One winter afternoon in the mid-1970s, my former colleague Brian Morris, then general editor of the New Mermaid series of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, was anxiously describing the plight of one of his editors, Roma Gill.

Gill was not just an academic associate but a friend. They were both in the English department at Sheffield University, where Morris daily saw her worsening disablement from the multiple sclerosis with which she was diagnosed in 1965. He feared she would be too incapacitated to complete the Mermaid edition she had set her heart on, and might not even live to do so, even though she was “very determined”.

In the event, Gill outlived Morris by a few months. Both died this summer, Gill on August 3, having lived to see the immaculate, 20-volume, new edition of her life’s central achievement, The Oxford School Shakespeare. On the snowy day of Brian Morris’s forebodings about her, she hadn’t even started it.

For more than 20 years, confronting her body’s demon head-on, and using every available modern gadget to outwit it, Roma Gill single-handedly created her attractive and successful Shakespeare series, adding roughly one play a year, and seeing it progress from school edition to trade edition and these new updated texts, embellished with production photographs and neat, witty illustrations.

It gives the trite phrase a serious meaning to say she put body and soul into the work. The result is a major service to Shakespeare, and all young readers meeting him afresh.

So individual and alive is Roma Gill’s temperament, imprinted vividly on these editions, that it always comes as a surprise to see how conservative their contents are. The introductory material has notes on characters, a synopsis of the plot and a commentary that tells the story scene by scene, deftly interweaving narrative with critical ideas and insights.

There are standard sections on Shakespeare’s verse and source, date and text, and, at the end, succinct paragraphs of historical background and biographical summary. Nothing, in outline, is unorthodox.

In practice, things prove very different. The introductions pounce immediately on the reader. “A pound of flesh. You know the expressionI” “She’s not 14!” “Sex - or your brother dies!” “What do you know about Julius Caesar?” Blood starts to flow through the play, and doesn’t stop.

All her school editions have a section on classwork and examinations. Gill, ever practical in her approach, might have said with Shakespeare’s Henry IV: “Are these things then necessities? Then let us meet them like necessities.”

You will find in this section ample material for speaking and listening, reading and writing, as well as performance and project work, but the bureaucratic terms are never referred to. The only national curriculum to earn a mention is, mischievously, the Elizabethan one. Peter Quince knows his mythology because it was “part of the national curriculum of the grammar school”. Yet the present-day teacher’s statutory needs are quietly supplied, without ever dislodging Shakespeare from pride of place.

The Oxford School Shakespeare is everything a school text needs to be, without looking or sounding like a textbook. Gill is always alert to parallels with modern life, yet never sounds self-consciously topical. Her notes are remarkably comprehensive, and her eye for the young reader’s problems and perplexities is sharp. She has the gift of saying simple, necessary things, and the gift of saying difficult things simply. The combination is rare and precious.

Out of all Gill’s years of unspeakable illness came this cumulative tour de force, which is full of passion and vitality. This series, her memorial, is everyone’s passport to Shakespeare.