entrances and exits of the characters. Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected and modernised.
Alexander Pope, 1688-1744.
The poet Pope was Shakespeare’s second editor. His edition in six quarto volumes was completed in 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.
Lewis Theobald, 1688-1744.
Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, although contemptible as a writer of original verse and
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 (Henry V, II. 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, but over 300 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. [317a] The following are favourable specimens of his insight. In ‘Macbeth’ (I. 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 recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ‘Hamlet’ (II. ii. 529). [317b]