The Works of Mr William Shakespear Edited by Nicholas Rowe:
With the Poems Edited by Gildon, 1710
Introduction by Peter Holland
978 1 85196 398 0: 234x156mm: £495.00/$875.00
Availability: Japan: Maruzen
In the last few years interest in eighteenth–century editions of Shakespeare has grown extremely rapidly. Some of the most exciting recent Shakespeare criticism has been about the work of Rowe and his successors. For students and critics interested in Shakespeare's texts or the rise of his reputation, or those interested in the rise of literary criticism and for all those with any interest in the nature of eighteenth–century culture, Rowe's editions of Shakespeare have become a crucial and exhilarating area of study.
Gildon’s critical writing is an extremely important and hugely undervalued commentary on Shakespeare. The nearly 200 pages of remarks add up to a careful attempt to identify the worth of Shakespeare by continual and sustained comparison with the best classical drama. Gildon’s ‘Remarks’ constitute a measured advocacy of Shakespeare, a cautious recognition of what he was prepared to admire and an equally determined refusal to indulge in what would later become the cult of bardolatry. It seems an inaugurating moment. Like so much else in Rowe’s work on the edition, Gildon’s Shakespeare contains most of the seeds of the Shakespeare constructed by the eighteenth-century editors, the basis for our own version of him.
For the first time in a collected edition the language of Shakespeare's plays was systematically modernised and repunctuated. Rowe was the first to include lists of the characters for every play, the first to divide all the plays into acts and scenes, the first to mark the location of each scene.
This was also the first illustrated edition with a neat engraving placed as frontispiece to each play. For almost every play, this was the first time an image of the drama had been published and these drawings constitute a crucial beginning to the rich history of artists' responses to Shakespeare. In his first volume, Rowe also included a biography of the dramatist, the first attempt to provide an authorative 'Account of the Life, &c., of Mr William Shakespear', an essay that would be the basis for all accounts of Shakespeare for the rest of the century. Rowe also included a number of plays then thought to be by Shakespeare, including Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle and The Puritan.
Contents
The Plays
Rowe worked hard on the edition, recognising that the text needed some serious attention. As he said in his preface: 'I have taken some Care to redeem him [Shakespeare] from the Injuries of former Impressions. I must not pretend to have return'd this Work to the Exactness of the Author's Original Manuscripts: Those are lost, or, at least, are gone beyond any Inquiry I could make; so that there was nothing left, but to compare the several Editions, and give the true Reading as well as I could from thence.'
The Poems
Tonson had in 1707 bought the copyright to Shakespeare's plays but not to the poems. In 1710 a rival publisher, Edmund Curll, published an additional volume, designed to look like the six volumes of Rowe's edition and titled 'Volume the Seventh'. Charles Gildon edited the poems but he also provided a glossary of obscure words, an essay on the history of drama, a commentary on the plays and numerous other features that Rowe had, in his view, failed to provide. Gildon's work is a vital addition to Rowe's edition, completing the presentation of the text with the poems but also adding to Rowe's way of making the plays available and understandable.