A Review of David George’s Variorum Edition of Coriolanus

David George’s magisterial variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in two volumes has now appeared after thirty or more years of dedicated and laborious work. For reasons unknown to me, Professor George has had to publish it as a commercial work, although it was originally designed to be included in the New Variorum Shakespeare published by the Modern Language Association. Be that as it may, the edition includes all the scholarship and criticism previous editions published by the MLA contain, although it does not follow their format in every instance. For example, textual notes and commentary do not appear at the bottom of each page of text , possibly because they are so extensive that they would crowd out much of the text were they to do so. But rest assured, the collations of seventy-seven texts of previous editions of the play (1623-2013) plus occasional additional notes from partly consulted editions appear on pages 112-136. They immediately follow the diplomatic reprint of Coriolanus that George has established from the text of the First Folio. The Commentary takes up the remaining 500 or so pages of volume 1, with excerpts from or references to the earliest critics up to 2016. Volume 2 includes everything else, e.g. essays on the sources, critical assessments, characters, themes, and stage history, concluding with a vast bibliography. George uses subtitles in many sections for a reader’s quick and easy access to desired material.

An enterprise of this magnitude obviously needs help from others, and Professor George properly…