The Oxford School Shakespeare
Roma Gill (series editor)
Oxford University Press
pound;4.99 each
One 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.
In the event, Gill outlived Morris by a few months. Both died this summer, Gill having lived to see the immaculate, 20-volume, new edition of her life’s central achievement, The Oxford School Shakespeare .
For more than 20 years, 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.
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.
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.
- Picture: Kevin Kline as Bottom and Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania in the 1999 film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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