Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734)

Preface to the Works of
Shakespeare (1734)

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(1734)
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Title: Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734)
Author: Lewis Theobald
Commentator: Hugh G. Dick
Release Date: July 22, 2005 [EBook #16346]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE ***

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[Transcriber's Note: This e-text contains a few brief passages of Greek.
They have been transliterated and placed between +marks+.]

The Augustan Reprint Society
LEWIS THEOBALD Preface to The Works of Shakespeare (1734)
With an Introduction by Hugh G. Dick
Publication Number 20 (Extra Series, No. 2)

Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of
California 1949
* * * * *
GENERAL EDITORS H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial
Library RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan EDWARD
NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ H.T.
SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_
ASSISTANT EDITORS W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
JOHN LOFTIS, _University of California, Los Angeles_
ADVISORY EDITORS EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of
Washington BENJAMIN BOYCE, University of Nebraska LOUIS I.
BREDVOLD, University of Michigan CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale
University JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University ARTHUR
FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago SAMUEL H. MONK, University
of Minnesota ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas JAMES
SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
Lewis Theobald's edition of Shakespeare (1734) is one cornerstone of
modern Shakespearian scholarship and hence of English literary
scholarship in general. It is the first edition of an English writer in
which a man with a professional breadth and concentration of reading

in the writer's period tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to
bear on the establishment of the author's text and the explication of his
obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who
displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare's language and
metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and
chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean
drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer. Thus
both in the edition itself and in his Preface, which stands as the first
significant statement of a scholar's editorial duties and methods in
handling an English classic, Theobald takes his place as an important
progenitor of modern English studies.
It is regrettable, though it was perhaps historically inevitable, that this
pioneer of English literary scholarship should have been tagged
"piddling Theobald" by Pope and crowned the first king of The
Dunciad. Pope's edition of Shakespeare was completed by 1725, and in
the following year Theobald made the poet his implacable enemy when
he issued his Shakespeare Restored, which demolished Pope's
pretensions as an editor by offering some two hundred corrections. But
the conflict was not merely strife between two writers: it was a clash
between two kinds of criticism in which the weight of tradition and
polite taste were all on the side of Pope. What Theobald had done, in
modern terms, was to open the rift between criticism and scholarship or,
in eighteenth-century terms, to proclaim himself a "literal critic" and to
insist upon the need for "literal criticism" in the understanding and just
appreciation of an older writer. The new concept, which Theobald
owed largely to Richard Bentley as primate of the classical scholars,
was of course the narrower one--implicit in it was the idea of
specialization--and Theobald's opponents among the literati were quick
to assail him as a mere "Word-catcher" (cf. R.F. Jones, Lewis Theobald,
1919, p. 114).
His own edition of Shakespeare, therefore, was the work of a man and a
method on trial. At first Theobald had proposed simply to write further
commentary on Shakespeare's plays, but by 1729 he determined to
issue a new edition and in October of that year signed a contract with
Tonson. From the first Theobald found warm support for his project

among booksellers, incipient patrons, and men of learning. His work
went forward steadily; subscribers, including members of the Royal
Family, were readily forthcoming; and by late 1731 Theobald felt that
his labors were virtually complete. But vexing delays occurred in the
printing so that the edition, though dated 1733, did not appear until
early in 1734, New Style. When it did appear, it was plain to all that
Theobald's vindication of himself and his method was complete.
Judicious critics like the anonymous author of Some Remarks on the
Tragedy of Hamlet (1736) were