In 1726 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of Shakespeare. Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos and the first two folios, but his edition was wantonly careless. He did, indeed, use some sense in excluding the seven spurious plays as well as _Pericles_ from his edition, and he undoubtedly {128} worked hard on the text. He subdivided the scenes more minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the French stage division,--where a new scene begins with every new character instead of after the stage has been cleared. Pope's explanations of the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's text were often laughably far from the truth. The word 'foison,' meaning 'plenty,' Pope defined as the 'natural juice of grass.' The word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.' Pistol is thus made to say, "Thy woman will I take." Phrases that appeared to be vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, or altered without notice. He rearranged the lines in order to give them the studied smoothness characteristic of the eighteenth century. In fact, he tried to make Shakespeare as near like Pope's poetry as he could. In 1726 Lewis Theobald published _Shakespeare Restored_, with many corrections of Pope's errors. In this little pamphlet most of the material was devoted to _Hamlet_. Theobald's corrections were taken by Pope in very bad part; and the latter tried to destroy Theobald's reputation by writing satires against him and by injuring him in every possible way in print. The first of these publications, _The Dunciad_, appeared in 1728; and this, the greatest satire in the English language, was so effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit until our own day. Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734, and was reprinted in 1740. It is famous for his corrections and improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all later editors of Shakespeare. The most notable of these is Mrs. Quickly's remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, "His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields." The previous texts had given "and a table of green fields." Pope had said that this nonsense crept in from the name of the property man who was named Greenfield, and thus there must have been a stage direction here,--"Bring in a table of Greenfield's." Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by Thomes Hanmer's edition in six volumes. Hanmer was a country gentleman, but not much of a scholar. Warburton's edition followed in 1747. In 1765 appeared {129} Samuel Johnson's long-delayed edition in eight volumes. Aside from a few common-sense explanations, the edition is not of much merit.