SOURCE: Kliman, Bernice W. “Samuel Johnson and Tonson's 1745 Shakespeare: Warburton, Anonymity, and the Shakespeare Wars.” In Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joanna Gondris, pp. 299-317. Madison N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

Conjectures being the very stuff of eighteenth-century Shakespeare editing, perhaps one of my own will not be amiss. I would like to advance the idea that bookseller Jacob Tonson hired Samuel Johnson in 1745 to write attributive notes, anonymously, in an inexpensive reproduction of the elegant 1744 Oxford University edition. The appearance of two textually identical editions by different publishers marks a tactical scrimmage in the complex moves of competition and collaboration that distinguish the editorial work of Johnson, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, Thomas Hanmer—and, above all, William Warburton, who allied himself now with one, now with another. Their editions and related editions dominate the field in the eighteenth century. Since Johnson's activities for 1745 are largely unknown, his work on the 1745 edition could fill a lacuna in his biography. Even more significantly, it would demonstrate his role in what may be called the Shakespeare Wars, the struggle for territorial rights to Shakespeare—by publishers who wanted to sell Shakespeare and by literary men who wanted to use Shakespeare to advance their careers or reputations or both.

The six-volume 1744 edition in large quarto, though also produced anonymously, was known to be by Sir Thomas Hanmer, invariably called the Oxford editor. Hanmer sidestepped Jacob Tonson and associates, who considered themselves the owners of the rights to Shakespeare, by turning to Oxford University, which published his edition embellished with illustrations that he commissioned and paid for. (Thirty-one of the frontispieces were designed by Francis Hayman and all were engraved by Gravelot.) Tonson and the other owners were understandably disturbed by Hanmer's edition, published to their detriment by Oxford.¹ Alexander Pope, in a letter to Warburton, 18 January 1742/43, expresses the threat to Tonson's interests very well:

One Good Consequence [of the publication of the Oxford Shakespeare] will attend the printing it, w^ch is, that it will determine y^e Book to be no mansBooksellers property, if Tonson does not contest it: & your the way will be open to any whom you chuse to deal with, or to y^rself, if y^u prefer to take y^e whole on y^rself.²

The main point here is that Pope saw the field as potentially open. An ancillary point is that in 1743 Warburton wanted to do something with Shakespeare but, as far as his close friend Pope knew, was undecided about what it should be.

Tonson acted quickly to contest the Oxford edition and to prevent other would-be poachers from moving in on his territory. While choosing not to prosecute his claim against Hanmer and Oxford (formidable opponents), Tonson could undercut Hanmer's success and assert his claim another way by reproducing the Oxford text and selling it cheaply. Neither Hanmer nor Oxford would dare or deign to object. Though the Oxford text presented its emendations and infrequent explanatory notes without attribution of their sources, Hanmer's brief “Preface” acknowledges debts to anonymous predecessors and contemporaries.³ Tonson's tactic was not only to duplicate, in octavo format, the Oxford text but also to assign appropriate credit for emendations. Using Hanmer's very text was a way for Tonson to lay his claim to it. The notes in his edition made it more valuable to serious readers than the almost entirely blank margins of the Oxford edition and more importantly established Tonson's right to the notes. Though the Oxford edition fell, ultimately, through the adverse opinion of other editors rather than by Tonson's reprisal edition, his counterstroke did strengthen his claim to any published Shakespeare, and his name is associated with all the major editions of the century until his death in 1767. When Warburton finally edited his version, published in 1747, he assigned all rights (including all the editorial matter) to Tonson for £500.⁴ Tonson was not taking any chances even though he believed his claim was clear. No matter who edited the text, no matter how it was annotated or emended, he owned the text of Shakespeare. He renewed his claim with each republication. Thus, the textually insignificant 1745 edition is pivotal in eighteenth-century copyright claims.

My purpose here is twofold—first, by examining Warburton's role in eighteenth-century editions (especially Hanmer's) to argue the implausibility of Warburton's writing attributive notes for the 1745 edition, and second, to gather the circumstantial evidence for Johnson's involvement. Since Warburton was mentioned as recently as 1991 as the person who wrote the notes for the reprisal volume, it is time to lay that idea to rest.⁵ He would not have done hack work in 1745. Possibly other literary workhorses would have been able, using resources such as Theobald's 1733 edition, to identify emendations and assign ownership to them and to Hanmer's explanatory notes, but several coincidences make Johnson an attractive candidate. His financial situation during this period forced him to do hack work—as one of his biographers asserts in entitling a chapter covering this period “The Bookseller's Hack, 1740-1745.”⁶ Later, of course, he edited the 1765 edition, but in 1745 he was virtually unknown, a struggling writer, with all his famous work and reputation still before him. The thread that leads to Johnson, though knotted, can be unraveled, but one must begin with the origin of the Shakespeare Wars and with William Warburton's efforts to establish himself.

The story of Warburton's correspondence, collaboration, and break with Theobald; Warburton's sudden intimacy with Alexander Pope that lasted five years, until the poet's death in 1744; Pope's bequest to Warburton of his literary remains, and Warburton's eventual publication in 1747 of an edition bearing both Pope's name and his, need only be sketched here.⁷ These well-known events lead to Warburton's link to the reprisal edition and, as I conjecture, to Johnson's work on that edition.

In 1736, after many years of intense correspondence, especially during the years immediately before Theobald produced his own 1733 edition of Shakespeare, Warburton broke decisively with Theobald and asserted his claim to all the emendations and interpretations he had communicated to Theobald that the latter had not already published (and had, in his textual notes, amply credited to Warburton). Theobald responded to Warburton's letter of 4 May on the 18th, greatly surprised at Warburton's anger and his demand for the return of his letters.⁸

The usual reasons imputed for the break may have been contributing but not decisive factors, that is, Theobald's unenthusiastic response to Warburton's proposed “compleat Critic” of Shakespeare, or Theobald's edition, which left out some of the emendations Warburton had offered. The fact that the letters between Theobald and Warburton continued for two years beyond 1733 (if at a more desultory rate) shows that these explanations are incomplete.⁹ No one appears to have noticed that the timing of the break suggests it occurred because Warburton had established a similar collaboration with Sir Thomas Hanmer, which by May 1736 was heating up. Hanmer solicited Warburton's ideas and urged him not only to write weekly letters but also to visit Mildenhall, Hanmer's Suffolk estate, to examine the emendations he had made in the Shakespeare texts in his personal library. For the weekly correspondence to Hanmer, Warburton needed the notes he had written to Theobald. Though with a few exceptions Warburton's letters are unrecoverable, Hanmer's from 24 Dec. 1735 to 25 May 1739 allow one to infer the tenor of Warburton's more frequent letters.¹⁰ In the first of these letters, Hanmer alludes to a previous discussion and a visit by Warburton to Mildenhall; thus, the genesis of the relationship is misty (and each explains it differently). By December 1736, Hanmer is so eager to have Warburton see his marginal notes that he will carry the books to London for that purpose if Warburton prefers to meet him there—for he has resolved always to keep them about him and will not loan them.¹¹ Hanmer's aim, he assures Warburton in this letter, is to produce for himself a “correct” copy of Shakespeare, since he is much disgusted with the editions then available to him:

I hear with uneasiness of the expectation you say is conceived of my making publick the observations and corrections I have made upon Shakespear. Nothing was further from my thoughts when I began them, I proposed nothing but amusement in carrying them on, and no other end but my own satisfaction in getting as correct a copy as I could of an Author I hold in the highest esteem. But there is nothing to which my mind is more averse than to become an Editor; and yet I hope you will not grudge the pains taken in communicating to me your remarks upon the same subject.

Though he insists in this letter that he has no intention of becoming an editor and of producing an edition, as Warburton appears to be urging him to do, a few days later (11 Jan. 1736/37) Hanmer is prepared to be persuaded by Warburton and other people whose judgment he respects to undertake an edition if it can be made more beautiful than the others available and if upon examination his emendations and notes are found to deserve publication:

After they have undergone your examination and that of a few others whose judgment I value, if a few of such chosen friends judge it fit that what I have done towards purifying the text of the Author should be the foundation of a new Edition they shall over-rule my averseness and we will consider of some manner in which it may be done.

Hanmer must have received the assurance he craved from Warburton that his corrections were worthy, for Warburton writes to Thomas Birch on 24 August 1737 that he has visited Hanmer:

You are pleased to inquire about Shakespear. I believe (to tell it as a secret) I shall, after I have got the whole of this Work out of my hands which I am now engaged in, give an Edition of it to the World—Sir T. H. has a true critical genius & has done great things in this Author so you may expect to see a very extraordinary edition of its Kind. I intend to draw up and preface to it a just and compleat Critic on Shakespear & his works.¹²

That Warburton respected Hanmer appears in this letter to Birch—a position he reversed in the preface of his 1747 edition, after Hanmer's death in 1746: “How the Oxford editor came to think himself qualified for this office, from which his whole course of life had been so remote, is … difficult to conceive. For whatever parts he might have either of genius or erudition, he was absolutely ignorant of the art of criticism, as well as of the poetry of that time, and the language of his author.”¹³ The 1737 letter to Birch also shows that Warburton expected that he and Hanmer would be collaborating in some way, that he and Hanmer would be editing while he, Warburton, would provide the literary criticism, the “compleat Critic” he had already proposed in 1734. If Warburton were to write a complete criticism he would be the first to do so, and if admired it could have furthered his reputation, which by 1736 was already on the rise with his publication of The Alliance between Church and State.

Warburton hinted to Hanmer that a collaborative edition would also be monetarily helpful, for Hanmer replied that he saw no way that Warburton would benefit from association in the sort of edition Hanmer had in mind. Later, Hanmer's queries in London about the possibility of producing an edition precipitated a break between the splenetic Warburton and Hanmer. Warburton believed that Hanmer was trying to steal his conjectures and produce the edition without crediting his weekly letters. Hanmer, in his response, insists that by canvassing the printers he was merely trying to find out if Warburton could benefit from an edition and had learned, he says, that there was no money to be had for such a project, for copies of the large quarto edited by Pope (the edition comparable in appearance to the one Hanmer had in mind) remained to be sold.¹⁴ With gentlemanly dignity, the nobleman apologizes to the clergyman for any misunderstanding. Hanmer agrees to return Warburton's letters containing all his notes (just as Theobald, at Warburton's insistence, had returned letters in 1736).

Shortly after, Warburton urges Birch to announce to the world in Bayle's Dictionary (the English text based on the French encyclopedia) that he intends to edit on his own a complete works of Shakespeare and that he also proposes to write not only a complete criticism but also to outline the laws of such a criticism, a canon of criticism (the very title Thomas Edwards took later in a work that caustically ridiculed Warburton and his pretensions). For Birch's essay on Shakespeare in volume nine of Bayle's Dictionary, Warburton provided many notes that made their way virtually verbatim into the encyclopedia.¹⁵ In any case, though Birch published the announcement of the new Warburton Shakespeare in Bayle's early in 1739, Warburton's edition did not appear for years—why is obscure—and, as Pope's letter of 18 January shows, in 1743 he was unsettled about what he would do about Shakespeare. His delay seems to have encouraged Hanmer to proceed with his edition. Sir Thomas had waited some time to conclude his arrangements with Oxford, having expected, as he says, Warburton to act. Since Warburton had already written so many of his notes, the project should not have taken nine years from announcement to completion. Something may have stopped him.¹⁶

Warburton's new relationship with Pope could have contributed to the delay. When he determined to produce his own edition in 1738, Warburton had not yet established his friendship with Pope, based on his brilliant (Pope thought) defense of Pope's “Essay on Man” against an attack: “A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, from the Misrepresentations of M. de Crousaz.”¹⁷ Warburton's letters defending Pope were published individually in December 1738 and the first half of 1739 and later collected. His defense shows such a marked turnabout from his earlier views of Pope that some have suspected his motives. Earlier, Warburton had written anonymous attacks on Pope and endorsed Theobald's claims against Pope, defending Theobald against the satires by Pope in the early Dunciad. Theobald's letters to Warburton indicate that Warburton not only agreed with him about Pope's deficiencies as an editor but also encouraged him in snide comments. Had he published his Shakespeare early in 1738, Warburton might have censured Pope's edition at least as enthusiastically as Theobald had. Pope knew nothing of Warburton's attacks.¹⁸ Inspired to defend Pope's poem late in 1738, having consequently become Pope's friend, the recipient of many warm protestations of love and esteem from Pope, Warburton would have to change targets in editing Shakespeare, would have to praise rather than condemn Pope. When he eventually produced his 1747 edition, by that time Pope's literary executor, Warburton credited the edition to Pope and himself—though little enough came from Pope's 1723-25 or 1728 editions.¹⁹ The condemnation of Pope that would have been a likely feature of the edition Warburton had first planned in the mid-1730s is altogether missing in the 1747 edition.

In 1743, after years of allowing his Shakespeare project to lie dormant, he acted out of concern for his notes in Hanmer's edition, then about to be published. Pope, in the same letter to Warburton already quoted, writes,

I consulted M^r Murray on y^r Question as to writing to S^r T. H. We agreed you s^hd not, as it was a thing not even to be surmized, that any Man of honour c^d dream of. But I have enquird farther, & am assured from one who hath seen y^e Copy, y^t there are no notes whatsoever to it, but a Removal only of one word for another, as he thinks fitting.

Curiously enough, at the beginning of their correspondence, Hanmer, who indeed was concerned only to change one word for another as he thought fit, encouraged Warburton not to bother with explanations for his changes. If they were right, they would appear so without explanation (6 May 1736). Warburton, a prickly sort, evidently bridled at this idea, and Hanmer hastened to write him (18 May 1736) that of course he might include the explanations in his letters if he liked, that he had told Warburton to withhold the discussions out of concern for Warburton's time, and that the arguments were certainly entertaining to read. So it is not surprising that Hanmer did not include justifications of emendations but only a few explanatory notes. Like Edward Capell some time later, Hanmer primarily wanted to produce a clean edition. He saw it as graced by engravings, with handsome, large type on fine paper. The long notes that Warburton wanted to write at the bottom of pages (emulating Theobald, the first to do so discursively) would not have answered Hanmer's purpose. Seeing his own emendations unattributed in the Oxford edition, Warburton certainly would have been eager to see it brought down.

Though it is possible that Tonson asked Warburton to write the attributive notes for the 1745 reprisal, it is not likely that he accepted. Giles Dawson shows that the person was someone close to Warburton (he thinks Warburton himself), but Arthur Sherbo demonstrates that Warburton could not have been the one. The editor attributes emendations to Warburton that Warburton himself does not claim in 1747. As Sherbo says, wouldn't Warburton be likely to recognize his own emendations? Wouldn't he credit himself with them in 1747 if he had done so in 1745? That he did not argues against his being the one to attribute them.²⁰

Warburton had no reason to write anonymous notes. In the 1740s, he was aggressively seeking fame as well as fortune. Through his friendship with Pope, Warburton won influential friends (Ralph Allen, 1741), an aristocratic wife related to Allen (1745 or 1746), and, through Pope's and Allen's vigorous campaigns on his behalf, preferment, becoming first Dean of Bristol (1757) and then Bishop of Gloucester (1760).²¹ His career epitomizes success as he understood it and in 1745 was already flourishing with promises of more to come. He was concerned, and had been since 1736 at least, with establishing a reputation as a polymath in spite of not having a university degree, and had already published not only his work on church and state but also the electrifying Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738). Why should he have been willing to do such drudgery as identifying the “owner” of explanations and emendations (those belonging to Hanmer presented without a name) and noting textual variants—and anonymously at that? Perhaps the drudgery of it would account for the anonymity, but this does not seem a job suitable for Warburton's ego. In 1745 Warburton was busy with several projects. According to Nichols's list of 1745 publications for bookseller William Bowyer, Warburton produced religious sermons and a pamphlet defending his Divine Legation, “Remarks on several Occasional Reflections. …” He was also much occupied in bringing out Pope's works.²² Even though he is likely to have been eager to further the reprisal, he would doubtless have wanted someone else do the work.

That Warburton is involved in the 1745 text is evident from the “Advertisement” in the 1745 reprisal alluding to his coming edition, which will set all right that Hanmer got so wrong:

This Edition [i.e., the 1745 reprisal] is exactly copied from that lately printed in Quarto at Oxford; but the Editor of that not having thought proper to point out the Alterations he has made from the former Copies, we were advised to mark those Passages in the Text thus, ———and place the discarded Readings at the bottom of the Page, as also to point out the Emendations made by Mr. Theobald, Mr. Warburton, and Dr. Thirlby, in Mr. Theobald's Edition, which are used by this Editor. The changes in the disposition of the Lines for the Regulation of the Metre are too numerous to be taken particular notice of. As to the other Emendations and Notes of Mr. Warburton, which are for the most part marked likewise in this Edition, we are only commission'd to say thus much; “That he desires the Publick would suspend their Opinion of his Conjectures 'till they see how they can be supported: For he holds it as ridiculous to alter the Text of an Author without Reasons assigned, as it was dishonourable to publish those Alterations without leave obtained. When he asks this Indulgence for himself, if the Publick will give it too to the Honourable Editor [Hanmer], he will not complain; as having no objection why his [Hanmer's] too should not occupy the Place they have usurped, until they be shewn to be arbitrary, groundless, mistaken, and violating not only the Sense of the Author, but all the Rules and Canons of true Criticism: Not that the Violation of these Rules ought to be any more objected to the Editor, than the Violation of the Rules of Poetry to his Author, as both professedly wrote without any” [emphasis in the original].

The 1745 reprisal would merely prepare the public for the new, the accurate, the final edition of Shakespeare, to be prepared by Warburton.

Into this scene steps Samuel Johnson, trying to eke out a literary subsistence, living from hand to mouth, writing both anonymous and signed articles for his friend Edward Cave, the originator and editor of Gentleman's Magazine. Since Johnson's father had not provided support, dying a bankrupt, and Johnson had wasted his wife's widow-pittance in a failed academy, he was desperate for income. Perhaps the idea that came to Pope in 1742/43, that is, that the way would be open for anybody to edit Shakespeare if Hanmer could do it with impunity, also occurred to Cave and Johnson. In any case, Cave's proposal for a new inexpensive edition appeared soon after Hanmer's edition, appended to Johnson's anonymous notes: “Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth: with Remarks on Sir. T. H.'s Edition of Shakespear. To which is affix'd, Proposals for a New Edition of Shakeshear [sic], with a Specimen. London: Printed for E. Cave … and sold by J. Roberts …, 1745,” published on 6 April.²³ The sixty-four-page pamphlet, a series of notes on lines and passages in Macbeth, is followed by the bookseller's advertisement and then a fold-out proposal for the new edition that emphasizes its low cost (one pound and five shillings in sheets) compared with the others available, especially the Oxford at three guineas, and includes a sample of notes from the Macbeth pamphlet. The advertisement lists both anonymous and credited works by Johnson, including his anonymous Life of Richard Savage; the two essays by M. Crousaz criticizing Pope (which Johnson had recommended to Cave for publication in translation and one of which Johnson had translated for him) bound with Warburton's defense; and, by “S. Johnson,” for one shilling, “A Poem, in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.” Both the proposal and Johnson's notes critical of Hanmer would have interested Tonson.

Johnson says he has looked a little into the Oxford editor's Macbeth:

The rest of this Edition I have not read, but, from the little that I have seen, think it not dangerous to declare that, in my Opinion, its Pomp recommends it more than its Accuracy. There is no Distinction made between the ancient Reading, and the Innovations of the Editor; there is no Reason given for any of the Alterations which are made; the Emendations of former Criticks are adopted without any Acknowledgment, and few of the Difficulties are removed which have hitherto embarrassed the Readers of Shakespear.

(64)

Probably the worst aspect of Hanmer's editing was motivated by his belief that a missing syllable “is a never failing mark with me that Shakespear has suffer'd some abuse” (letter to Warburton, Oct. 25, 1736). For tinkering with meter, Hanmer earns Johnson's ridicule: most of the Oxford Editor's emendations are “too trivial to deserve Mention”; though his “harmless Industry may, surely, be forgiven, if it cannot be praised: May he therefore never want a Monosyllable, who can use it with such wonderful Dexterity” (63). He recommends that Hanmer, an esteemed public figure, should leave such petty duties as editing to others:

I would not, however, be thought to insult the Editor, nor to censure him with too much Petulance, for having failed in little Things, of whom I have been told, that he excells in greater. But I may, without Indecency, observe, that no Man should attempt to teach others what he has never learned himself; and that those who, like Themistocles, have studied the Arts of Policy, and can teach a small State how to grow great, should, like him, disdain to labour in Trifles, and consider petty Accomplishments as below their Ambition.

(64)

Having suffered the publication of the Oxford edition, Tonson could not allow anyone else to publish Shakespeare without, as Pope had conjectured, jeopardizing his rights altogether. Writing immediately to Cave, Tonson assures him that he, Tonson, has a claim to the text of Shakespeare, a claim that he will go to law to maintain. Tonson's letter to Cave was evidently persuasive:

Sir, I have seen a proposal of yours for printing an edition of Shakespeare, which I own much surprized me; but I suppose you are misled by the edition lately printed at Oxford, and that you think it is a copy any one has a right to; if so, you are very much mistaken, and if you call on me any afternoon about four or five o'clock, I doubt not I can shew you such a title as will satisfy you, not only as to the original copy, but likewise to all the emendations to this time: and I will then give you my reasons why we rather chuse to proceed with the University by way of reprisal for their scandalous invasion of our right, than by law, which reasons will not hold good as to any other persons who shall take the same liberty. As you are a man of character, I had rather satisfy you of our right by argument than by the expence of a Chancery suit, which will be the method we shall take with any one who shall attack our property in this or any other copy that we have fairly bought and paid for. I am, Sir, your very humble servant,

Jacob Tonson.

Thursday. April 11, 1745²⁴

To soften the disappointment of the failed project, Tonson, I conjecture, gave the impecunious Johnson the job of editing the reprisal. Perhaps Tonson, Cave, and Johnson discussed the matter at the four or five o'clock meeting.

A non-Johnsonian narrative can certainly be constructed: Tonson, at the mooted April meeting, could have revealed that he already had responded to the Oxford edition, that his reprisal edition had already been typeset. Also, unlike some of Johnson's known hack work, the attributive notes provide no clue about the style of their writer.

But Tonson's reprisal edition was probably not complete in April and may have been incomplete in May, when Cave announced it in Gentleman's Magazine, (15: 280). It is even possible that the idea of adding attributive notes was not part of Tonson's original plan but was added onto the project after his discussion with Cave. If, as sometimes was the case and as Thomas Kaminski believes, the Cave announcement of his proposed edition in April signals that Johnson was well on his way with it (193), then Johnson would certainly have been prepared to assign the attributions if Tonson asked him to do so in April. The task would not have been beyond Johnson even were he not far advanced in April on his own edition. He was able to accomplish prodigious feats of labor when necessary; and modestly noting a completed text is less arduous than editing an original text.²⁵

Support for Johnson's connection comes from the fact that though Gentleman's Magazine did not generally publish notices of Shakespeare's Works and had printed none for the Oxford edition itself (1744), it published an announcement of the 1745 edition. It is likely that the unusual announcement appears as a favor to Johnson, a loyal and regular anonymous contributor to Gentleman's Magazine (see Nichols, Anecdotes, 5: 1-58). That Cave helped Johnson in just this way is shown by the next announcement of a Shakespeare text, in May 1747, listed under Warburton's name (17: 252). Not coincidentally, on the same page as the notice of the Warburton 1747 edition, an advertisement announces a reprint of the Johnson pamphlet: “Just publish'd. (Price 1s) Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of MACBETH. Printed for R. Dodsley, and sold by J. Roberts.”²⁶ Sales of the anonymous writer's Observations would be enhanced by Warburton's praise: “… as to all those Things, which have been published under the title of Essays, Remarks, Observations, &c. on Shakespear, if you except some critical Notes on Macbeth, given as a Specimen of a projected Edition, and written, as appears, by a Man of Parts and Genius, the rest are absolutely below a serious Notice” (“Preface,” I, xiii). The juxtaposition of Warburton's 1747 edition and a re-issue of Johnson's 1745 Observations suggests that the advertisement in 1747 is, in part, a favor to Johnson. Would any other hack that Cave is likely to have helped in 1745 have been able to work as quickly or have been as qualified? If so, such a person is not known.

The hole in what is known about Johnson's life at the time allows room for conjecture. No letters for 1745 appear in Johnson's Complete Letters, edited by Chapman, or in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Bruce Redford. James Boswell notes that “It is somewhat curious, that his literary career appears to have been almost totally suspended in the years 1745 and 1746. …” Joseph Wood Krutch, one of Johnson's later biographers, has little idea about what Johnson was up to in 1745. Nor does Clifford, who notes that “Throughout most of 1745 and the first half of the next year there is little evidence of what Johnson was doing. … [I]t is not clear what his assignments from the booksellers were. This is a period of his life about which least is known.” W. Jackson Bate, discussing the absence of apparent activity after the Miscellaneous Observations, sympathetically ascribes the suspension to a transition of middle age.²⁷ But why not the 1745 edition—not a lapse into depression and lethargy, but the most wonderful preparation, in fact, for much else that would ensure Johnson's lasting fame? The month of work would have earned him a respite from further hack labors.

Some of the facts—that no one knows what else Johnson was doing in 1745, that he frequently worked anonymously, and that he had no known source of income for that time—by themselves would be insufficient ground for the claim that Johnson wrote the notes for Tonson's edition and are merely suggestive. But they help make the case when coupled to other more compelling details: his 1745 proposal, his readiness to work on Shakespeare as indicated by his Macbeth pamphlet, the evident efficacy of Tonson's letter to Cave, and Cave's unusual announcement in Gentleman's Magazine of the 1745 edition. It hardly seems reasonable that Cave would further an edition by a publisher who had thwarted his own edition—unless he had a good reason to do so. Johnson would and could take on such a job.

Furthermore, the manner of the reprisal edition—the respect for Warburton, the evidence that the editor referred randomly to a variety of sources, without using any of them consistently or throughout, accords with Johnson's practice in his own Shakespeare.²⁸ The note writer had the Oxford text at his disposal, obviously. He glanced at Theobald's 1733 edition to find attributions to Theobald and Warburton. Warburton, for the same reasons he cannot be the note writer, cannot have supplied the note writer with a complete and accurate list. Warburton may, however, have allowed the writer a quick perusal of his letters—documents that Warburton could not, because of what he says (and later suppressed) about Pope, Theobald, and Hanmer, allow out of his hands, or allow to be copied. Boswell asserts that Johnson was amazing in needing only to scan a text to grasp its import (1: 71); a cursory reading of Warburton's letters by the writer could account for the errors. Warburton is likely to have shown his letter, even briefly, only to someone he trusted.

In his 1765 edition, Johnson often reprinted Warburton's notes, many of which he came to deplore without giving him occasion, it seems, to change his overall opinion about the genius of the man—partly inspired by his gratitude for Warburton's praise in his 1747 preface when Johnson had most needed it.²⁹ Though rising occasionally to refute Warburton's explanations, more often he simply allows Warburton's notes to speak for themselves without admitting his emendations into his text. Not placated by Johnson's mostly mild response, Warburton so took umbrage at the occasional exposures of his logical fallacies and æsthetic failings that in his own copy of his 1747 edition (now at the Folger), he struck out his praise of Johnson, probably in preparation for a new edition that was never required.

A telling point is Johnson's odd change of mind about Sir Thomas Hanmer, difficult to account for in the normal course of events but plausible if Johnson worked on the Hanmer text in 1745. Johnson had dismissed Hanmer's editorial work as beneath serious consideration in Miscellaneous Observations, after scanning, he admits, only Macbeth. In his 1765 Preface, Johnson has a much kinder regard for the Oxford editor and can put aside, it seems, Hanmer's syllabic puttering. In sketching the short history of editions, Johnson says:

Our authour fell then into the hands of Sir Thomas Hanmer, the Oxford-editor, a man, in my opinion, eminently qualified by nature for such studies. He had, what is the first requisite to emendatory criticism, that intuition by which the poet's intention is immediately discovered, and that dexterity of intellect which dispatches its work by the easiest means. He had undoubtedly read much; his acquaintance with customs, opinions, and traditions, seems to have been large; and he is often learned without shew.

After some mild criticism, Johnson deplored the world's too violent censuring of Hanmer's tinkering with syllables. Johnson does fault him for not indicating his literary debts (the fault the reprisal edition rectified), but he ends by asserting that

[a]s he never writes [referring to Hanmer's few notes] without careful enquiry and diligent consideration, I have received all his notes, and believe that every reader will wish for more.³⁰

The mere half-dozen notes in Macbeth did not display Hanmer's perspicacity, for whatever one may say about his text, his few explanations are concise and elegant. The opportunity to read all of Hanmer's notes could have led Johnson to this altered opinion; because the Hanmer text was not authoritative and had no notes about emendations, Johnson is unlikely to have read Hanmer's edition unless required to do so.

Johnson's dictionary, his next major undertaking and the one that made his reputation, naturally includes a large percentage of examples from Shakespeare. Hanmer's limited glossary—the first to appear as part of an edition of Shakespeare and of course included in the reprisal edition³¹—may have helped Johnson decide that a detailed, literary dictionary of the English language would be a viable project, and with his dazzling memory he would have gathered while working on the 1745 edition a storehouse of Shakespeare quotations. Affirming that he had thought of a dictionary before Robert Dodsley approached him (but without specifying when or how), in 1746 Johnson entered into an agreement with the publisher to compile a dictionary (Clifford, 292). Thus, the 1745 edition, a decisive element in Tonson's copyright claims, may also have been a step toward Johnson's more important works, the dictionary published in 1755, and then the 1765 edition, proposed in 1756, when it was clear that Warburton's edition would not be the last word.

Johnson entered the Shakespeare world opportunistically, without, it seems fair to say, adulation for Shakespeare but with an unclouded mind and eye that allowed him to detach himself from ownership. Thus, his 1765 text, which has been called the first variorum edition, registers a new phase in the battles for supremacy that shape the work of the first Shakespeare scholars. His 1765 notes are very unlike the intrusive ones in his 1745 Miscellaneous Observations. He had not yet developed his conviction that the less the text is emended the better.³² In his preface Johnson is less than just to Theobald, disdaining the displays of exultant pedantry that Theobald sometimes allows himself. Still, Johnson's notes are generous to predecessors, including Theobald and Hanmer, and exhibit a spirit of inclusiveness.³³ Perhaps it is not too farfetched to say that the impersonal notes of the 1745 edition could have prepared him for this generosity and inclusiveness—helping him shun his predecessors' overt attacks in their notes on their predecessors.

What remains to be explored is the function of anonymity in editing Shakespeare—which I can touch on only briefly here. Hanmer's is the coy anonymity of one who knows he is recognized, and it can be understood as a feint of false modesty or as a gesture of dignity and status—a Sir Thomas Hanmer craves neither money nor recognition. His identity, however, and the imprimatur of Oxford University give the text an ex cathedra validity, the permanence and finality of a large, clean text—one seemingly untainted by marketplace strategies. Everything about the 1745 reprisal, in contrast, from the anonymity of the person who supplied its variants and attributions, to its size and price, place it firmly in the marketplace, yet it was meant to be a throw-away text, merely a scout for other texts that would come after it. The note-writer's anonymity, contrived to serve the publisher's interests, was not meant to be breached and resists exposure. The anonymity gave Johnson—if he was indeed the note writer—a useful staging point for much of the good work he accomplished thereafter as a somewhat reluctant Shakespearean.³⁴

Notes

1. Giles E. Dawson discusses not only general copyright issues but also analyzes the various moves against Tonson's claim, both before and after 1744. See “The Copyright of Shakespeare's Dramatic Works,” The University of Missouri Studies in Honor of A. H. R. Fairchild, ed. Charles T. Prouty (Columbia, Missouri: Univ. of Missouri, 1946), 11-35, especially 26-33. I use “Jacob Tonson,” the primary shareholder, as a handy metonymy for all the booksellers who had purchased an interest in Shakespeare. Tonson was the principal player. The 1745 octavo appeared in six volumes.

   An earlier version of this essay appeared in Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography N.S. 6.3-4 (1992 [published fall 1994]): 185-207. I am grateful to its editor, William Proctor Williams, for permission to publish this revision.

2. See The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols., ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 4: 439. From the version in British Library, Egerton MS. 1946, ff.71-73, I show the words “mans” and “your,” crossed out, followed by the words that replaced them in the ms. When transcribing manuscripts, I have silently expanded some abbreviations and adjusted other orthographic features. All British Library mss. are quoted with permission.

3. Since Hanmer's was only the fourth edition after Rowe, conventions for assigning credit had not been established. Thus, to say that Hanmer “stole” anyone's emendations goes beyond the facts.

4. 24 January 1746/47; see Folger MS. S.a. 165, reprinted in Donald W. Nichol, ed., Pope's Literary Legacy: The Book-Trade Correspondence of William Warburton and John Knapton with other letters and documents, 1744-1780 (Oxford: The Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1992), 191-92.

5. Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 192n.44, mentions the conjecture first advanced by Giles E. Dawson that Warburton edited the 1745 text; see “Warburton, Hanmer, and the 1745 Edition of Shakespeare,” Studies in Bibliography 2 (1949-50): 35-48. Arthur Sherbo, “Warburton and the 1745 Shakespeare,” JEGP 51 (1952): 71-82, has a strong argument against the claim that Warburton wrote the notes.

6. See James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955). A note by O. M. Brack, Jr., and Mary Early, “Samuel Johnson's Proposals for the Harleian Miscellany,” Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992): 127-30, describes other work that Johnson had in hand in 1743 and possibly later. Thomas Kaminski has a thorough investigation of Johnson's poverty, his hack work and his connection to Cave in The Early Career of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).

7. Several writers have told the story in the detail it requires, especially Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See also Richard Foster Jones, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship with Some Unpublished Letters (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1919), Thomas R. Lounsbury, The First Editors of Shakespeare (Pope and Theobald). The Story of the First Shakespearian Controversy and of the Earliest Attempt at Establishing a Critical Text of Shakespeare (London: David Nutt, 1906), and A[rthur] W[illiam] Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Controversies (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932). Nichol discusses the bequest, xxx-xxxviii.

8. Almost the entire correspondence from Theobald to Warburton and others, and from Warburton to various people, can be found in John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century. … Intended as a Sequel to The Literary Anecdotes (London, 1817). Most of Theobald's letters are in 2: 189-647. The letter of 18 May is in the British Library, Egerton MS. 1956, and has been published by Jones, 343-44.

9. A letter from Warburton that begins “My Dear Friend,” dated 2 June 1934, says, “I have sent you all I could find to cavil at in your Edition of Shakespeare. I know it will be a pleasure to you to receive it, & it is no small compliment to your Edition. For I have been so exact in my inquisitive search after Faults that I dare undertake to defend every note thro' out the whole bulkey work save these 13” (Folger W.b. 75, f.145). How different was his attack in his “Preface,” The Works of Shakespear in Eight Volumes (London, 1747), 1: x-xi, and throughout the Works, where he often criticizes Theobald for ideas he had approved in the letters. Lumping together the scholarly Theobald with Hanmer, Warburton says, “They separately possessed those two qualities which, more than any other, have contributed to bring the Art of Criticism into disrepute, Dulness of Apprehension, and Extravagance of Conjecture” (1: xiii).

10. Hanmer's are in the British Library (Egerton MS. 1957); Evans published some of the letters, 151-55, including Hanmer's last letter to Warburton. Evans also includes a letter by Hanmer to Oxford University dated 1742 that came to light in 1761 and a rejoinder to this letter by Warburton, written when it was shown to him in 1761. See also John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century … in six volumes (London, 1812), 5: 588-90. Robert Ryley, William Warburton, Twayne's English Authors Series (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 99-100, prints the letter to Hanmer by Warburton requesting the return of his notes. Neither Hanmer nor Warburton tells the whole truth in his letter about the affair—as a survey of all of their extant letters reveals.

11. Hanmer's letters (not among those published by Evans) show that Warburton is trying to insinuate himself into the nobleman's circle, but Hanmer resists turning the literary relationship into a more general friendship. For example, after making Warburton a Christmas wish, Hanmer puts Warburton in his place: “And I hope you will not think it [the greeting] improper from so distant a friend as Your very humble servant Tho: Hanmer” (British Library, Egerton MS. 1957, 13 Dec. 1736). Hanmer often says he will miss Warburton's weekly letters; he lets Warburton know that Shakespeare alone connects them. Warburton's method in ingratiating himself was to pour letters and flattery upon his object: Theobald, Hanmer, and Pope all remark on the tardiness of their replies to his very frequent letters.

12. British Library, add. MS. 4320; Nichols, Illustrations, 2:72-73.

13. “Preface,” 1: xi-xii.

14. Pope's edition of 1723-25; its slow sales are verified by a report in Gentleman's Magazine 57 [1787]: 76.

15. Warburton's letter to Birch is in the British Library, Birch add. MS. 4320. See also Nichols, Illustrations, 2: 93, 96-97. See Bayle's Dictionary 9 (1739): 190. Brian Vickers has a convenient extract in his valuable collection of primary sources, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols. (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 3: 81-96. Sherbo shows that Warburton's proposed emendations in Bayle's could have helped the anonymous note-writer in 1745. Birch is also a link among Warburton, Johnson and Cave, since Birch and Johnson both assisted Cave with Gentleman's Magazine: see Kaminski, 30, 32.

16. Or at least slowed him. In a letter to Birch on 18 January 1742/43, Warburton writes that “for my amusement, [I] from time to time go on in preparing Shakespeare for the press”; see Nichols, Illustrations, 2: 129. Considering the urgency with which he had solicited Birch to announce his projected edition, Warburton appears to be remarkably relaxed about the project years later. He also says in this letter that he expects Hanmer's edition will sell so poorly that the plates from drawings by Hayman will be available for his own edition. He was wrong.

17. Warburton's defense was first published anonymously in the journal The History of the Works of the Learned, but Pope soon broke through the anonymity; see reference in Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 5: 491, hereafter cited as Boswell. Warburton and Pope, whose correspondence began after Warburton's defense began, did not meet until 1740, for on 16 April 1740, Pope writes, “Let us meet, like Men who have been many years acquainted with each other, & and whose friendship is not to begin, but continue” (Sherburn, 4: 233). Samuel Johnson encouraged Cave to publish Crousaz's attack and Warburton's “Vindication.” Kaminski (154) points out that Warburton's defense helped to call attention to Johnson's translation of Crousaz that Cave had published anonymously and which he reissued in 1741—another link among Cave, Johnson and Warburton.

18. Maynard Mack says that Warburton spoke and wrote against Pope as late as 1733-34. See Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 744. See also Nichols, Anecdotes, 5: 554. I do not believe that Warburton could have confessed to the anonymous attacks and maintained Pope's friendship, though Pope knew that Warburton had helped Theobald in 1733 and had subsequently broken off with him. Lounsbury (353-62) identifies three anonymous letters by Warburton, dating them in 1729, and reproduces a good part of their texts, showing that Warburton had “spoken worse [of Pope] than ever did Theobald, or indeed any of the writers satirized in ‘The Dunciad’” (362).

    Johnson believed that Warburton dropped Theobald and took up the defense of Pope “seeing him [Pope] the rising man …” (Boswell 5:80). Johnson missed the intermediate attempt on Hanmer.

19. Warburton, as Paul Bertram pointed out to me orally, superficially follows Pope in scene divisions, in marking the shining passages with inverted commas (though marking many more than Pope), and with an index of noteworthy passages (again adding many more). However, Warburton often disagrees with Pope on substantive issues.

20. For Dawson and Sherbo, see n. 5, above. Sherbo does not cite many examples from Hamlet, but the notes in that play continue the pattern he found in the six plays he examined in detail; I offer some examples from Hamlet that further corroborate Sherbo's assertion:

    In the summary that follows, TLN refers to the numbering system in Charleton Hinman, The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare (New York: Norton and London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968). For Claudius's line describing Fortinbras, “Coleagued with this dream of his advantage” (Hamlet, TLN 199), Theobald in Shakespeare Restored (1726) had suggested collogued, meaning “flattered, imposed on, cajol'd” (4-5), but omitted the emendation in his 1733 edition. In 1744, Hanmer accepted collogued, but in the reprint of 1745 it passes unnoted, when it should have been credited to Theobald. An editor not as familiar with Theobald's work as was Warburton might very naturally overlook the emendation and allow it to go unremarked. The reprisal edition credits Warburton with explaining “palmy” as “victorious” (Hamlet, TLN 124 + 6), but how could Pope's executor, Warburton, credit to himself one of the few explanations by his friend and patron that he used, and credited to Pope, in 1747? Further, in 1745 Warburton could not have been so absentminded as to credit himself for the emendation “sanity” in “The sanity and health of this whole state” (Hamlet, TLN 484) when Theobald suggested it in Shakespeare Restored (but again had changed his mind by 1733) and Warburton preferred “safety” in 1747. The 1745 editor did not use Pope 1728, which includes a note on Theobald's “sanity” from Shakespeare Restored.

    In 1765, after retaining Warburton's note about Q2 “safety,” Johnson credits Hanmer with “sanity”: he may have assigned ownership by a process of elimination and never have seen Shakespeare Restored or systematically consulted Pope's second edition.

21. See Mack, A Life, 744. Mack gives the date of the marriage as 1746, Nichols as 1745, Anecdotes, 5: 593. From that time, says Nichols, “Prior Park, the splendid seat of Mr. Allen, became … [Warburton's] principal residence, and ultimately his own property” (5: 593-94).

22. Anecdotes, 2: 174-78; for Warburton's 1745 works, his own and his editions of Pope, published by John and Paul Knapton, see 186, 188-89.

23. Norman Page, A Dr Johnson Chronology (Boston: Hall, 1990), gives the publication date of Observations as 6 April 1745. He has no other information about Johnson in 1745 (7-8). For an excerpt from Observations, see Vickers, 3: 165-85. A copy of the original is at the Folger. Cave's text was to be printed in “Ten small Volumes.”

24. The text of letter is from Karl Young, “Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: One Aspect,” Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 18 (1923): 147-227, rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1975. The letter, on 176, Young transcribed from Samuel Pegge, ed. Anonymiana (London, 1818; 1st issue c. 1766), 23-24, alerted to its presence there by Courtney's Bibliography of Johnson (18). Dawson, “Copyright,” also reproduces the letter, 32.

25. Johnson could work quickly when he wished; he says he “wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages in the Life of Savage at a sitting” (Boswell, 1: 71n.3).

26. See Johnson's letters to Cave mentioning Dodsley in Nichols, Anecdotes, 5: 24-25, 26. Dodsley, Cave, and Johnson often collaborated. See Kaminski, 19.

27. Redford, Volume I: 1731-1772 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York: Holt, 1944), 87-88; Boswell, 1: 175. Clifford, 265. Bate, Samuel Johnson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Kaminski also comments on the 1745 gap in our knowledge about Johnson, 195. The mystery about how Johnson could have survived during this gap is solved if Tonson paid Johnson enough in April and May 1745 to enable him to take a sabbatical from his labors. Kaminski discusses Johnson's finances in detail throughout his book. Other hiatuses in Johnson's work history suggest that a surge of activity might be followed by a lull. Johnson was also, as is well known, subject to melancholy.

28. Robert DeMaria, Jr., in Johnson's Dictionary and the Language of Learning (Chapel Hill and London: Univ. of No. Carolina Press, 1986), discusses the fact that for intrenchant Johnson in his dictionary provides Hanmer's definition and his own but does not use the example in his own edition: “The fact that Johnson chose not to gloss [intrenchant] in his edition of Shakespeare suggests that he proceeded in an ad hoc way on both critical projects, rising to comment where he felt stimulated to do so, rather than on a regular principle” (197). While others certainly used similar ad hoc methods, the method is compatible with Johnson's hand. Kaminski confirms DeMaria's view about Johnson's way of working (113-14).

29. Boswell records Johnson's gratitude to Warburton: “He praised me at a time when praise was of value to me” (1: 176). In Boswell's opinion, Johnson “had done liberal justice to Warburton's edition” (4: 46). Johnson did not forget those who helped him. Robert DeMaria, Jr., points out that Johnson was more severe with Warburton in “cancelled leaves” than in the 1765 edition and that he softened still further in the edition he and Steevens jointly edited in 1773. See The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 231, 258.

30. “Preface,” The Plays of William Shakespeare … to which are added notes by Sam. Johnson (London, 1765), 1: li-lii. Interestingly enough, in 1770-71 Oxford reprinted its quarto edition, with some embellishments, including a list of 1733 Theobald and 1765 Capell variants from the Hanmer readings—ignoring the textual contributions of the 1747 Warburton and the 1765 Johnson.

31. Charles Gildon produced a glossary in his edition of Shakespeare's poems published by Curll in 1710 as “volume seven” of Tonson's 6-volume, 1709 Rowe edition. A four-page glossary also appeared at the end of volume nine, which Curll, with Tonson's approval, added to the eight volumes of Rowe's 1714 edition: the glossaries, the same except for the order of the words under each letter heading, have about 160 entries. The Gildon material appeared also in an added volume for Pope's edition, “The whole revis'd and corrected, with a preface by Dr. Sewell” (title page). Except for a few changes in spelling (e.g., burn becomes bourn) and some additions to take into account Pope's emendations (unknelled for Folio unnaneld), the Sewell glossary appears to be copied from Gildon 1714. The Oxford glossary is much longer, about 23 pages in the 1745 edition with about 450 words, and is an integral part of the edition rather than something added.

32. See Shirley Johnston on his development from the exuberant certainty of Miscellaneous Observations to his mature modesty in his 1765 edition, “Samuel Johnson's Macbeth: ‘Fair is Foul,’” in The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 3, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 189-230. She speculates on the reasons Johnson includes in his 1765 edition notes from Miscellaneous Observations so different from his later practice.

33. For this insight into Johnson, I am indebted to Shirley Johnston, “From Preface to Practice: Samuel Johnson's Editorship of Shakespeare,” in Greene Centennial Studies: Essays Presented to Donald Greene in the Centennial Year of the University of Southern California, ed. Paul J. Korshin and Robert R. Allen (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), 250-70. See also Edward Tomarken, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare: The Discipline of Criticism (Athens and London: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991), who discusses Johnson's use of the variorum method to further his critical aims, especially, 47-48, and 145-46.

    I would also like to thank Kent Cartwright, David George, William Hutchings, and E. Pearlman for their help. Members of the SAA seminar on Editing Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, especially Frank N. Clary, Jr., Irene Dash, Joanna Gondris, Eric Rasmussen, and Peter Seary, read a later draft. Thanks also to Morris Brownell, Thomas Kaminski, and John H. Middendorf for their useful cautions.

34. To his biographer Sir John Hawkins, Johnson said (The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, 1787, 363), “I look upon this [editing of Shakespeare] as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of” (quoted in Boswell 1: 318n.5). The question of what induced Johnson to edit Shakespeare shades into the question of Johnson's regard for his author, but perhaps the two should be kept separate.