20th Century Julius Caesar Editions

The last century

features the first truly significant series of single editions of Julius Caesar, beginning with the hard-to-find yet unsurpassed Sir Mark Hunter College Classics Series version (1900), which he produced while working for the British government as a civil servant in India. This was followed by the first Arden edition of the play by Michael Macmillan (1902), Hunter’s colleague and champion. Both of these texts reply, in some ways, to the William Aldis Wright First Clarendon edition (1878), this distinguished scholar the co-editor of the Globe (1864) and First Cambridge (1865) with William George Clark, and the single editor of the Second Cambridge (1892).

Since most of the twentieth-century editions of Julius Caesar remain in copyright, they are not generally available in our preferred venue. Other important versions are those by M. R. Ridley (1935), George Lyman Kittredge (1936), John Dover Wilson’s Third Cambridge (1949) and T. S. Dorsch’s Second Arden (1955), all of which we have fully collated for our New Variorum Edition. This is also the century that features our predecessor’s first Variorum (1913), which can be accessed in a link to the right.

Three important recent single editions are Arthur Humphreys’s Fourth Oxford (1982), Marvin Spevack’s Fourth Cambridge (1988), and David Daniell’s Third Arden (1998).

John Ripley’s “Julius Caesar” on Stage in England and America, 1599-1973 (1980) is also an absolutely invaluable study.

Here is a link to the Editions page (1623-1919).

Here is a link to the Shakespeariana page.