Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734)

The Augustan Reprint Society LEWIS THEOBALD Preface to The Works of Shakespeare (1734) With an Introduction by Hugh G. Dick Publication Number 1̶9̶ 20 (Extra Series, No. 2) Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1949
GENERAL EDITORS H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles ASSISTANT EDITORS W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan John Loftis, University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan Cleanth Brooks, Yale University James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Ernest Mossner, University of Texas James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London

INTRODUCTION
Lewis Theobald's edition of Shakespeare (1734) is one cornerstone of modern Shakespearian scholarship and hence of English literary scholarship in general. It is the first edition of an English writer in which a man with a professional breadth and concentration of reading in the writer's period tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to bear on the establishment of the author's text and the explication of his obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare's language and metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer. Thus both in the edition itself and in his Preface, which stands as the first significant statement of a scholar's editorial duties and methods in handling an English classic, Theobald takes his place as an important progenitor of modern English studies.