Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Theobald, thus weak and ignorant, thus mean and faithless, thus petulant and ostentatious, by the good luck of having Pope for his enemy, has escaped, and escaped alone, with reputation, from this undertaking“ of editing Shakespeare. In these words Johnson touched on one of the more troublesome ironies of literary history, the fact that such highly gifted men as Pope and Warburton had failed to achieve Shakespearean texts that their contemporaries and scholarly posterity could praise. Pope's Shakespeare, printed but twice, had been buried by Theobald; and Warburton's Shakespeare, printed but once, had been interred by Edwards. The question for Johnson was whether his own forthcoming edition would suffer a similar fate.
1 Preface, Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), i, sigs. Dlv-D2r, italics mine. Some of the material in this paper was part of my doctoral dissertation at Yale University.
2 Mr. William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1765), i, 18 n. 8.
3 Observations and Conjectures Upon Some Passages of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1766), pp. 12, 19, 33-34, 40.
4 Remarks, Critical and Illustrative on the Text and Notes of the Last Edition of Shakspeare (1783), p. iv.
6 The three reasons presented here are, I think, the main ones. Johnson himself appears to have feared “the expectation of ignorance” (Preface, sig. E3V) which his long delay in publishing had surely inflamed. It appears quite possible, too, that Johnson's respect for Warburton, manifest in the notes and commentary, may have done him a disservice with those who had come to accept the judgment of Upton (Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 2d ed., 1748) and Edwards (.4 Supplement to Mr. Warburton's Edition of Shake-spear. Being the Canons of Criticism, 1748). Edwards in his 3rd ed. (1750, p. 10) affirms that Warburton's Shakespeare had already established itself as a failure by 1748.
6 An Enquiry into the Learning of Shakespeare (1748), p. 16.
7 Preface to The Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont, and Mr. John Fletcher, ed. Theobald, Seward, and Sympson (1750), i, lix.
8 The following discussion of seven categories of Johnson's alterations should be read in the light of three qualifications. First, these seven categories are not all-inclusive. Johnson changed spellings, revised prose passages as verse, made new selections from quartos and folios, reduced capitals to lower case, redivided scenes, etc. The categories here treated are, however, clearly among the principal categories and warrant separate treatment by their combined contribution to a single effect. Second, Johnson learned on the job, and as he learned he altered his practices and revised his policies. Since his edition was printed volume by volume as he prepared it for the press, however, it was impossible for him, had he had the inclination, to return to his first plays to make them accord with his later policies. In the later volumes, for example, Johnson usually substituted commas or dashes for parentheses; in the earlier volumes he let the parentheses stand. Third, Johnson was humanly inconsistent in his attention to detail. “It is hard to keep a busy eye steadily fixed upon evanescent atoms”, he wrote in his Preface (sig. E1v), and his edition warrants the application of his apothegm to himself. For example, he makes approximately one change for every 5j lines in Act i of The Tempest but only one change for every 22J lines in Act rv of All's Well. Such irregularity, either in evolution of policy or its application, makes a finely calibrated evaluation of Johnson's text exceedingly difficult and tedious; but to see the general direction Johnson was going, it is perhaps enough to state these cautions as general qualifications without referring to them again.
9 As I have shown in “The Texts from Which Johnson Printed His Shakespeare” (JEGP, April, 1940), Johnson printed his text from both Theobald (1757) and Warburton (1747), both of which stem from Theobald (1740), which in turn derives from Theobald (1733). Concerning this 1733 edition, R. B. McKerrow has pointed out that it had “revised Pope's punctuation very thoroughly, making it much heavier and in particular greatly increasing the number of commas. Thus in the two scenes … A Midsummer Night's Dream, i.i, and Julius Caesar, rxi. ii, amounting to 523 lines in all, Theobald inserted no less than 80 commas and replaced 34 of Pope's commas by semicolons”, etc. (“The Treatment of Shakespeare's Text by His Earlier Editors, 1709-1768”, Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy [1933], pp. 34-35). The following discussion of Johnson's punctuation, then, is primarily applicable to post-Popean Shakespeares, but it is not therefore confined to them. There are, for example, 151 differences between Theobald (1757) and Johnson in the 522 lines of Henry V ii. 125 of these differences are in punctuation or capitalization related to punctuation. In 18 instances Pope agrees with Johnson; in 93 he agrees with Theobald (1757). Johnson's adjustments of punctuation, therefore, are not mere lightenings of Theobald's heavy punctuation; they are basic alterations of the punctuation of Rowe and Pope as well as of Theobald and Warburton.
10 All act, scene, and line references are to the Cambridge text of 1863-66.
11 Cf. Boswell: “Johnson's attention to precision and clearness in expression was very remarkable. He disapproved of parentheses; and I believe in all his voluminous writings, not half a dozen of them will be found.” Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. ed. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), iv, 190.
12 Johnson's Dictionary throws light on his practice here and elsewhere of getting rid of the colon: “A point [:] used to mark a pause greater than that of a comma, and less than that of a period. Its use is not very exactly fixed, nor is it very necessary, being confounded by most with the semicolon. It was used before punctuation was refined, to mark almost any sense less than a period. To apply it properly, we should place it, perhaps, only where the sense is continued without dependence of grammar or construction; as, I love him, I despise him: I have long ceased to trust, but shall never forbear to succour him.”
13 T57 has “speak: Sweet.”
14 TS7 has “hap. Cheerly … hearts: out.”
15 Boswell's Life of Johnson, Hill and Powell, i, 70 and n. 2.
