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Originally Posted by HarryT
"School editions" of Shakespeare tend to be bowdlerised to remove the rude bits (and Macbeth has some quite astonishingly rude bits in it!). When I was in school it was Macmillan editions, which were very similar to the format you describe.
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The Folger Editions are legit unabridged editions, with modern spelling but otherwise faithful to original sources. They included detailed notes when they depart from the primary source text (usually done if the primary source text chosen has problems that other sources can fill in—e.g. if an early Quarto was used but is missing some passages).
The Folger editions tend to prefer early Quartos over the First Folio, which is different from the newer Oxford/RSC/Norton approach but similar to what Riverside and the earlier Globe/Cambridge editions (the source of most public-domain copies) do.
People who are really into the Bard can debate endlessly about which approach is better, but they're both legitimate scholarly approaches and it's not like you're getting an intentionally bowlderized version with one approach vs. the other.
Here's long-time Folger editor Barbara Mowat on the sort of decisions they make on a regular basis; they're mostly about choosing between the early available sources:
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People seem fascinated by the decisions facing editors over, for example, whether Hamlet’s mother should be called “Gertrard” (as in 1604) or “Gertrude” (as in 1623), and whether it is “Puck” (according to Rowe) or “Robin Goodfellow” (as in the early printing)...so what is an editor to do? Does one replace “Gertrude” with “Gertrard”? My co-editor and I decided that this character lives today as Gertrude, and that to give her back her original name in our text would do too much violence to readers’ (and audiences’) rights.
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