Shakespeare Straight

THE NEW NONESUCH SHAKESPEARE (4 vols., 3,995 pp.)--Random House ($35).

In three centuries of academic grubbing, scholars have tidied up and clarified William Shakespeare's manuscripts, making archaic words intelligible to the ordinary reader. But the bard's most dedicated fans want their Shakespeare straight. One such was Herbert Farjeon, a British amateur scholar whose special dread was the day when Shakespeare would be read in "Nu Spelin and Nu Punctuashun." In 1933 he brought out not only the handsomest but the best-edited Shakespeare in existence.

Farjeon took his purist's text from the First Folio (1623) and Quarto editions, made his bow to modernizing scholars by offering the best of their changes in the page margins. For the average reader, there was one catch. Farjeon's Nonesuch Shakespeare came in seven volumes at $200 a set, and only 1,600 sets were printed. They have long since become collectors' items. Now the Nonesuch is back in a new, beautifully bound and printed edition, this time not limited, and priced at a more reasonable $35. The New Nonesuch keeps Farjeon's text (he died in 1945), tries for what the designer of both editions, Sir Francis Meynell, calls the "sheerest Shakespeare." Sheer it is, especially in spelling and punctuation, e.g.:

To dye to sleepe, To sleepe, perchance to Dreame; I,

there's the rub, For in that sleepe of death, what dreames

may come, When we have shufflel'd off this mortall

coile, Must give us pawse.

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