Our copy - we once had more than one of the things - of the collected works remaining missing, I went on a hunt for one in Epsom. Oxfam, which I thought the most likely place to get one, was shut for the morning. Four other charity shops had no Shakespeare at all, never mind this particular one. Then the library managed four or five paperback Ardens, including this one.
To round out the experience, and having no Waterstone's in Epsom at the moment, I thought I would try Smith's, quite strong in the educational department, to find that they also had four or five paperback Penguins, including this one. Given that I was already in possession of the library Arden, I restrained myself from parting with the tenner or so required.
But restraint had vanished by the time that I got home and I tried Amazon for a hardback, one of the trusty blue cloth ones. No luck there. Try Abebooks, which could do lots of paperbacks - identical to the library one - from England, or a hardback from Germany, from Herner Straße in Recklinghausen to be precise. To the east of the Rhine and the northwest of Dortmund. Gmaps 51.582273, 7.15076 to be even more precise. Oddly, no Streetview available in these parts, but I did find my way to an outpost of the Google empire called Panoramio, from which I borrowed the illustration, possibly of somewhere near the Resser Bach, just to the east of the bookshop. All rather countryfied which I did not expect at all. But then, I may have made a mistake.
The book, which has now turned up, turns out to be a cast off from the Library of the University of Düsseldorf, blue cloth bound hardback, more or less in mint condition, paperwork complete with two brass paper clips, a relative of the sort which used to be common in this country. No masses of pencil marginalia from some eager student, such as one is apt to get from such books when procured from the UK. Further inspection revealed that the paperback version, which looked much smaller, was actually in the same sized print, but reproduced photographically on smaller pages in Singapore, from the properly typeset originals. Hence the slightly muzzy appearance of the paperback words, most unattractive to the knowing eye.
I have now turned the pages a little, to find out various things which I did not know. For example, Romeo is an early play, roughly contemporary with Richard II (which I did not know for an early play either, despite it being a set book at some point in my school career). The story was rooted in folklore and had been done by various writers of romances before Shakespeare got to it. I close with a quote from Tybalt.
'Now seeming sweet, convert to bitt'rest gall' (Act I, Scene V, line 91).
So just as in all the best murder mysteries on ITV3, Shakespeare drops hints of tragedy to come, hints which one is apt to miss first time around.
And just as the bowdlerisation of Gawain (vide supra), this bowdlerisation has served to lead me back to the original. To the point where I thought it might be good to go to a proper performance, to which end I turned up reference 2. Sadly, the only convenient production of Romeo is another bowdlerisation from the Globe, a production cut down to a travelling size. Pass.
PS: a good picture of the brass paper clips is to be had at ID 27520744 © Mobi68 @ Dreamstime.com. A little trickery is needed to get from the home page to the image in question, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/romeo-alpha.html.
Reference 2: http://www.touchstone.bham.ac.uk/performance/shakespeare%20productions.html.
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