Pericles

The Oxford Shakespeare

William Shakespeare and George Wilkins
Edited by Roger Warren, on the basis of a text prepared by Gary Taylor, and Macd. P. Jackson

The Oxford Shakespeare

The only edition to be based on the Oxford Complete Works (1986), modified in the light of subsequent productions.
The text draws upon Jacobean dramatist George Wilkins's The Painful Adventures of Pericles to emend some of the Quarto's errors and to supply some missing material.
The introduction argues the case for authorial collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins and also draws upon Warren's extensive experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to suggest why it is regaining its original popularity in the modern theatre.
Reprints the entire Quarto text in an appendix, together with passages from Wilkins's narrative, so readers can see how the reconstruction has been made.

Pericles

The Oxford Shakespeare

William Shakespeare and George Wilkins
Edited by Roger Warren, on the basis of a text prepared by Gary Taylor, and Macd. P. Jackson

Description

Pericles was one of the most popular plays of its time, and it has regained much of that popularity today. In a wide-ranging introduction, Roger Warren draws on his experience of the play in rehearsal and performance to explore the reasons for this enduring popularity. Unfortunately Pericles survives only in a corrupt text, the Quarto of 1609, in which many passages are nonsensical and others appear to be missing altogether. Earlier editions have merely cleaned-up the Quarto, but this edition offers a conjectural reconstruction of what the original play might have been like. It draws upon George Wilkin's The Painful Adventures of Pericles (1608) to emend some of the errors and missing material. It does so in the belief that the play is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Wilkins. The entire Quarto text is reprinted in an appendix, together with the passages from Wilkin's narrative that have particularly contributed to the reconstruction, so that readers can see for themselves how the reconstruction has been made.

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