Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare by Peter Seary (review)

HUMANITIES 147 At the beginning of each play's entry, there is a list of all the music demanded by the Shakespearean text. The compilers here have been content to let Blakemore Evans's Riverside Shakespeare be their guide (with a few additions from the Oxford Shakespeare). They have not attempted their own examination of the quartos and Folio to ensure that modem editors have included everything. Even with these limitations, the Catalogue is a source of much interesting information: for instance, what truly great composers never were inspired by Shakespeare? Well, Bach, no surprise there; Gluck, Mozart makes it, but when the details are examined one cannot help but feel it is on false pretences. There was a lost cantata by Mozart, Salieri, and Comet entitled Per la recuperata salute di Ophelia, which you would have a hard time finding text for in Hamlet; another entry, in apparent contradiction of the principles about originality stated in the Preface, refers to an opera called Peines d'amour perdues cobbled up by Barbier and Carre out of Love's Labour's Lost with music stolen by Delibes from Cosi fan tutte; the third entry is another of the compilers' non-events, an alleged plan by Mozart to work on an opera based vaguely on The Tempest. So, no Mozart. Ofcourse, the great Europeanization ofShakespeare was only beginning at the end of the eighteenth century; it is no surprise to find the nineteenth century powerfully represented, though the austere Bruckner does not appear, and Mussorgsky and Mahler make it only once each (dodgy entries at that); none of the second Viennese school (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) turns up, nor does Janacek (a shame; he'd have set Shakespeare wonderfully), and neither Boulez nor Stockhausen. On the other hand, unexpected names do crop up: Anna Russell, for instance; someone or something called Fuzzy; some actors not noted for their compositional talents (among them Charlie Chaplin and Laurence Olivier ). The composer with the longest index listing is someone called Richard Simpson, who died in 1876; there are three John Smiths, and two composers called Lear (no Hamlet, I'm afraid), but there is a William Shakespeare (1849- 1931). (ANTONY HAMMOND) Peter Seary. Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare Clarendon Press 190. xvi, 248. $68.95 This useful book is part biography, part apologia pro vita eius, and mainly an account of the development of modern literary scholarship and editing in the first half of the eighteenth century. It makes valuable contributions to each subject, but mainly to the first and last. As Seary abundantly shows, Lewis Theobald lived a scholarly and artistic life of far greater achievement than is generally recognized. Born the 148 LETTERS IN CANADA 1991 son of a Kentish attorney, he was raised in an aristocratic household by his godfather, Baron Rockingham, and was thoroughly schooled in classical literature. Though he received legal rather than university training, he soon made his mark in the literary world, first as translator, then as dramatist, journalist, novelist, and poet, and ultimately as editor of Shakespeare and of Beaumont and Fletcher. He won the admiration and friendship of such men as Addison, Fielding, and Thomas Warton and the patronage of such men as the fourth and fifth Earls of Orrery, Sir Robert Walpole, and Frederick Prince of Wales. Even those familiar with the range of classical learning shown in his editions of Shakespeare may be surprised to learn of his translations of Plato, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes, of Cato, Horace, and Ovid, and of French criticism; those who think of him mainly as a commentator and editor may be surprised at his career as editor of a journal, the Censor, and at his authorship of several published volumes of verse and even of an oriental novel. Most surprising of all may be the account of his theatrical career. Recently a group of scholars associated with the new Oxford edition of Shakespeare have dismissed the efforts of eighteenth-century editors to restore from the quartos those passages missing from the First Folio, thereby attempting to discredit modern editions that continue this conflation of F and Q texts, as virtually all do. Rowe, Pope, and Theobald...