A second edition, 10 volumes, 12mo, was published in 1728, ‘by Mr Pope and Dr Sewell.’ In this edition, after Pope’s preface, reprinted, comes: ‘A table of the several editions of Shakespeare’s plays, made use of and compared in this impression.’ Then follows a list containing the first and second Folios, and twenty-eight Quarto editions of separate plays. It does not, however, appear that even the first Folio was compared with any care, for the changes made in this second edition are very few.
Lewis Theobald had the misfortune to incur the enmity of one who was both the most popular poet, and, if not the first, at least the second, satirist of his time. The main cause of offence was Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored, or a Specimen of the many Errors committed as well as unamended by Mr Pope in his late edition of this Poet, 1726. Theobald was also in the habit of communicating notes on passages of Shakespeare to Mist’s Journal, a weekly Tory paper. Hence he was made the hero of the Dunciad till dethroned in the fourth edition to make way for Cibber; hence, too, the allusions in that poem:
‘There hapless Shakespear, yet of Theobald sore,
Wish’d he had blotted for himself before;’
and, in the earlier editions,
‘Here studious I unlucky moderns save,
Nor sleeps one error in its father’s grave;
Old puns restore, lost blunders nicely seek,
And crucify poor Shakespear once a week.’
Pope’s editors and commentators, adopting their author’s quarrel, have spoken of Theobald as ‘Tibbald, a cold, plodding, and tasteless writer and critic.’ These are Warton’s words. A more unjust sentence was never penned. Theobald, as an Editor, is incomparably superior to his predecessors, and to his immediate successor, Warburton, although the latter had the advantage of working on his materials. He was the first to recal a multitude of readings of the first Folio unquestionably right, but unnoticed by previous editors. Many most brilliant emendations, such as could not have suggested themselves to a mere ‘cold, plodding, and tasteless critic,’ are due to him. If he sometimes erred—‘humanum est.’ It is remarkable that with all his minute diligence[8], (which even his enemies conceded to him, or rather of which they accused him) he left a goodly number of genuine readings from the first Folio to be gleaned by the still more minutely diligent Capell. It is to be regretted that he gave up numbering the scenes, which makes his edition difficult to refer to. It was first published in 1733, in seven volumes, 8vo. A second, 8 volumes, 12mo, appeared in 1740.