The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hammer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing a 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 thorough-going 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. [318] Hanmer’s edition was reprinted in 1770-1.
Bishop Warburton, 1698-1779.
In 1747 Bishop Warburton produced a revised version of Pope’s edition in eight volumes. Warburton was hardly better qualified for the task than Pope, and such improvements 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, 1709-1783.
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.
Edward Capell, 1713-1781.
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 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).’