Wells and Taylor: William Shakespeare, the Complete Works

Title page of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s Oxford Edition of the complete works.

In 1986, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor oversaw an edition that departed radically from prior editorial practices. Instead of working towards a vision of Shakespeare’s intended perfected version of each play, Wells and Taylor attempted to identify the text of each play as first performed. While their textual goal was thus different from Shakespeare’s 18th-century editors, they similarly had to make choices about plays’ wording that could not be objectively determined, as we do not have surviving copies of playhouse scripts for Shakespeare’s plays.

Wells and Taylor explain the reasoning, radical in its moment, for printing two texts of Lear.

Wells and Taylor’s interest in plays as performed leads them to include two versions of King Lear, which they assume was substantially revised for the stage, yielding the very different quarto and First Folio versions. This inclusion of two versions of what had been presented as a single Shakespeare play was startling in its moment, though many editors and scholars have long believed that the quarto and Folio versions of Lear reflect authorial revision.

Wells and Taylor’s Pericles includes material from John Wilkins’s The Painful Adventures of Pericles. They mark their changes by calling their version “A Reconstructed Text of Pericles.”

To approximate the original performed text of Pericles, Wells and Taylor draw on the prose romance by George Wilkins, The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608), arguing that Wilkins's work may represent text as it was first performed by the King's Men, producing a markedly different version of the play.

The Oxford Shakespeare makes room for plays that might have been written but whose texts have not survived, such as Cardenio, presumably based on the character in Cervantes’s satiric romance, Don Quixote.

Wells and Taylor also include speculative summaries of two plays whose texts have not survived but whose performance by Shakespeare’s companies is implied in period documents: Cardenio and a sequel to Love’s Labor’s Lost, called Love’s Labor’s Won. We do not know for certain if these plays were ever written or performed. Wells and Taylor's inclusion of them captures the imagination, drawing our attention to the not-unlikely prospect of plays by Shakespeare that may not have survived.

The actual Shakespeare text in Wells and Taylor’s edition hearkens back to the Folios in not providing on-page interpretive help to readers, who must evaluate the text on their own. This image is of the first page of Wells and Taylor’s edition of King Lear, Folio version (1623).

This volume includes an introduction by Wells and Taylor explaining their methods, but departs from editorial trends in offering no explanatory notes on individual plays. Wells and Taylor’s readers – like the readers of the First Folio – must evaluate the meaning of the plays for themselves.

Wells and Taylor’s work led to newly unfamiliar Shakespeare plays and new ways of thinking about them. Their philosophy of editing remains controversial. Nonetheless, Wells and Taylor continue the tradition of editors shining light on Shakespeare’s work by making choices about the wording of his plays and poems and by framing him for the readers of their time.