Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

19TH-CENTURY EDITIONS
In 1807, English editors Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler first published
The Family Shakespeare. Bowdler announced that it “has been my study to
exclude . . . whatever is unfit to be read aloud by a gentleman to a company
of ladies” and that he had endeavored to omit “words and expressions which
are of a nature as to raise a blush on the cheek of modesty.” The term
bowdlerized has subsequently been applied to any text from which passages
have been removed to suit notions of propriety.
Among the more scholarly Shakespeare collections of the 19th century
were a handsomely illustrated edition (1838-1842) of Charles Knight and the

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first Cambridge edition (1863-1866), edited by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and
W. A. Wright. The one-volume reprint of the Cambridge text, known as the
Globe edition, was until recently the most widely accepted text of the works
ever distributed, and it was in this form that Shakespeare first became a
playwright belonging to the world.
The most ambitious editions undertaken have been the various variorum
editions, which collect and reprint the corrections and comments of earlier
critics and editors. (The word variorum comes from the Latin phrase “cum
notis variorum,” meaning “with the notes of various people.”) The First and
Second variorums (1803 and 1813) were edited by Isaac Reed. The Third
Variorum (21 vols., 1821) was prepared by James Boswell, son of Samuel
Johnson’s biographer, and was based on Edmund Malone’s text. Like the
preceding variorums, it contained a vast amount of biographical and critical
matter. In 1871 American scholar H. H. Furness began the New Variorum
Shakespeare, a project that has been continued to the present and is the most
comprehensive of all editions of Shakespeare. The Modern Language
Association of America has sponsored the New Variorum Shakespeare since
1936.