentimes taking up from half a page to a whole page.

Advantage: It is audience appropriate in that readers of this edition will likely be those seeking detailed information on the text.

Disadvantage: The lengthy annotation can intimidate readers and include tedious detail that detracts from the play

Critical Controversy edition of The Tempest: Graduate students

This edition turns out a consistent paragraph length of annotation at the bottom, mainly focused on definition, rather than in-depth description or history of what’s annotated.

Advantage: It puts Shakespeare in easy to understand, modern-day terms.

Disadvantage: Some of the definitions are elementary and unnecessary, especially for a grad student audience. If this edition is for grad students, more detail could be added.

Norton Critical edition of Richard III: A collegiate audience

The more lengthy annotations are reserved for the context portion of the book—expounding for those who bother to delve deeper into it, while definition-based annotations are confined to the text of the play.

Advantage: This makes reading the play very compact and viewer friendly.

Disadvantage: For a collegiate audience, it doesn’t offer up a lot of annotation within the text of the play.

Kamps and Raber's Measure for Measure: Undergraduate audience

This edition provides an adequate, but not overwhelming, paragraph of annotation that focuses on explaining the differences of Shakespeare’s vernacular with modern day vernacular.

Advantage: The annotations are audience appropriate and helpful.

Disadvantage: The annotations are referenced by line number and sometimes it’s tedious to count lines to see where to find the annotation. It might be better to have them off to the side for an undergrad audience.

A new approach to annotation...

In the Arden Shakespeare Edition of As You Like It, Act 3 Scene 3 is nearly two-thirds annotation. These text-heavy pages essentially invite the high school reader to shut down, close the book, and turn to Spark Notes for a much simpler explanation of the scene. However, with a mere change to the annotations, this scene can come alive for the high school reader in the modern age.

In any given text, when more than half of the page is filled with footnotes, the reader will often be so cowed by the sheer amount of supplementary material that he/she skips the whole page. To correct this, I propose removing much of the annotation so as not to scare the reader away. Rather, provide much less annotation and only provide what is necessary, such as definitions to strange words like “bill” on line 75 or “God’ild you” on line 69.

Many of the annotations are far too long, providing information a high school reader likely would not care about. This includes the origins of words or even interpretations as to contemporary history, such as the annotation on line 53: “Is the single man therefore blessed?” This footnote provides contemporary sources on this statement, which would likely go over the heads of a high school audience. This can be removed entirely.

Another way to engage a high school audience would be to rearrange the footnotes so as to facilitate easy reading, without pausing over and over to scan the bottom of the page. This can be accomplished by setting the annotations in the margins of the book rather than at the bottom, whenever possible due to length.

One final solution would be to provide an explanation of analyses at the end of the scene so students who struggle with Shakespeare can still understand the flow of the story. Instead of commenting on the theme of "poetry versus lies" in the moment and interrupting the flow of reading, such as in lines 15-16, an annotation could be provided at the end of the scene providing an analysis of this theme. If necessary, the editors could select which themes to mention so as to not overwhelm the reader.