The Works of William Shakspeare — Chandos Classics, Frederick Warne & Co. (c.1879–1900)

Opening

The editor does not give his name. The preface is unsigned, the emendations declared few and reluctant, and the whole editorial philosophy is stated in a single sentence: the aim was to keep as close to the early text as possible. No new readings. No flourish. A million copies would eventually be sold from that position of deliberate modesty, and the works of a man dead three centuries would reach drawing rooms, schoolrooms, and parlours that had never owned a book of his before.

The Book

The Works of William Shakspeare is a single-volume complete edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems, published by Frederick Warne and Co. as part of their Chandos Classics series. The title page reads: Carefully Edited from the Best Texts. With a Memoir, Glossary, etc. London: Frederick Warne and Co. and New York. The printer was Morrison and Gibb of Edinburgh. The volume is undated; on the basis of the publisher's series advertising at the rear, the physical format, and the series context, this copy dates to approximately 1879–1900.

The volume opens with a Memoir of Shakespeare (p. ix) and Shakespeare's Will (p. lvi), followed by the complete plays and poems running to p. 921. The editorial preface states that the text was carefully compared with the First Folio and the Quartos, as well as the Variorum edition and more recent editions, and that only emendations manifestly necessary from press errors in the first editions were made. No new readings were introduced. The plays are arranged following the First Folio order as far as Henry VIII, after which the editor grouped the Greek and Roman plays together, then the early British plays and Macbeth, then the romantic tragedies, closing with the doubtful plays Titus Andronicus and Pericles.

The complete contents are thirty-seven plays and six poems. The plays run from The Tempest (p. 1) through the comedies, histories, and tragedies to Pericles (p. 844), followed by Venus and Adonis (p. 865), Lucrece (p. 877), the Sonnets (p. 894), A Lover's Complaint (p. 914), The Passionate Pilgrim (p. 917), and The Phoenix and the Turtle (p. 921). A Glossary and full index complete the volume.

The rear of the volume carries an advertisement page for the Imperial Poets series — also published by Frederick Warne — listing twelve volumes including Shakspeare's Complete Works as item no. 1, with photographs by Poulton and Son, priced at 8s. 6d. A second advertisement page lists the Cavendish Library series.

The Chandos Classics

Frederick Warne (1825–1901) began his independent publishing career in 1865 at 15 Bedford Street, Strand, London — premises subsequently known as Chandos House, from which the series took its name. He had previously been a partner in the firm of Routledge, Warne and Routledge from 1851 to 1865. In 1868 he inaugurated the Chandos Classics, explicitly designed to make the standard works of English literature available at low prices in well-printed, well-bound editions accessible to the general reading public — a continuation of the mid-Victorian project of democratising literary culture begun by Routledge's Railway Library and John Cassell's cheap reprints in the 1840s and 1850s.

The series ultimately ran to 154 volumes and sold five million copies. The Shakespeare edition within the Chandos Classics alone reached a print run of 340,000 copies, making it one of the best-selling editions of Shakespeare's complete works in Victorian England. The series included editions of Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dickens, Scott, Gibbon, Hume, and many others. The series archive file copies, with their publishing histories and print-run records, are held at the University of Reading Special Collections as the Warne St Clair Collection.

The Publisher

Frederick Warne and Co. was founded in London in 1865 and became one of the major Victorian popular publishers. Warne's programme spanned cheap reprints of the literary classics through the Chandos Classics and related series; illustrated children's books including the works of Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; and, from 1902, the works of Beatrix Potter, beginning with The Tale of Peter Rabbit. In the educational and reference field, Warne published the first Warne editions of Nuttall's Standard Dictionary from 1867, selling over 668,000 copies in its first edition alone. The firm is described in the Dictionary of National Biography (1912 Supplement) as having effectively emulated George Routledge's ambition to popularise good literature, and expanded it.

The Printer

Morrison and Gibb was a long-established Edinburgh printing firm, active throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods. They served as printers to Her Majesty's Stationery Office for Scotland, printing the Edinburgh Gazette among many official publications. Their premises were at 11 Queen Street, Edinburgh, later Tanfield. The Edinburgh-London combination — text set and printed in Edinburgh, published from the Strand — was a standard commercial arrangement for Victorian cheap reprints, exploiting lower Scottish printing costs while retaining London as the commercial base and point of sale.

The Spelling: Shakspeare

The title page of this edition uses the spelling Shakspeare rather than the now-standard Shakespeare. This was not careless — it was a deliberate Victorian editorial choice, and one with genuine documentary backing. The spelling of Shakespeare's own name varied substantially in his lifetime: his own surviving signatures spell it Shakspere, Shakspeare, Shakspear, and Shaksper, never in the form now standard. The First Folio of 1623 used Shakespeare. Victorian editors were aware of the inconsistency, and different publishers made different choices; Shakspeare was frequently preferred by editors who wished to signal fidelity to documentary evidence rather than convention.

Bibliographic Details

Author: William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Editor: Anonymous (Editor of the Chandos Classics edition)

Publisher: Frederick Warne and Co., London and New York

Series: The Chandos Classics

Date: Undated; c.1879–1900 (internal evidence)

Printer: Morrison and Gibb, Edinburgh

Format: Hardback, gilt spine, small 8vo, 921 pp

Contents: Memoir (p. ix), Shakespeare's Will (p. lvi), 37 plays (p. 1–844), 6 poems and Sonnets (p. 865–921), Glossary

Chandos Classics series total: 154 volumes, 5 million copies sold

Shakespeare Chandos print run: 340,000 copies