Pope: The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare. Collated and corrected by the former editions
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Shakespeare, William and Alexander Pope. The Works of Mr. William Shakespear. In six volumes. Collated and corrected by the former editions, By Mr. Pope. London: Jacob Tonson, 1723-25.
Image source: University of Oregon Rare Books Collection
Preparing his 1723-1725 edition of Shakespeare’s works, poet Alexander Pope was the first editor to attempt to consult all of the versions of Shakespeare’s plays published in Shakespeare’s day in order to help determine authorial text. He placed newspaper advertisements seeking additional quarto copies published before the First Folio, prompting discovery and preservation of editions that might otherwise have been lost. Pope understood that these early editions might help supply authorial readings, as those who had prepared the 17th-century folios typically corrected errors or seeming errors by changing the text to whatever seemed reasonable to them, “corruption” (in Pope’s word) distorting Shakespeare’s plays (see “Shakespeare’s Folios”).
Still, Pope himself freely imposed numerous 18th-century norms and his own judgment on Shakespeare’s text. Pope marks the speeches he considers best and exiles hundreds of lines he thought too bad to be by Shakespeare, “degrading” them (as this process was called) by placing them at the bottom of the page. These images provide examples of Pope denoting the plays’ “most shining passages” with commas in the margin and “degrading” other passages he found “excessively bad.” Those he marks with asterisks and prints in small type at the bottom of the page.
Pope also regularized the meter and form of Shakespeare’s verse, seeing irregularities as blights on Shakespeare’s genius. In response to Pope’s alterations, future Shakespeare editor Lewis Theobald published Shakespeare Restored , a book drawing attention to Pope’s “many Errors.” Furious, Pope attacked Theobald in his poetry, but in his 1728 second edition of Shakespeare’s works, Pope adopted many of Theobald’s suggested readings.
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Pope’s Preface offers some commentary on Shakespeare’s “Beauties and Faults” (p. i). In terms representative of his time, he praises Shakespeare’s “natural” way of representing and individuating characters, whom he thinks so uniquely drawn that they might be recognized even without their speech prefixes (p. iii).
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