Rowe: The works of Mr. William Shakespear
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William Shakespeare and Nicholas Rowe. The works of Mr. William Shakespear; in six volumes. Adorn'd with cuts. Revis'd and corrected, with an account of the life and writings of the author. By N. Rowe, Esq. London: Jacob Tonson, 1709.
Image sources: The Folger Shakespeare Library and The Huntington Library
Nicholas Rowe was the first editor of Shakespeare to prepare what we recognize as a modern edition: user-friendly, standardized in format, and treating Shakespeare's plays as though they require interpretive and explanatory text, including a Preface discussing Rowe’s sense of Shakespeare’s strengths and weaknesses. Rowe’s Preface also offered biographical information about Shakespeare, suggesting for the first time in a Shakespeare edition that such information about Shakespeare's life might bear on a reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Rowe divided each play into five acts (the Folios had done this piecemeal) and was methodical about including stage directions, character entrances and exits, and complete dramatis personae lists. That is, Rowe pioneered many of the textual features that you have likely taken for granted in your own Shakespeare reading experiences, features that can help a reader visualize the play but that also add content that was not consistently present in the plays’ earliest publications. These changes made the plays seem more formally similar to one another than they had ever seemed before.
For the first time, too, Shakespeare’s Works were published in a more physically manageable, readable size: six small octovo volumes rather than one big folio. Rowe included reproductions of a portrait thought to be of Shakespeare, very recently discovered in 1708, when Rose sent the actor Thomas Betterton to Stratford to collect Shakespearean biographical materials. All subsequent eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare would copy all of these innovations. Rowe followed the 17th-century Folios, however, in including only plays and not Shakespeare’s poems.
Rowe was the first editor to express the desire to print “the Author’s Original Manuscripts” and to refer to comparison (i.e. “collation”) of early editions as a means to approach Shakespeare’s text. You may see his discussion of “the Injuries of former Impressions” and acknowledgment of the difficulty of restoring them “to the Exactness of the Author’s Original Manuscripts” (A2r-v) in his dedicatory letter (left).
However, Rowe in fact based the text of his edition on the most recent Shakespeare collection, the Fourth Folio of 1685, a text which had drifted substantially from those published nearer to Shakespeare’s time (as described in “Fourth Folio”). Rowe – like many 18th-century editors – was also free in altering Shakespeare’s text according to what seemed logical or preferable to him. His biography of Shakespeare contained numerous episodes whose authenticity was supported only by their past repetition or their seeming fittingness. Rowe continued to include plays in the Works that later editors would determine were not written by Shakespeare. In short, his edition was just the first step towards more objective measures of textual authority; later editors would refine these impulses further.
Rowe’s edition was also the first to feature illustrations of the play. Below at left, Francois Boitard's image of The Tempest is followed by Rowe's standardized dramatis personae list for the play and the clear divisions of act and scene at the start of the play (click on images below).
Boitard's illustrations suggest conventions and features of 18th-century performances. Below, the illustration of Hamlet shows Hamlet's fear on seeing the ghost – note the unraveled stocking as well as the chair Hamlet has knocked down in his surprise. The wigs, costumes, and set design also reveal 18th-century norms. Click to see more of the Rowe Hamlet and Boitard's images of a decidedly 18th-century Troilus and Cressida.
Plays that later centuries would rule not by Shakespeare remained in Rowe's edition. Below are Boitard's illustrations of The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and The History of Sir John Oldcastle, following the text of the Third and Fourth Folios.
