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IV
Reed's sympathy with the increasing editorial conservatism of his fellow Shakespeareans is unmistakable in the marked emendations in the 1785 printer's copy, for they restore Folio or quarto readings in 117 instances. Only forty-five emendations abandon the Folio readings of 1778, and they are a mixed lot, ranging from the revision of spellings and changes in speech tags, to the less compelling conjectures by his correspondents, including eight by Dr. Farmer. While Steevens claims only a few new readings in the 1785 text, it is possible that he made other changes too. Nevertheless, there is no instance I have seen in the 1778 or 1785 text of Steevens actually defending the restoration of a Folio reading. Consequently, since fifty-two of the eighty-six anonymous emendations in 1785 do restore Folio text, the bulk of them are probably Reed's. He also is the likely hand behind the twenty anonymous new readings which neither Malone (1790) nor Steevens (1793) would follow. Although his editorial self-effacement has obscured his contribution to the 1785 variorum, his quiet challenge to the laxity of Steevens' 1778 text should win Isaac Reed a niche in the history of Shakespeare's editors.
In the face of the rising textual conservatism, be it noted, Steevens remained staunchly unregenerate, and in the Advertisement to his 1793 edition (p. xi) he mocked his fellow editors for believing any quarto or the Folio to represent Shakespeare's "genuine text": "few literary occurences are better understood, than that it came down to us discoloured by 'the variation of every soil' through which it had flowed, and that it stagnated at last in the muddy reservoir of the first folio." Only Steevens would be capable of retailing such a belief by this late date, or of comparing the integrity of the Folio text "with the innocence of females nursed in a camp and educated in a bagnio" (p. xii). With such a man, it was better not to quarrel at all.
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