The Plays of William Shakespeare in perspective, we have only to remind ourselves what Johnson brought to it – an assemblage of almost every qualification we should ideally like to have brought to this kind of work with the single exception of patience... Operating in and through these qualities was his own extensive knowledge of human nature and life. No Shakespearean critic or editor has ever approached him in this respect. John Wain, another of Johnson's biographers, claimed, "There is no better statement of the reason why Shakespeare needs to be edited, and what aims an editor can reasonably set himself" than Johnson's "Proposal". The
The Cambridge Shakespeare The Cambridge Shakespeare The Cambridge Shakespeare is a long-running series of critical editions of William Shakespeare's works published by Cambridge University Press. The name encompasses three distinct series: "The Cambridge Shakespeare" (1863–1866), "The New Shakespeare" (1921–1969), and "The New Cambridge Shakespeare" (1984–). "The Cambridge Shakespeare" was edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright and released in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866. Clark and Wright used the "First Folio" (1623) as their base text and collated it with the second, third, and fourth folios as well as all the known quarto editions. The edition modernized the orthography to