Herford, Lee, Porter

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Lee's Shakespeare exists in two primary versions: the 40 vol. Renaissance and the 20 vol. Caxton, which is simply a doubling up reprint of the former in half the shelf space.

Lee wrote on many subjects, including a biography of Queen Victoria, and several lives of the eminent as co-editor of the DNB, a massive undertaking.  He compiled a  biography of Shakespeare and created collotype facsimile eds. of F1. the Sonnets, Luc., &c. 

Lee's 1926 obit in the Times

Terry Gray's Sidney Lee page

Renaissance Shakespeare

Note: Henry James wrote the preface to Tmp (v.16)

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LEEv20 (R3) LEEv21 (R2) LEEv22 (Jn) LEEv23 (1H4) LEEv24 (2H4) LEEv25 (Tim) LEEv26 (H8) LEEv27 (Rom) LEEv28 (Tit) LEEv29 (JC) LEEv30 (Ham) LEEv31 (Tro) LEEv32 (Oth) LEEv33 (Mac)

LEEv34 (Lr) LEEv35 (Tim) LEEv36 (Ant) LEEv37 (Cor) LEEv38 (Son) LEEv39 (Ven Luc PP) LEEv40 (LC PhT)

Caxton Shakespeare

Henry James preface to Tmp (v8)

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 LEEv11 (R2, Jn) LEEv12 (1H4 2H4) LEEv13 (H5 H8) LEEv14 (Rom Tit) LEEv15 (JC Ham) LEEv16 (Tro Oth) LEEv17 (Mac Lr) LEEv18 (Tim Ant) LEEv19 (Cor Son) LEEv20 (Ven Luc LC PP PhT)

A Life of William Shakespeare (1905)

The Shakespeare First Folio: Some Notes and a Discovery (1899)

Shakespeare and the Modern Stage (1906)

Lee's DNB contributions

Munro (1883-1956) was the author of several books on Shakespeare and edited him. He was awarded the OBE, and was Deputy Inspector General of Telegraphs, Egyptian Government. He took his M.A. degree from Christ Church, Oxford in 1913. During World War I he served in the Royal Corps of Signals in Gallipoli and Palestine and was awarded the Military Cross. After the war he worked in the telephone and telegraph industry in Egypt and then in London. Munro resumed his literary work on Shakespeare following his retirement in the 1940s. He authored and edited multiple works on Shakespeare and wrote a biography of Frederick James Furnivall, the second editor of the OED. He also co-edited The Century Shakespeare, 40 vols (1908) with Furnivall, and helped direct The Early English Text Society.

Munro had prepared The London Shakespeare for publication but died suddenly before he could see it through the press. Glynne Wickham finished the job and appended this prefatory material to their "joint" edition.

The facts relating to Mr. Munro’s connexion with scholarship must be among the most curious in the history of English letters. Scholarship was his first love and one which he pursued on his own initiative when he started work in the Post Office in his early teems. At the age of twenty-six he managed, as one of Dr. Fumivall’s ‘working men,* to earn a place in the English School at Oxford, and in 1913, to proceed to the degree of M.A. Fumivall was not the only person to have recognised his scholastic ability, for Sir Israel Gollancz appointed him, while still a very young man, as assistant director of die Early English Text Society, in which capacity he edited Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine and Life of St. Cuthbert of Sempringham and Caxton’s Life of Jason. This work, together with his editiems (with Fumivall) in Shakespeare Classics of Romeus and Juliet, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and Shakespeare: Life and Work (again with Furnivall), was achieved before and during his time at Oxford. Shakespeare enthusiasts probably know him best by his Shakespeare Allusion Book of 1909, revised and re-edited from C. M. Ingleby's Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse of 1874.

Then, in 1914, the outbreak of war and the knowledge of telephones he had acquired with the Post Office combined to take him away from a career in scholarship. He joined the Royai Enginers (Signals), served in Gallipoli and Palestine, won the M.C. and continued to work in the Telephone and Telegraph service until the end of the Second World War, which saw him as traffic manager in London of Cable and Wireless communications.

On retirement, he returned once more to scholarship and acquired a very good Shakespeare Library, his first having been disposed. The harvest that he reaped from it is this edition of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The long interval of thirty years between his early studies and their resumption did not involve total severance from the changing trends of scholarly opinion: for he was a contributor to several periodicals including The Times Literary Supplement, the Athaeneum and Modern Philology. For some years he served on the council of the Philoogical Society, and in 1948 he was elected to the council of the Malone Society where his advice was found to be as useful on practical matters as on scholarly ones.

It would clearly be impertinent and probably inadvisable as well to tamper with the work of such an editor. Accordingly, the text here given togedier with all the variant readings appended in footnotes, the independent Introductions to the plays and the Bibliography are published exactly as the late editor left them: in corrected foundry proof stage.

If errors, omissions, disproportionate emphasis or other such faults are found in the General Introduction, these should not be attributed to Mr. Munro, but to me; since, in the absence of any pointers from him as to the structure or content he had intended, I have followed my own judgement in trying to place his work within an appropriate frame: an up-to-date account of Shakespeare’s life and theatre both in Elizabethan times and in the wider context of subsequent criticism.

                                                (MUNv1: vi-vii)

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His Online Books Page entry

John Dover Wilson (at right) was general ed. of this 39 vol. set., once referred to as the New Cambridge Shakespeare. Now  reissued, it goes under the title of the Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare.  Here is a .pdf of Tmp. and a Google Books TGV

Dover Wilson trained as a bibliographer and editor with W. W. Greg and R. B. McKerrow, but retained a love of speculation and a sense of humor about the whole enterprise. In this, he demonstrated the influence of another mentor, Alfred W. Pollard.  His CAM3 was the first to embody the New Bibliography by including a "Note on the Text" for each play and the poems. He believed it was an editor's job to "infer" the "foul papers" or manuscript behind a printed play text.