The forms of eighteenth-century editions of English literary texts were at least as diverse as the forms taken by literary editions in our own time, varying as they did not only with the different markets at which particular editions were aimed, but also with the naturally more fluid state of a scholarly genre in a relatively early phase of its historical development. Small-format editions for instance, aimed at general use, or theatre texts meant to be pocketed by a playhouse audience, included minimal scholarly paratexts. Early editions of Shakespeare, prepared by poets—Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Alexander Pope (1723-25)—for a general and genteel readership similarly provided sparse textual and explanatory matter. As vernacular literary editing became more and more a domain of historical scholarship, or `philology', the poetic text was increasingly accompanied by a far more elaborated apparatus, as in Zachary Grey's edition of Hudibras (1744), Thomas Newton's variorum Paradise Lost (1749), or Thomas Tyrwhitt's Chaucer (1775). The disposition and relations of that apparatus, as now, were variable. In Tyrwhitt's Chaucer, or in John Upton's 1758 Spenser, elaborated scholarly annotation was printed separately from the `clean' text. In Grey's Hudibras or Newton's Milton the text was accompanied by substantial bodies of footnotes. In Richard Bentley's 1732 edition of Paradise Lost the text page becomes a complex and interrelating pattern of various components, the text attended by substantial and typographically insistent footnotes and a battery of marginal alternative readings, and itself broken up by italics and square brackets— `hooks'—drawing attention to what Bentley thought dubious readings.
In the editing of the plays of William Shakespeare, however, an essentially `standard' format for the scholarly edition was adopted and evolved over the course of the century. Lewis Theobald, arguably the first `critical'— to use his own word, `intelligent'—editor of Shakespeare, also led the way in providing a formal model, deliberately choosing (as he told his then friend William Warburton) `to follow the form of Bentley's Amsterdam
Horace, in subjoining the notes to the place controverted.'
[1] Theobald's example of providing the text with a running accompaniment of explanatory and textual footnotes was followed, with a generally rising ratio of notes to text, and more or less steadily increasing scholarly paratexts, in the editions of Pope and Warburton (1747), Samuel Johnson (1765), Johnson and Steevens (1773 and 1778), Reed (1785), Malone (1790), and Steevens (1793).
In this paper I shall be discussing the highly individual editorial work of Edward Capell, which formally is strikingly distinct from this recognizable main stream. Capell is now best remembered for his edition of Shakespeare, ten octavo volumes of the text of the plays, published in 1768, followed by a First Part of Notes and Various Readings in 1774, and the complete threevolume
Notes and Various Readings of 1779 through 1783. I shall refer also to Capell's only other piece of published editing, the Prolusions . . . of Antient Poetry (1760); to Capell's holograph copy for the Shakespeare edition; and to Capell's unpublished holograph Milton, which survives with the Shakespeare holograph in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Both the text and the subsequent apparatus of Capell's Shakespeare edition are innovative and distinctive. As we shall see, the Shakespearean text was published, in 1768, in a strikingly, even provocatively, `clean' form. Capell's textual practice, abandoning the textus receptus and returning to the `original copies', displayed what is arguably a radical text-critical modernity. Capell's explanatory notes, published many years after the text, and very different in book form and mise en page, are based on a daunting range and depth of contextualizing knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean culture and literature rivalled, amongst previous editors of Shakespeare, only by Theobald and Johnson.
Capell's hermeneutic procedures and text-editorial methodologies have been both discussed and appreciated by such scholars as Alice Walker and Brian Vickers.[2] Here I shall examine rather the `bibliographical codes' of Capell's works of English editorial scholarship: matters of volume format and makeup, the relations among texts and paratexts, styling and mise en page. In particular I shall argue that Capell's editorial publications are deliberately designed and carefully produced, reflecting not only the expertise and craftsmanship of their printer, but also the intentions of Capell himself. Both the Shakespeare and the Prolusions display Capell's thorough and thoughtful attention to form and to the effect of form on function. Both books show the clearest evidence of Capell's highly distinctive view of the editor's role, of typographic layout, of the reader's use of the text, and of the relation of the editor both to his author and to his reader.
