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His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis persona to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected. and modernised.

1688-1744.

The poet Pope was Shakespeare's second editor. His Alexander edition in six spacious quarto volumes was completed in Pope, 1725. The poems, edited by Dr. George Sewell, with an essay on the rise and progress of the stage, and a glossary, appeared in a seventh volume. Pope had few qualifications for the task, and the venture was a commercial failure. In his preface Pope, while he fully recognised Shakespeare's native genius, deemed his achievement deficient in artistic quality. Pope claimed to have collated the text of the Fourth Folio with that of all preceding editions, and although his work indicates that he had access to the First Folio and some of the quartos, it is clear that his text was based on that of Rowe. His innovations are numerous, and are derived from 'his private sense and conjecture,' but they are often plausible and ingenious. He was the first to indicate the place of each new scene, and he improved on Rowe's subdivision of the scenes. A second edition of Pope's version in ten duodecimo volumes appeared in 1728 with Sewell's name on the title-page as well as Pope's. There were few alterations in the text, though a preliminary table supplied a list of twenty-eight quartos. Other editions followed in 1735 and 1768. The last was printed at Garrick's suggestion at Birmingham from Baskerville's types.

Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, Lewis although contemptible as a writer of original verse and Theobald, 1688-1744. prose, proved himself the most inspired of all the textual critics of Shakespeare. Pope savagely avenged himself on his censor by holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the 'Dunciad.' Theobald first displayed his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which deserves to rank as a classic in English literature. The title runs 'Shakespeare Restored, or a specimen of the many errors as well committed as unamended by Mr. Pope in his late edition of this poet, designed not only to correct the said edition but to restore the true reading of Shakespeare in all the editions ever yet publish'd.' There at page 137 appears Theobald's great emendation in Shakespeare's account of Falstaff's death

Sir

Thomas
Hanmer,

(Henry V, I. iii. 17): His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields,' in place of the reading in the old copies, His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.' In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of Shakespeare in seven volumes. In 1740 it reached a second issue. A third edition was published in 1752. Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold. Theobald made the First Folio the basis of his text, although he failed to adopt all the correct readings of that version. Over 300 original corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have become part and parcel of the authorised canon. Theobald's principles of textual criticism were as enlightened as his practice was triumphant. 'I ever labour,' he wrote to Warburton, 'to make the smallest deviation that I possibly can from the text; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.' Theobald has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism. The following are favourable specimens of his insight. In 'Macbeth' (1. vii. 6) for this bank and school of time,' he substituted the familiar 'bank and shoal of time.' In 'Antony and Cleopatra' the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony :

For his bounty,

There was no winter in't; an Anthony it was
That grew the more by reaping.

For the gibberish 'an Anthony it was,' Theobald read 'an
autumn 'twas,' and thus gave the lines true point and poetry.
A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found
in 'Coriolanus' (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the
tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your
besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this
character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet
'besom' by 'bisson' [i.e. purblind], a recognized Eliza-
bethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in
Hamlet' (II. ii. 529).

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The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hanmer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing a 1677-1746. large measure of mother wit. He was speaker in the House of Commons for a few months in 1714, and retiring soon afterwards from public life devoted his leisure to a

thoroughgoing scrutiny of Shakespeare's plays. His edition, which was the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, and was long highly valued by book collectors. No editor's name was given. In forming his text, Hanmer depended exclusively on his own ingenuity. He made no recourse to the old copies. The result was a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted. A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from 'King Lear,' III. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar's enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line 'Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].' For the last word Hanmer substituted 'lym,' which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound. Hanmer's edition was reprinted in 1770-1.

Warbur

In 1747 Bishop Warburton produced a revised version of Bishop Pope's edition in eight volumes. Warburton was hardly ton, 1698better qualified for the task than Pope, and such improve- 1779. ments as he introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald and Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface. The Bishop was consequently criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers; among them, by Thomas Edwards, whose 'Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare' first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed 'The Canons of Criticism' next year in the third edition, passed through as many as seven editions by 1765.

Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition in eight volumes in 1765, and a second issue followed three years later. Although he made some independent collation of the quartos, his textual labours were slight, and his verbal notes show little close knowledge of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature. But in his preface and elsewhere he displays a genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare's greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to indicate convincingly Shakespeare's triumphs of characterisation.

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, advanced on his predecessors in many respects. He was a clumsy writer, and Johnson declared, with some justice, that he 'gabbled

N

Dr. John

son, 1709

1783.

Edward Capell, 1713-1781.

George Steevens, 1736-1800.

monstrously,' but his collation of the quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his predecessors, not excepting Theobald. His industry was untiring, and he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. Capell's edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768. He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled 'Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,' which were not published till 1783, two years after his death. The last volume, 'The School of Shakespeare,' consisted of 'authentic extracts from divers English books that were in print in that author's time,' to which was appended 'Notitia Dramatica; or, Tables of Ancient Plays (from their beginning to the Restoration of Charles II).'

George Steevens, whose saturnine humour involved him in a lifelong series of literary quarrels with rival students of Shakespeare, made invaluable contributions to Shakespearean study. In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from the quartos. Soon afterwards he revised Johnson's edition without much assistance from the Doctor, and his revision, which embodied numerous improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 1773. It was long regarded as the standard version. Steevens's antiquarian knowledge alike of Elizabethan history and literature was greater than that of any previous editor; his citations of parallel passages from the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, in elucidation of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors. All commentators of recent times are more deeply indebted in this department of their labours to Steevens than to any other critic. But he lacked taste as well as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare's sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, 'the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.' The second edition of Johnson and Steevens's version appeared in ten volumes in 1778. The third edition, published in ten volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed (1742-1807), a scholar of his own type. The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens's lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793. As he grew older he made some reckless changes in the text,

chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended. He had known and quarrelled with both. Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied to him of 'the Puck of Commentators.'

1741-1812.

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens's quick wit and Edmund incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archæologist, Malone, without much ear for poetry or delicate literary taste. He threw abundance of new light on Shakespeare's biography and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone is due the first rational 'attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.' His earliest results on the topic were contributed to Steevens's edition of 1778. Two years later he published, as a supplement to Steevens's work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Brooke's 'Romeus and Juliet,' Shakespeare's Poems, and the plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued 'A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,' tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts.

editions.

What is known among booksellers as the 'First Variorum Variorum' edition of Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens's death. It was based on a copy of Steevens's work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous manuscript additions, and it embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was published in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The Second Variorum' edition, which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 1813. The Third Variorum' was prepared for the press by James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson's biographer. It was based on Malone's edition of 1790, but included

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