Nicholas Rowe, Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709)

With an Introduction by

Samuel H. Monk

The Augustan Reprint Society
November, 1948
Price. One Dollar

GENERAL EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles
H.t. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles


ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan


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

Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
by
Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
1948

INTRODUCTION.

The Rowe-Tonson edition of Shakespeare's plays (1709) is an important event in the history of both Shakespeare studies and English literary criticism. Though based substantially on the Fourth Folio (1685), it is the first, "edited" edition: Rowe modernized spelling and punctuation and quietly made a number of sensible emendations. It is the first edition to include dramatis personae, the first to attempt a systematic division of all the plays into acts and scenes, and the first to give to scenes their distinct locations. It is the first of many illustrated editions. It is the first to abandon the clumsy folio format and to attempt to bring the plays within reach of the understanding and the pocketbooks of the average reader. Finally, it is the first to include an extended life and critique of the author.

Shakespeare scholars from Pope to the present have not been kind to Rowe either as editor or as critic; but all eighteenth-century editors accepted many of his emendations, and the biographical material that he and Betterton assembled remained the basis of all accounts of the dramatist until the scepticism and scholarship of Steevens and Malone proved most of it to be merely dubious tradition. Johnson, indeed, spoke generously of the edition. In the Life of Rowe he said that as an editor Howe "has done more than he promised; and that, without the pomp of notes or the boast of criticism, many passages are happily restored." The preface, in his opinion, "cannot be said to discover much profundity or penetration." But he acknowledged Rowe's influence on Shakespeare's reputation. In our own century, more justice has been done Rowe, at least as an editor.[1]

The years 1709-14 were of great importance in the growth of Shakespeare's reputation. As we shall see, the plays as well as the poems, both authentic and spurious, were frequently printed and bought. With the passing of the seventeenth-century folios and the occasional quartos of acting versions of single plays, Shakespeare could find a place in libraries and could be intimately known by hundreds who had hitherto known him only in the theater. Tonson's business acumen made Shakespeare available to the general reader in the reign of Anne; Rowe's editorial, biographical, and critical work helped to make him comprehensible within the framework of contemporary taste.

When Rowe's edition appeared twenty-four years had passed since the publication of the Fourth Folio. As Allardyce Nicoll has shown, Tonson owned certain rights in the publication of the plays, rights derived ultimately from the printers of the First Folio. Precisely when he decided to publish a revised octavo edition is not known, nor do we know when Rowe accepted the commission and began his work. McKerrow has plausibly suggested that Tonson may have been anxious to call attention to his rights in Shakespeare on the eve of the passage of the copyright law which went into effect in April, 1710.[2] Certainly Tonson must have felt that he was adding to the prestige which his publishing house had gained by the publication of Milton and Dryden's Virgil.

In March 1708/9 Tonson was advertising for materials "serviceable to [the] Design" of publishing an edition of Shakespeare's works in six volumes octavo, which would be ready "in 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