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By Root 19845 0

A third edition was published in 1752. Others are dated 1772 and 1773. It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold. Theobald made the First Folio the basis of his text, although he failed to adopt all the correct readings of that version, but over 300 corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have become part and parcel of the authorised canon. Theobald’s principles of textual criticism were as enlightened as his practice was triumphant. ‘I ever labour,’ he wrote to Warburton, ‘to make the smallest deviation that I possibly can from the text; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.’ Theobald has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism. The following are favourable specimens of his insight. In ‘Macbeth’ (I. vii. 6) for ‘this bank and school of time,’ he substituted the familiar ‘bank and shoal of time.’ In ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony:

For his bounty,

There was no winter in’t; an Anthony it was

That grew the more by reaping.

For the gibberish ‘an Anthony it was,’ Theobald read ‘an autumn ’twas,’ and thus gave the lines true point and poetry. A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in ‘Coriolanus’ (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version ‘what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?’ Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet ‘besom’ by ‘bisson’ (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ‘Hamlet’ (II. ii. 529).

Sir Thomas Hanmer, 1677-1746.

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. 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,