Although this review is not the appropriate place for extended obituary comment, the deaths, within one year, of A. C. Cairncross, J. W. Lever and J. C. Maxwell, must mark 1975–6 as a season of dreadful and irreplaceable loss to Shakespearian editing and textual studies and cannot pass unnoted. All three made important contributions to the revised Arden Shakespeare and Maxwell had the unique distinction of belonging as well to Dover Wilson’s team for the new Cambridge Shakespeare.

Coriolanus and Pericles, which may have been written in the same year but have little in common either as plays or in the tasks they offer to editors, are the latest volumes to appear, respectively, in the New Arden and New Penguin Shakespeares, the former edited by Philip Brockbank, the latter by Philip Edwards.

Brockbank's long introduction to Coriolanus, for all its divisions into sections on ‘The Text’ and ‘The Play’, is a seamless garment. His deepest engagement with the play is revealed in his commentary on Shakespeare's handling of his sources and in his pages on ‘The Tragedy of Coriolanus’, but the same questioning alertness which distinguishes his critical discussion is equally apparent in his treatment of the historical and technical issues of dating, stage history and text.