Language Versus Design in Drama: A Background to the Pope-Theobald Controversy

LANGUAGE VERSUS DESIGN IN DRAMA: A BACKGROUND TO THE POPE-THEOBALD CONTROVERSY PETERSEARY Lewis Theobald is usually known to those interested in eighteenthcentury literature as a scholar whose interests were confined to the minutiae of language and whose pedantry in exposing the weaknesses of Pope's Shakespear (I725) in Shakespeare Restored (I726) rightly earned him his prominent place in The Dunciad (I728). This view derives essentially from The Dunciad and has been only slightly modified by the fact that Theobald's edition of Shakespeare [January 1734] is generally acknowledged to be superior to that of Pope. Literary historians have been content to grant Theobald's supremacy in scholarship, but they have denigrated his critical sensibilities in deference to Pope, thereby accepting Pope's equation of scholarship and pedantry. David Nichol Smith represents Theobald as one of the 'pedant theorists' with a 'complacent belief in the rules....', As a consequence, Smith is forced to disregard Theobald's devotion to Shakespeare, his 'Veneration, almost rising to Idolatry, for the Writings of this inimitable Poet," perhaps because the rise of Bardolatry is supposed to be a mid-eighteenth-century phenomenon .s Smith's influence is unfortunate when it leads W.K. Wimsatt, Jr, to characterize the 'antithetic editions' of Shakespeare by Pope and Theobald as 'the appreciative and free versus the scholarly and careful. ...', Apart from the unhappy assumption that careful scholarship precludes appreciation, Wimsatt's formulation ignores the implications of Pope's well-known practice of casting into footnotes certain passages as unworthy of Shakespeare. J.R. Sutherland, in 'The Dull Duty of an Editor,' skirted the pitfalls of associating Pope and Theobald with criticism and scholarship respectively and discussed instead their differing views of what scholarship entails. If scholarship is a game of cricket, Pope is one of the 'gentlemen' and Theobald one of the 'players': 'It is often assumed that Pope knew Theobald to be a better editor than himself, and that his satire of the man can be safely attributed to this knowledge, and to the annoyance it caused him. But this is perhaps to judge the issue from a modern UTQ, Volume XLII, NumbeT }. Fall 1972 LANGUAGE VERSUS DESIGN IN DRAMA 41 standpoint: it is at least doubtful if Pope considered Theobald a good editor at aIL" This surely goes too far, and, indeed, Sutherland has a radically different account in his introduction to the Twickenham Edition of The Dunciad: 'To one as sensitive as Pope, the publication of [Shakespeare Restored] must have caused intense annoyance and some acute mental suffering. His reputation, of course, would stand or fall On his poetry, not on his editing; but he was unwilling to think that something he had toiled at so hard was done badly, and certainly not as badly as Theobald's book made out. Here was an exposure of his incompetence as an editor, all the more galling for being in the main justified.'" The trouble with this approach is that Pope's motives in displaying Theobald as the monarch of dullness in The Dunciad seem to arise too exclusively from pique and chagrin at Theobald's success with Shakespeare Restored, an explanation which seems incongruous with Pope's infectious delight when lampooning Theobald. There remain to be considered in the controversy the critical postulates of Pope and Theobald in their approaches to Shakespeare. When in the 1720s the two men addressed themselves to the problems of Shakespeare's text, there were two well-established but opposed trends in dramatic criticism (apparently hitherto not fully explored), on centring On language, the other on designT as of paramount importance in dramaturgy, and they found themselves On opposite sides in a war of critical prinCiples. These derive from the seventeenth century and in particular from the dispute between Dryden and Thomas Rymer. In an age that takes close reading for granted as a critical technique, it is easy to overlook eighteenth-century objections to the minute scrutiny of texts. In dramatic criticism especially, there were developments after the Restoration which tended to make an aversion to close reading virtually the mark of critical integrity. A natural distrust of critics who judge on the basis of a consideration of the parts...