Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) | Page 2

a Month." There was a
delay, however, and it was on 2 June that Tonson finally announced:
"There is this day Publish'd ... the Works of Mr. William Shakespear, in
six Vols. 8vo. adorn'd with Cuts, Revis'd and carefully Corrected: With
an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by N. Rowe, Esq;
Price 30s." Subscription copies on large paper, some few to be bound in
nine volumes, were to be had at his shop.[3]
The success of the venture must have been immediately apparent. By
1710 a second edition, identical in title page and typography with the
first, but differing in many details, had been printed,[4] followed in
1714 by a third in duodecimo. This so-called second edition exists in
three issues, the first made up of eight volumes, the third of nine. In all
three editions the spurious plays were collected in the last volume,
except in the third issue of 1714, in which the ninth volume contains
the poems.
That other publishers sensed the profits in Shakespeare is evident from
the activities of Edmund Curll and Bernard Lintot. Curll acted with
imagination and promptness: within three weeks of the publication of
Tonson's edition, he advertised as Volume VII of the works of
Shakespeare his forthcoming volume of the poems. This volume,
misdated 1710 on the title page, seems to have been published in
September 1709. A reprint with corrections and some emendations of
the Cotes-Benson Poems _Written By Wil. Shake-speare. Gent._, 1640,
it contains Charles Gildon's "Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of
the Stage in Greece, Rome, and England," his "Remarks" on the
separate plays, his "References to Classic Authors," and his glossary.
With great shrewdness Curll produced a volume uniform in size and
format with Rowe's edition and equipped with an essay which opens

with an attack on Tonson for printing doubtful plays and for attempting
to disparage the poems through envy of their publisher. This attack was
certainly provoked by the curious final paragraph of Rowe's
introduction, in which he refused to determine the genuineness of the
1640 poems. Obviously Tonson was perturbed when he learned that
Curll was publishing the poems as an appendix to Rowe's edition.
Once again a Shakespearian publication was successful, and Tonson
incorporated the Curll volume into the third issue of the 1714 edition,
having apparently come to some agreement with Curll, since the title
page of Volume IX states that it was "Printed for J. Tonson, E. Curll, J.
Pemberton, and K. Sanger." In this edition Gildon omitted his offensive
remarks about Tonson, as well as the "References to Classic Authors,"
in which he had suggested topics treated by both the ancients and
Shakespeare. This volume was revised by George Sewell and appeared
in appropriate format as an addition to Pope's Shakespeare, 1723-25.
Meanwhile, in July, 1709, Lintot had begun to advertise his edition of
the poems, which was expanded in 1710/11 to include the sonnets in a
second volume.[5] Thus within a year of the publication of Rowe's
edition, all of Shakespeare, as well as some spurious works, was on the
market. With the publication of these volumes, Shakespeare began to
pass rapidly into the literary consciousness of the race. And formal
criticism of his writings inevitably followed.
Rowe's "Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,"
reprinted with a very few trifling typographical changes in 1714,
survived in all the important eighteenth-century editions, but it was
never reprinted in its original form. Pope re-arranged the material,
giving it a more orderly structure and omitting passages that were
obviously erroneous or that seemed outmoded.[6] It is odd that all later
eighteenth-century editors seem to have believed that Pope's revision
was actually Rowe's own re-writing of the Account for the 1714 edition.
Theobald did not reprint the essay, but he used and amplified Rowe's
material in his biography of Shakespeare; Warburton, of course,
reprinted Pope's version, as did Johnson, Steevens, and Malone. Both
Steevens and Malone identified the Pope revision as Rowe's.[7]

Thus it came about that Rowe's preface in its original form was lost
from sight during the entire eighteenth century. Even in the twentieth,
Pope's revision has been printed with the statement that it is taken
"from the second edition (1714), slightly altered from the first edition
of 1709."[8] Only D. Nichol Smith has republished the original essay in
his Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903.
The biographical part of Rowe's Account assembled the few facts and
most of the traditions still current about Shakespeare a century after his
death. It would be easy for any undergraduate to distinguish fact from
legend in Rowe's preface; and scholarship since Steevens and Malone
has demonstrated the unreliability of most of the local traditions that
Betterton reported from Warwickshire. Antiquarian research has added
a vast amount