The edition before us contains the scansion of the lines, with occasional verbal as well as metrical corrections, marked in red ink, in Capell’s hand. This was done, as he tells us in a note prefixed to Vol. I., in 1769.
He described, much more minutely than Pope had done, the places of the scenes, and made many changes, generally for the better, in the stage directions.
In his peculiar notation, Asides are marked by inverted commas, and obvious stage business is indicated by an obelus.
In a note to his preface, p. xxiii, Capell says:
‘In the manuscripts from which all these plays are printed, the emendations are given to their proper owners by initials and other marks that are in the margin of those manuscripts; but they are suppressed in the print for two reasons: First their number, in some pages, makes them a little unsightly; and the editor professes himself weak enough to like a well-printed book; in the next place, he does declare, that his only object has been to do service to his Author; which provided it be done, he thinks it of small importance by what hand the service was administer’d,’ &c.
By this unfortunate decision, Capell deprived his book of almost all its interest and value[11]. And thus his unequalled zeal and industry have never received from the public the recognition they deserved.
In 1774, a volume of notes[12] was printed in quarto, and in 1783, two years after his death, appeared Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare, 3 vols. 4to.[13] The printing of this work was begun in 1779.
George Steevens, who had edited in 1766 a reprint of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare from the Quartos, at a time, when, as he himself afterwards said, he was ‘young and uninformed,’ and had been in the meanwhile one of Johnson’s most active and useful correspondents, was formally associated with him as Editor in 1770 (Boswell, Vol. III. p. 116). At Steevens’s suggestion, Johnson wrote to Dr Farmer of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, requesting him to furnish a Catalogue of all the Translations Shakespeare might have seen and used. Hence, it seems, Farmer took an interest in the successive editions, and supplied many valuable notes and acute conjectural readings. It was on Farmer’s authority that Pericles has been re-admitted among the Plays of Shakespeare.
The first edition of Johnson and Steevens appeared in 1773. The improvements in this edition, as compared with those which bore Johnson’s name only, are evidently the work of the new editor, who brought to the task diligent and methodical habits and great antiquarian knowledge, thus supplementing the defects of his senior partner. J. Collins, editor of Capell’s Notes &c. charged Steevens with plagiarism from Capell. Steevens denied the charge. The second edition came out in 1778; the third in 1785; and the fourth in 1793. In this edition Steevens made many changes in the text, as if for the purpose of differing from the cautious Malone, now become a rival.
Edmond Malone contributed to Steevens his Attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written; in 1780, published a Supplement to the edition of 1778, containing the Poems, the seven plays from F3, notes, &c., and moreover distinguished himself by various researches into the history and literature of the early English stage. He published in 1790 a new edition of Shakespeare in 10 volumes, 8vo, containing the Plays and Poems, ‘collated verbatim with the most authentic copies, and revised,’ together with several essay and dissertations, among the rest that on the order of the plays, corrected and enlarged.