by Olivia Cole

LONDON • Shakespeare may not have intended Lady Macbeth to be quite so vindictive after all. A new edition of his works, to be published with official backing, is to make significant changes to the characters and elements of the plots of the plays.

The RSC Shakespeare Complete Works, to be published this month, will break with the literary consensus of more than three centuries to produce a version that it claims will be closer to the playwright’s intentions.

It will use as its text Shakespeare’s First Folio of 1623 — the version authorised by John Hemings and Henry Condell, his fellow actors.

Even minor changes in punctuation can change the meaning of key scenes. In the usual version of the play, Lady Macbeth appears to reassure her husband that there is nothing to fear and that he will get away with the murder of Duncan, the king of Scotland.

In the new edition, a question mark removes the Machiavellian undercurrent, so that she is simply asking him: what do we fear? She also loses her title in the new version and is known as the wife or lady of Macbeth.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays were originally published in two different versions, known as the Quarto and Folio, and for more than 300 years editors of the full works have adopted a pick and mix approach, creating texts that draw on both versions.

The Quarto was made up of pirated versions of the plays that circulated during Shakespeare’s lifetime — he died in 1616.

he new edition is the work of an international team of academic experts and directors, led by Jonathan Bate, professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Warwick, and Eric Rasmussen, professor of English at the University of Nevada.

While directors will remain free to cut or add lines, the new texts, says the RSC, “will form the base text provided for every director working with the company”. Rehearsals for forthcoming RSC shows of Macbeth, Twelfth Night and Richard II are using the new texts.

In Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy is more brutal and less sentimental in the new version. Most previous editions instruct the actress to kiss the dead Romeo and then stab herself, as if to portray the last kiss as restorative.

In the Folio version there is no instruction for Juliet to kiss Romeo. Indeed, the stage instruction to kiss occurs only seven times in the Complete Works.

In King Lear, which is currently being played for the RSC by Sir Ian McKellen, the tragedy in the new version is presented in almost wholly personal terms, rather than as a dynastic disaster.

In the version based on the First Folio, references to the threat of an invasion from France are removed so it seems that Lear’s age and emotional entanglements with his daughters are responsible for his tragic decline and not his anxieties about threats to his kingdom.

In the received version of Othello, the stage directions point to a tender moment showing the protagonist’s horror at killing his wife: his last act is to kiss her corpse before he kills himself. There is no such moment in the Folio and Othello comes across as self-obsessed to the end.

In Hamlet, the fourth soliloquy, in which the prince speaks of avenging his father’s death, will be cut in the new edition, losing the lines:O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

According to Bate, the text of the new edition shows Shakespeare’s works to be far cruder and loaded with more sexual innuendo and humour than editors have in the past acknowledged.

He said the Folio’s original editors were actors and that the RSC was the modern equivalent: “For a Shakespeare scholar, editing the complete works is like climbing Everest. I am astonished that nobody has ever done this before.”

René Weis, professor of English at University College London and author of the recent biography entitled Shakespeare Revealed, said: “This whole project [will] make people look again at one of the greatest single books of all time.”