Produced by David Starner, Louise Hope and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net The Augustan Reprint Society LEWIS THEOBALD _Preface to The Works of Shakespeare_ (1734) With an Introduction by Hugh G. Dick Publication Number 20 (Extra Series, No. 2) Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1949 * * * * * _GENERAL EDITORS_ H. RICHARD ARCHER, _Clark Memorial Library_ RICHARD C. BOYS, _University of Michigan_ EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_ H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_ _ASSISTANT EDITORS_ W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_ JOHN LOFTIS, _University of California, Los Angeles_ _ADVISORY EDITORS_ EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_ BENJAMIN BOYCE, _University of Nebraska_ LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_ CLEANTH BROOKS, _Yale University_ JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_ ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_ SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_ ERNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_ JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_ * * * * * INTRODUCTION Lewis Theobald's edition of Shakespeare (1734) is one cornerstone of modern Shakespearian scholarship and hence of English literary scholarship in general. It is the first edition of an English writer in which a man with a professional breadth and concentration of reading in the writer's period tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to bear on the establishment of the author's text and the explication of his obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare's language and metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer. Thus both in the edition itself and in his Preface, which stands as the first significant statement of a scholar's editorial duties and methods in handling an English classic, Theobald takes his place as an important progenitor of modern English studies.