The Cambridge Shakespeare

The edition modernized the orthography to 19th-century standards rather than preserve the variable Elizabethan spelling, but generally left the grammar and metre unchanged.

In what a modern editor called "a bold move for a Victorian edition", Clark and Wright restored various original phrases that had previously been considered profane, where needed to preserve metre or meaning.

[1] The earlier volumes of the series contain critical introductions by Quiller-Couch (signed "Q") and written in a belles lettres style that, according to R. A. Foakes in The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare (2003), have been "largely forgotten".

In the 1921 edition of The Tempest, Wilson included a facsimile of the manuscript for Sir Thomas More and a full discussion of the copy for the texts, which afterward became required reading in the field.

The earliest editions featured cyan covers with an illustration by C. Walter Hodges of the relevant play in performance on an Elizabethan stage.

In the 1990s, these covers were replaced with a new uniform blue design featuring a multicoloured sketch of Shakespeare's face based on a drawing by David Hockney.