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By Root 19489 0

’ but his collation of the quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his predecessors not excepting Theobald. His industry was untiring, and he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times. Capell’s edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768. He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled ‘Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,’ which were not published till 1783, two years after his death. The last volume, ‘The School of Shakespeare,’ consisted of ‘authentic extracts from divers English books that were in print in that author’s time,’ to which was appended ‘Notitia Dramatica; or, Tables of Ancient Plays (from their beginning to the Restoration of Charles II).’

George Steevens, 1736-1800.

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.’ 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.