The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 20. The Cambridge Shakespeare
He paved the way for what has now become the standard text of Shakespeare—The Cambridge Shakespeare, 1863–6, edited by W.G. Clark and W. Aldis Wright. The introductions contain the safest guide as to authorities for the text and the notes form a complete apparatus criticus of the text. The variant and doublet quartos whose texts differ too widely from the folio to allow of collation in the notes are printed in full. If this edition errs at all, it is in exhibiting too great a partiality for the quartos in the case of the variant quarto plays, and in giving to modern (mostly futile) conjectures too much valuable space in the notes, which might have been better filled by recording the coincidences of the chief editions with the folio or quarto text—small flaws in a work which is a monument of editorial judgment and accurate scholarship, as well as of careful typography.