Abstract
As named authors fronted definitive collections of their own literary works on an increasingly frequent basis, scholars waged an anxious war over the right way to edit an English classic.2 Each question raised a further battle. Are vernacular authors different from classical and scriptural ones? Which were the more reliable copy-texts: manuscripts, which often survived in a heavily degraded state, or the somewhat slapdash print editions? Is textual scholarship a necessary tool in the recovery of authorial intentions or a pedantic encumbrance? Who is more qualified for the duty of bringing a work back to life: a dull critic or an empathetic poet? The best known of these skirmishes involved Richard Bentley and Lewis Theobald on one side and Alexander Pope on the other. The fame of Pope’s merciless lampoon of Theobald as the King of the Dunces in The Dunciad, as well as the vociferous backlash against Bentley’s heavy-handed emendation in his edition of Milton, might well indicate that the scholars lost; in the popular imagination, they certainly did. Textual critics were widely depicted as duncical, vainglorious parasites who usurped the role of the author. Within the nascent field of professional editing, however, the battles between learning and taste engendered a dualistic adaptation of classical humanism, a compromise between a cluttered and a clean page.
[T]o be commented on, is only the Fate of the greatest and brightest Genius’s, and to comment the Task of the heaviest Pedants … it’s no longer Bentley at the Tail of Horace or Theobald at the Tail of Shakespear; but as if the Authors Works were become their Properties, they call them Bentley’s Horace, or Theobald’s Shakespear.
(Grub Street Journal) 1
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Notes
See Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991)
Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1991).
See Anecdotes, vol. 3, p. 148n. B. A. Windeatt has dubbed Tyrwhitt the ‘founder of modem traditions of Chaucer editing’: Thomas Tyrwhitt’, in Paul G. Ruggiers (ed.), Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1984), pp. 117–45.
Philip Neve, Cursory Remarks on Some of the Ancient English Poets, Particularly Milton (London: Printed for the author, 1789), p. 6.
Thomas Wright, Anecdota Literaria (London: John Russell Smith, 1844), p. 23.
Arthur Sherbo, Shakespeare’s Midwives: Some Neglected Shakespeareans (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), pp. 23–49.
E.g., L. F. Powell, ‘Thomas Tyrwhitt and the Rowley Poems’, RES 7 (1931), pp. 314–26.
Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton & Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 10.
Peter Shillingsbuig’s Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996 [1986]).
John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare (London: G. Hawkins, 1746), p. 155.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt, 5 vols (London: T. Payne, 1775–8), vol. 5, p. v.
Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored (London: R. Francklin, 1726), p. 128.
See Marcus Walsh, ‘Form and Function in the English Eighteenth-Century Literary Edition: The Case of Edward Capell’, Studies in Bibliography, vol. 54 (2001), pp. 226–43.
William Shakespeare, The Plays of William Shakespeare, eds Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 2nd edn, 10 vols (London: C. Bathurst, W. Strahan, J. F. and C. Rivington et al., 1778), vol. 3, p. 506
See Life, pp. 250–84. On Chatterton’s homemade Rowley anthologies designed as wares, see Ian Haywood, ‘Chatterton’s Plans for the Publication of the Forgery’, RES 36 (1985), pp. 58–68.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols (London: Charles Dilly, 1791), vol. 2, p. 70.
G. Thomas Tanselle, ‘Editing without a Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994), pp. 1–22.
See Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 37.
John Berkenhout, Biographia Literaria (London: J. Dodsley 1777), pp. 316–18.
Works, vol. 1, p. 54. For a contemporary reading of Chaucer and Lydgate see Richard Farmer, Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (Cambridge: J. Archdeacon, 1767), p. 22.
Nick Groom, ‘Richard Farmer and the Rowley Controversy’, N&Q 239 (1994), pp. 314–18.
Thomas Evans (ed.), Old Ballads, Historical and Narrative, with Some of Modern Date, 2 vols (London: T Evans, 1777), vol. 2, pp. 1–17.
Irving N. Rothman, ‘The Songs as Thematic Center in Chatterton’s Ælla’, Modem Language Studies 5.1 (1975), pp. 67–77
William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807), vol. 1, pp. 97–105.
Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 51–2.
CR 43 (1777), pp. 88–98. Oskar Wellens suggests the CR’s sustained interest in Chatterton throughout the decade was unified by one contributor, Joseph Robertson: see ‘Joseph Robertson: The Anti-Rowleian Critic of the Critical Review’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87.4 (1986), pp. 594–8.
MR 1 (1749), pp. 66–7. See Patricia Gael, ‘The Origins of the Book Review in England, 1663–1749’, The Library, 7th series, 13.1 (2012), pp. 63–89
Antonia Forster, ‘Review Journals and the Reading Public’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), pp. 171–90.
MR 56 (1777), pp. 256–65, 321–8 and 445–9. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1930), pp. 208–9.
MR 56 (1777), pp. 265, 321. See William Stafford, ‘Representations of the Social Order in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1785–1815’, ECL 33.2 (2009), pp. 64–91.
See Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1688–1788 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 136–40
C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman’s Magazine (Providence, RI: Brown University 1938).
Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 90.
See James Marquis Kuist, The Nichols File of the Gentleman’s Magazine: Attributions of Authorship and Other Documentation in Editorial Papers at the Folger Library (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 30
GM 47 (1777), pp. 361–5. Ashby appears to have been a much-respected antiquary. See William Cole’s descriptions, BL: Add MSS 5821, fol. 82; Add MSS 5847, fol. 397. Ashby’s Dissertation on a Singular Coin ofNerva (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1774)
Kuist, Nichols File of the Gentleman’s Magazine, p. 143, identifies Scott as the author. See Anne McWhir, ‘John Scott (1730–1783)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Lawrence D. Stewart, John Scott of Amwell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).
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Cook, D. (2013). Tyrwhitt’s Rowley, or ‘what the author wrote’. In: Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332493_3
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