Oxford-Cambridge rivalry now extends to Shakespeare publishing by the two university presses. The new Cambridge editions, like the Oxford ones, present modern-spelling texts and imitate the Arden layout, but their textual analyses are placed in appendixes and they offer reading lists of books and articles, not Oxford’s indexes to the commentaries. Sketches by C. Walter Hodges reconstruct possible Elizabethan-Jacobean stagings of selected episodes. The pages are larger, though not more readable, than those in the Oxford and Arden series. The volumes are pleasant to look at and handle.

Ann Thompson's edition of The Taming of the Shrew, appearing soon after Brian Morris's new Arden (1981) and H. J. Oliver's Oxford (1982), is a worthy competitor. On the main scholarly issues she agrees with Morris against Oliver when they differ and with both men when they do not: she believes that the Folio text was set from a transcript rather than foul papers, that A Shrew (1594) derives from Shakespeare's play, that none of the discrepancies between the sub-plots of A Shrew and The Shrew imply major revision of the latter, but that The Shrew once contained equivalents of the additional Sly episodes preserved in A Shrew.