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Shakespeare Interleaved
At the end of my post on the collection of Richard Warner’s notes in the Beinecke, I mentioned that his editions of Shakespeare, complete with working notes on interleaved pages, had been digitised and was available online. With a day between returning from America and planning out my work for the term with my supervisor,…
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Beinecke: Warner
This is my last and shortest post from the Beinecke materials for now, and it will focus exclusively on the notes of Richard Warner, a friend of David Garrick who began an edition of Shakespeare but abandoned his efforts when he learnt of preparations for the Steevens edition. What remains of Warner’s attempt to become…
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Editors and Actors: Pope
What attitude towards the stage does Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays evince? That is the question. Answering it turns out to be quite difficult, so this post will be as much about methodology as about tentative conclusions. As most readers of Pope’s Shakespeare would, I began with the preface, where many differences with…
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Editors and Actors: Rowe
Having chosen the topic of ‘actors and editors’ for the BSECS conference in January, I have started work on the voluminous editions of Shakespeare produced throughout the eighteenth century, looking for how the editors respond to the world of the stage. I’ve done some of this already, as exploratory reading for one chapter of the…
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“The rubbish cast on thy fair page”
I have just submitted this paper proposal for the BSECS in early 2014. It also works as a rough overview for part of what I’m currently calling chapter 1. Pope relegates the “Interpolations” of actors to the bottom of the page; Johnson criticises Heminge and Condell as player-editors who divided up Shakespeare’s plays without “very…
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Malone’s Method
The following comes from an exchange between Edmund Malone and Joseph Ritson, where the latter violently attacked Malone’s 1778 edition of Shakespeare, stooping so low as to attribute any errors to Malone’s “irishness”. At one point, Malone gives his method regarding which texts to use as the basis of an edition. The second edition of…
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Theobald and the Theatre
The first book ever published about Hamlet was a scathing attack on the way Alexander Pope had edited the play, supplemented with additional point-scoring on the back of errors found elsewhere in the poet’s 1725 edition. This book was Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored, and I came to it with the slightly odd question of whether this…
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Rescuing Shakespeare
An Attempt to Rescue Shakespeare that Ancient English Poet and Playwright, Master William Shakespeare From the Maney Errors, Falsely Charged on Him by Certain New-Fangled Wittes […] by a Gentleman Formerly of Grey’s-Inn (1749): this is a title that starts strong and then falls off, to the point that Arthur Freeman (the editor of my…
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The Canons of Criticism
I’ve just finished yet another book in the series Eighteenth-century Shakespeare, this time called The Canons of Criticism, by Thomas Edwards, first published in 1748, and reissued six times thereafter, finally stopping in 1765. The book is a critique of Bishop Warburton’s 1747 edition of Shakespeare’s works. It functions by fulfilling Warburton’s over-ambitious promise of…