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, the editions of Shakespeare have become a crucial and exhilarating area of study.
On 2nd of June 1709 the publisher Jacob Tonson announced 'There is this day Publish'd ...the Works of Mr William Shakespear.' Edited by the dramatist Nicholas Rowe, this edition was the first of the great editions that marked - and substantially created the eighteenth century's view of Shakespeare and formed the basis for our own.
After the fourth and last of the massive Folio editions was published in 1685, it was time to present Shakespeare in a new way for a new readership.Tonson, the astutest of publishers, brought out an edition in six neat octavo volumes, small enough to read with ease, light enough for a gentleman or lady to carry around and, compared with the cost of the Folios, cheap enough for the wider public to buy.
The work of Jacob Tonson as printer and Nicholas Rowe as editor moved the whole history of editing Shakespeare onto an entirely new plane.
Between 1709 and 1986, Rowe's edition was the single greatest determinant on the way Shakespeare's plays appeared in collected editions.
From the names by which we know some of Shakespeare's characters, the definition of where scenes take place, the list of characters or the act and scene divisions to the spelling, hundreds of emendations to the text and the way in which Shakespeare's language is punctuated, Rowe's work defined the methods and the details by which we think we know Shakespeare in print.
For more than 200 years, Shakespeare's plays looked on the page remarkably like Rowe's edition and totally unlike any edition that had appeared before 1709.
The influence of the edition is colossal, so great indeed that we are often totally unaware that it is to Rowe we owe so much.Were it not for Rowe, we probably would not talk of a character named Puck or believe that Lear goes out onto a heath in the storm, we would not say 'Some are born great', quoting Malvolio reading from the letter, or assume that Shakespeare wrote all his plays in five acts.
Rowe created a text that in its spelling looks to us quite comfortable and familiar in ways that previous texts do not.
He imposed modern patterns of punctuation on the flowing syntax of the plays and divided them into acts and scenes ensuring that all the plays had the kind of dramatic shape that any Restoration play might have.
But it is the inclusion of 'locators', a definition of where a scene is taking place, that has been one of Rowe's most contentious and significant modernisations. 'Some Account of the Life, etc' No one had published an extensive biography of Shakespeare by the time Rowe came to compile his.
The account is built on anecdote and precious little evidence.However, by interweaving his account of the man and his life with a critical evaluation of the plays Rowe is the first to argue that the biographical information is not an end in itself but may lead to a better understanding of an author's work. 'Adorn'd with Cuts' For the first time each Shakespeare play was illustrated with an image of a moment from the drama.
For the most part the illustrations derive their visual vocabulary from contemporary performance with elements of a theatre apparent in many of the plates.
Like the plays themselves, the characters appear in contemporary early eighteenth-century costume. 'Volume the Seventh' The opportunity to benefit from the decision not to include Shakespeare's poems in Rowe's edition was seized immediately by the publisher Edmund Curll.
He commissioned Charles Gildon, not only to edit the poems, but to provide a series of aids to the readers of Rowe's edition and to follow the style of Rowe's edition as closely as possible.
Gildon prefaced the poems with 'An Essay on the Art, Rise and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome and England' and 'An Explanation of the Old Words us'd by Shakespear in his Works'.Following the poems he provided extensive 'Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear', further remarks on the poems and a set of tabulated comparisons between topics he had identified in Shakespeare and parallel examples in classical authors.
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, etc., 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.
