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Lewis Theobald (1685-1744), The Works of Shakespeare, 1733. Courtesy Internet Archive.
About Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's life
Religion • Sexuality
Bibliography
Collaborations • Attribution
Criticism
Reputation • Influence
World Bibliography
Folger Shakespeare Library
Books on Shakespeare

Poems

Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespearean sonnet
Petrach vs. Shakespeare
"A Lover's Complaint"
"Venus and Adonis"
"The Rape of Lucrece"
"The Phoenix and the Turtle"

Chronology • Early texts
First Folio • Second Folio
False Folio • Style

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love's Labour's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
All's Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night

Histories

King John • Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2
Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3
Richard III • Henry VIII

Tragedies

Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet''
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth • Hamlet
King Lear • Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra

Romances

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Editors

Rowe • Pope • Theobald
Johnson • Steevens • Malone
Chalmers

Contemporaries

Elizabeth I • James I
Richard Barnfield
Beaumont and Fletcher
Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle
Robert Davenport
Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton
Thomas Heywood • John Ford
Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd
John Lyly • Gervase Markham
Christopher Marlowe
John Marston • Tho. Middleton
Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe
George Peele • William Percy
Walter Raleigh • William Rowley
Cyril Tourneur • John Webster
Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth
Elizabethan miscellanies

In performance

Shakespeare's Globe
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Theatre companies
Film and TV adaptations
BBC Television Shakespeare

Miscellaneous

Shakespeare Apocrypha
Authorship question • History
Jubilee • Bardolatry
Shakespeare's Birthplace
Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare garden

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Shakespeare's editors were essential in the development of the modern practice of producing printed books and the evolution of textual criticism.

History[]

17th century[]

The 17th-century folio collections of the plays of William Shakespeare did not have editors in the modern sense of the term. In the best understanding of contemporary consensus scholarship, the plays to be included in the First Folio (1623) were gathered together or "compiled" by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two long-time colleagues of Shakespeare in the King's Men. The play manuscripts may have been proofread and prepared for printing by Edward Knight, the "book-keeper" or prompter of the company. The task of proofreading and correcting the actual printed pages of the Folio was left to the compositors and printers in the print-shop, yielding the uneven and often defective text that is the First Folio.

Even less is known about the creation of the Second (1632), Third (1663–64), and Fourth Folios (1685) than about the First; see Folios and Quartos (Shakespeare).

18th century[]

In the 18th century, however, interested individuals made the first concerted efforts to bring order to the tangle of textual difficulties that the Folios of the previous century presented. The list below gives the date of each edition of Shakespeare's plays, the editor, the format of the collection, and pertinent specific information.

  • 1709, Nicholas Rowe; octavo, 6 volumes. Rowe was the first person to attempt a clean and fully comprehensible text of the plays; but he depended upon a copy of the Fourth Folio and made generally conjectural emendations. He added full stage directions (he was a playwright himself) and full lists of Dramatis personae, and wrote the first biographical sketch of Shakespeare..
  • 1725, Alexander Pope; quarto, 6 volumes. Pope was the first to attempt a collation of the quarto texts of the plays, yet he produced what was basically a reprint of Rowe that added little of value.
  • 1733, Lewis Theobald; octavo, 7 volumes. Theobald has been called "the first Shakespeare scholar";[1] he carried forward the task of collating the quartos, and began the study of Shakespeare's sources and the order of the plays' composition. (See Chronology of Shakespeare's plays.)
  • 1744, Thomas Hanmer; quarto, 6 volumes. Hanmer relied on Theobald's text, and made guesswork corrections. His edition was reprinted in 1770.
  • 1747, William Warburton; octavo, 8 volumes. The "supercilious" Warburton also relied on Theobald while criticizing him, and made his own sometimes fanciful emendations. In 1748 Thomas Edwards published his Supplement to Warburton's Edition of Shakespeare, in later editions called The Canons of Criticism — a satirical exposure of Warburton's failings.
  • 1765, Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare; octavo, 8 volumes. Johnson in turn relied upon Warburton; his edition is noteworthy mainly for its famous Preface.
  • 1768, Edward Capell; octavo, 10 volumes. Appalled by the undisciplined emendations of Hanmer and Warburton, Capell spent three decades collecting and collating the quartos. He was also the first to exploit the Stationers' Register and Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia, and to explore Shakespeare's use of Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles and Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.
  • 1773, George Steevens; octavo, 10 volumes. Steevens employed Johnson's text, but continued Capell's trend of adding new material. Steevens revised and re-issued his edition in 1778; in 1780 Edmond Malone added another 2 volumes that contained Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems and other material. Isaac Reed revised the Steevens edition again in 1785, and Steevens himself produced one final, 15-volume revision in 1793.
  • 1790, Edmond Malone; octavo, 10 volumes. Malone, often considered the best of the century's editors of Shakespeare, wrote the first general consideration of English Renaissance theatre, utilizing resources like the records of the Master of the Revels and Edward Alleyn's papers at Dulwich College. He is also noted for his work on the problem of chronology.

19th century[]

Alexander Chalmers, editor of the General Biographical Dictionary, issued a 9-volume edition of ‘Shakespeare, with an abridgment of the notes of Steevens and a life of Shakespeare (probably by Chalmers), in 1809, with a new edition in 1823.[2]

The early 19th century saw the first Variorum editions of Shakespeare's works, editions that collated and synthesized the efforts of the editors of the previous century:

  • 1803, the First Variorum edition, edited by Isaac Reed; 21 volumes.
  • 1813, the Second Variorum, a reprint of the First; 21 volumes.
  • 1821, the Third Variorum, edited by James Boswell;[3] 21 volumes.

These massive editions laid the foundation for modern textual scholarship on Shakespeare's works, and by extension on works of literature in general. In the 19th century the text, drawn primarily from Malone and Steevens, was "monumentalized"[4] in the Cambridge edition (1863-6) and its single-volume companion, the Globe edition (1864). It was followed by the New Cambridge edition in 1921, and all modern standard editions inherit primarily from this edition.[4]

As for the personalities involved: some of these men were friends, like Steevens, Reed, and Malone; acquaintances called them the Shakespeare Gang. Others nourished spirits of competitiveness and resentment. Pope made Theobald the first hero of The Dunciad. Warburton belittled Rowe's "Account of the Life" of Shakespeare — but he reprinted it in his own edition, without change or improvement. Despite his friendship with Malone and Reed, Steevens was famous for his irascibility; in notes to his 1793 edition of Shakespeare, he concocted obscene interpretations of some passages and attributed those readings to people he didn't like.[5]

The next major edition, the Cambridge Shakespeare (1863–66), moved away from the practice of a single editor following his own sometimes capricious instincts and judgments. The first volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare was edited by William George Clark and John Glover, and the subsequent eight volumes by Clark and William Aldis Wright. Clark and Wright also produced the single-volume Globe Shakespeare (1864) using their Cambridge texts; together, these became the standard for the remainder of the century.

20th century[]

The most radical edition in the twentieth century was the Oxford Shakespeare, prepared under the general editorship of Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. It aims to present the texts as they were originally performed, which results in numerous controversial choices, including presenting multiple texts of King Lear, a text of Hamlet in which the scenes presumably cut by Shakespeare are relegated to an appendix, and an emphasis on the collaborative nature of several of the plays.

References[]

  • de Grazia, Margreta (1991). Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198117787. 
  • Halliday, F.E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
  • Schoenbaum, Samuel (1991). Shakespeare's Lives. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198186185. 
  • The Cambridge Shakespeare; Macmillan, 1863-6 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-108-00077-2)

Notes[]

  1. Halliday, p. 148.
  2. Cooper, Thompson Cooper, "Chalmers, Alexander," Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Stephen Leslie) 9. London: Smith, Elder, 1887, 443-445.
  3. Not the famous Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, but rather his third son (1778–1822).
  4. 4.0 4.1 de Grazia 1991, p. 14.
  5. Halliday, pp. 30, 110, 474.

External links[]

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