The Culture of Newtonianism and Shakespeare’s Editors: From Pope to Johnson

During the eighteenth century, a succession of ten major editions played a pivotal role in the elevation of William Shakespeare to the status of a timeless author and a British national hero. The editions were those of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1723–25), Lewis Theobald (1733), Thomas Hanmer (1744), William Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson (1765), George Steevens (1766), Edward Capell (1767–68), Johnson and Steevens (1773), and Edmond Malone (1790). These men emended Shakespeare’s text, printed extensive commentary on his plays, and introduced lasting innovations such as character lists and act and scene divisions. Never before had a vernacular author in the English world received such intense editorial attention. In their prefaces, the editors describe their work as a serious scholarly endeavour designed to rescue Shakespeare’s brilliant depictions of human nature from the corruption of the theatre. Over the last two decades, scholars have treated the editors’ claims sceptically and have stressed the importance of material and ideological factors in propelling the Shakespearean publishing project. While several studies have examined the editors’ scholarship in depth, there has also been an increasingly dominant tendency to view their work in terms of pressures that originate outside the domain of textual work.¹ Cultural materialism has transformed the reference frame of eighteenth-century Shakespeare scholarship by demonstrating that the editorial promotion of Shakespeare had a strong basis in the material and ideological conditions of eighteenth-century Britain, in particular the rise of commercial publishing and the development of the concept of individual authorship.² The attention to these external factors creates a critical blind spot that prevents scholars from fully understanding the cultural context of the focus on truth in the editorial discourse. Having relegated the editors’ words and practices to a secondary status, less important than their material and ideological motivations, materialist scholars tend to pay insufficient attention to the editors’ statements of vision and intent. The focus on knowledge and truth in the prefaces, however, reveals a historical, cultural dimension to the editorial project that has escaped the attention of literary criticism. The missing context is the popularity of science in eighteenth-century England, and, in particular, the legacy of Isaac Newton.

The eighteenth century was an age deeply affected by the culture of Newtonianism. G.S. Rousseau calls the image of Newton in the period a “vast region of the literate imagination” because his achievements, popularized through books, magazines, public demonstrations, and sermons, captivated English men and women far beyond those who were directly engaged in natural philosophy.³ Given Newton’s popularity, one can reasonably assume that most, if not all, readers of Shakespeare in the period were familiar with popularized ideas about Newton. One of Shakespeare’s editors, Pope, wrote what became perhaps the most well-known lines of admiration for Newton: “Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. / God said, Let Newton be! / and All was Light.”⁴ Pope’s emphasis on “Laws” captures a central idea in the mythology constructed around Newton—that his discovery of the law of universal gravitation and of the three laws of motion made him what Robert Markley calls “an avatar of divine authority.”⁵ In cosmology, Newton’s achievement was in establishing the causes of planetary motion. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion provided a correct description of the motion of the planets around the sun. Kepler deducted three simple mathematical laws from the available astronomical observations. These were kinematical laws, namely laws that describe what happens but not why it happens. Newton succeeded in explaining why the planets obeyed Kepler’s laws, and he developed what later came to be referred to as dynamics: a description of the underlying principles that govern motion. He accomplished this feat by adding to the two known physical quantities—length and time— new fundamental quantities, including inertial mass, gravitational mass, force, and momentum. He also developed (at the same time as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz) the mathematical tool of calculus. Stunningly, the resulting laws explained not only...