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.’ [320]
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.’
Edmund Malone, 1741-1812.
Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens’s quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archæologist, 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.
Variorum editions.
What is known among booksellers as the ‘First 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 massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by Malone at his death. Malone had been long engaged on a revision of his edition, but died in 1812, before it was completed. Boswell’s ‘Malone,’ as the new work is often called, appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1821. It is the most
valuable of all collective editions of Shakespeare’s works, but the three volumes of preliminary essays on Shakespeare’s biography and writings, and the illustrative notes brought together in the final volume, are confusedly arranged and are unindexed; many of the essays and notes break off abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone’s death. A new ‘Variorum’ edition, on an exhaustive scale, was undertaken by Mr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, and eleven volumes have appeared since 1871 (‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Hamlet,’ 2 vols., ‘King Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Merchant of Venice,’ ‘As You Like It,’ ‘Tempest,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Winter’s Tale’).
Nineteenth-century editors.
Of nineteenth-century editors who have prepared collective editions of Shakespeare’s work with original annotations those who have most successfully pursued the great traditions of the eighteenth century are Alexander Dyce, Howard Staunton, Nikolaus Delius, and the Cambridge editors William George Clark (1821-1878) and Dr. Aldis Wright.