Edited Works: The Works of Shakespear

Overview
Alexander Pope’s 1725 The Works of Shakespear is a landmark early eighteenth-century edition that presents Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of Augustan taste. Issued in multiple volumes for Jacob Tonson, it aimed to deliver a readable, polished text for contemporary readers while asserting a critical program to cleanse perceived corruptions that had entered through seventeenth-century printing and theatrical alteration. Pope’s edition follows Nicholas Rowe’s pioneering 1709 effort yet is more assertive in reshaping the language and presentation, pairing admiration for Shakespeare’s genius with a poet-editor’s willingness to refine what he judged coarse, irregular, or corrupted.

Contents and Textual Basis
The set offers the dramatic canon, comedies, histories, and tragedies, arranged in the familiar tripartite order and packaged with prefatory material and explanatory aids. Pope worked primarily from the First Folio and later folios, with selective consultation of early quartos. His reliance on folio copy furnished a coherent base text but also transmitted inherited errors; the partial and unsystematic use of quartos limited the edition’s textual authority compared with later scholarship. Dramatis personae, stage directions, and act-and-scene divisions are regularized to suit contemporary expectations of clarity and decorum, continuing and refining features introduced by Rowe.

Editorial Method and Aims
Pope’s guiding conviction is that Shakespeare’s native excellence shines most brightly once the text is purged of corruptions and accidental roughness. He modernizes spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, smooths meter, and standardizes speech headings and names. Where lines appear nonsensical, redundant, or stylistically alien, he emends them, marks them as doubtful, or removes them; where sense seems recoverable, he supplies conjectural readings. The result is a Shakespeare filtered through the precision and polish prized by Augustan poetics, seeking consistency of tone, clarity of syntax, and harmonious versification. Pope’s preface famously balances homage and censure: it celebrates Shakespeare’s inventive power and broad humanity while rebuking perceived faults, mixture of comic and tragic, lapses in taste, and negligence, often attributing blemishes to transmission and the stage rather than to the poet’s design.

Annotations and Apparatus
The edition provides concise notes that gloss difficult words, clarify references, and justify major emendations. A glossary and occasional scene-setting remarks help orient readers unfamiliar with Elizabethan idiom and theatrical practice. Yet the apparatus is selective and stylistically elegant rather than exhaustive; Pope favors decisive critical judgments over philological accumulation. This restraint gives the pages a clean typographic look but offers fewer alternative readings than later editorial norms would demand.

Reception and Legacy
Pope’s Shakespeare quickly commanded attention and provoked controversy. Admirers praised its readability and the authority of a major poet’s taste applied to the national dramatist. Detractors, led by Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726), accused Pope of arbitrary cuts, high-handed emendations, and insufficient collation of quartos. The quarrel helped catalyze the modern discipline of Shakespearean editing, and Pope’s satirical counterattack in The Dunciad made the dispute famous. Subsequent editors, especially Theobald (1733) and later Johnson (1765), corrected many of Pope’s readings while acknowledging his edition’s stylistic influence and the galvanizing role it played.

Significance
The 1725 Works of Shakespear stands as a decisive moment when Shakespeare’s text was reshaped to suit eighteenth-century ideals of order and elegance, even at the cost of documentary fidelity. It bequeathed a model of the editor as arbiter of taste and initiated debates, between conjecture and collation, polish and authenticity, that would define Shakespeare scholarship for generations. Despite its limitations, the edition’s clarity, preface, and confident critical voice made it a cultural event and a foundational step toward the more rigorous editorial standards that followed.