In 1773 Samuel Johnson published revised editions of his monumental
Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed., folio),[1] and, with George Steevens, of The Plays of William Shakespeare. The working relationship of the two men dated from at least 1765 when Johnson had published his first Shakespeare edition, a project to which Steevens contributed forty-nine textual and usage notes.[2] Johnson in turn encouraged and praised Steevens's 1766 edition of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare, Being the whole Number printed in Quarto During his Lifetime, or before the Restoration. While the 1773 Shakespeare was an ostensible collaboration, both the impetus for the edition and the bulk of the work were provided by Steevens. Johnson contributed some eighty new notes to the commentary, while Steevens established the text, wrote General Observations for The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing (which had been lacking in the 1765 edition), and added hundreds of explanatory notes, many citing parallel passages from other Renaissance dramatists.[3] Conversely, although Steevens is nowhere
identified as a contributor to the revised
Dictionary, Arthur Sherbo has discerned an element of cross-fertilization between the two projects by identifying a number of instances in which Steevens's notes to the Shakespeare edition resulted in Johnsonian revisions in the
Dictionary.
[4]
Steevens's scholarly abilities were eminently suited to both textual criticism and lexicography, and contemporary praises for his intelligence, industry, and wide acquaintance with antiquarian literature—especially that of English Renaissance drama—are plentiful.[5] Steevens's scholarly interests coincided with the aims of both the Dictionary and the Shakespeare editions, and his rationale for reprinting the Shakespeare quartos recognizes the affinity between the two projects:
It is not merely to obtain justice to Shakespeare, that I have made this collection, and advise others to be made. The general interest of English literature, and the attention due to our own language and history, require that our ancient writings should be diligently reviewed. There is no age that has not produced some works that deserved to be remembered; and as words and phrases are only understood by comparing them in different places, the lower writers must be read for the explanation of the highest. No language can be ascertained and settled, but by deducing its words from their original sources, and tracing them through their successive varieties of signification; and this deduction can only be performed by consulting the earliest and intermediate authors.
("Advertisement to the Reader,"
Twenty Plays, 13)
The last sentence might serve as a concise statement of Johnson's methodology in compiling the Dictionary, and appears to have been designed both to flatter Johnson and to demonstrate Steevens's own grasp of the project's nature and scope. If the reference was not sufficiently transparent, Steevens continued:
Many volumes which were mouldering in dust have been collected; many authors which were forgotten have been revived; many laborious catalogues have been formed; and many judicious glossaries compiled: the literary transactions of the darker ages are now open to discovery; and the language in its intermediate gradations, from the Conquest to the Restoration, is better understood than in any former time.
(
Twenty Plays, 13)
This better understanding is implicitly the product of Johnson's efforts in producing the laborious catalogue and judicious glossary that is the
Dictionary of the English Language. By reprinting the Shakespearean quartos Steevens contributes to the larger cultural project: he not only offers the public "the poet's first thoughts" (14) but also helps to preserve the literary heritage by providing the raw materials from which dictionaries can be made. Steevens has thus in a few lines insinuated himself into a productive scholarly
association with Dr. Johnson, William Shakespeare, and the art of lexicography.
John Middendorf has speculated that "from time to time evidence may still emerge to add to our knowledge of the possible extent of Steevens's anonymous assistance" to the 1773 Shakespeare edition (129). It is now possible to expand this statement to include Steeven's activity in assisting Johnson with the Dictionary during "The Year of Revision" (Sherbo, "1773," 18). I will argue that George Steevens, dubbed the "Puck of Commentators" by a contemporary for his literary quarrels and hoaxes, played a much more active role in the revision of the Dictionary than has hitherto been suspected, a role that, without acknowledgment, continued long past Johnson's death.
