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This paper has benefited from kind suggestions made in response to earlier and partial versions presented at seminars at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I would particularly like to thank Roger Lonsdale, Paulina Kewes, Jim McLaverty, Simon Jarvis, William St Clair, Howard Erskine Hill, and Michael Suarez, S. J.

[1]

Letter to William Warburton, November 18, 1731. Quoted by Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), p. 127.

[2]

Alice Walker, `Edward Capell and his Edition of Shakespeare', Proceedings of the British Academy, 46 (1960), 131-145; Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage, 6 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974-81), vols. 5 and 6 passim. See also my own Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 175-198.

[3]

There is a comparably polemic application of a different Virgilian metaphor in the choice, by Alexander Pope for his 1725 Shakespear, and by Lewis Theobald for his Shakespeare Restored (1726), of Virgil's lines on the mangled condition of Deiphobus: `—Laniatum corpore toto / Deiphobum vidi' [`I saw Deiphobus, his whole frame mangled'] (Aeneid, 6.494 ff.).

[4]

Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry (London, 1760), fol. A4r; p. i; Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. (London, 1768), 1.20.

[5]

These are the measurements of my own, apparently untrimmed, copy.

[6]

Birmingham Shakespeare Library copy, S176.7 D.

[7]

In The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 173-198. I refer particularly to pp. 178-181.

[8]

David Foxon, rev. and ed. James McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), p. 166.

[9]

British Library C.45.b.11.

[10]

I argue the point more fully in Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing, p. 183.

[11]

The Prolusions, irritatingly for those of us who like neat theories, has 30 lines per page.

[12]

Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, chapter 3 passim.

[13]

John N. Balston, The Whatmans and Wove [Vélin] Paper (West Farleigh: John Balston, 1998). See also Balston, The Elder James Whatman: England's Greatest Paper Maker (1702-1759), 2 vols. (West Farleigh: J. N. Balston, 1992), 1.254-255.

[14]

Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press (London: Hart-Davis, 1964), pp. 23, 26-27.

[15]

Barker, `Typography and the Meaning of Words: the Revolution in the Layout of Books in the Eighteenth Century', in Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im achtzehten Jahrhundert: The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Proceedings of the Fifth Wolfenbütteler Symposium, November 1-3, 1977, ed. Giles Barber and Bernhard Fabian (Hamburg: Dr Ernst Hauswedell & Co., 1981), pp. 127-166 (pp. 133-134, 150-151).

[16]

On the last two points, see Gaskell, Bibliography of the Foulis Press, p. 23.

[17]

The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Los Angeles and London: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 154.

[18]

The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. 7-8: Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), 7.111.

[19]

The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. 7: The Iliad of Homer, Bks I-IX, ed. Maynard Mack et al. (London: Methuen and New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 82.

[20]

Anne Middleton, `Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?' in New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1990) pp. 167-183 (pp. 169, 170).

[21]

Monthly Review, 39 (1768), 274; Critical Review, 26 (1768), 327; Lear, ed. Jennens (London, 1770), p. viii.

[22]

English Review, 3 (1784), 176, 273-275.

[23]

Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 13.

[24]

The Textual Condition, p. 115.

[25]

`Editorial and Critical Theory: from Modernism to Postmodernism', in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 9-24 (p. 12).

[26]

Advertisement to the Notes and Various Readings (1774), sig. a3v.

[27]

School, pp. 163, 298, 345, 379, 404, 431.

[28]

Monthly Review, 53 (1776), 395.