e obsolete or unusual words are explained." Hardly
one of these statements is entirely true. Pope possessed copies of the
first and second Folios, and at least one Quarto of each play that had
been printed before 1623, except _Much Ado_, but these he consulted only
occasionally, and seldom registered the variants as he said he had done.
When he did, he gave no clue to their source. He constantly inserted his
private conjectures without notice, and his explanations of difficult
expressions are few and frequently wrong. Passages considered by him
inferior or spurious he relegated to the foot of the pages; others he
merely omitted without notice. His ear was often jarred by the freedom
of Shakespeare's verse, and he did his best to make it "regular" by
eighteenth-century standards. Yet Pope spent much ingenuity in striving
to better the text, and no small number of restorations and emendations
are to be credited to him, especially in connection with the arrangement
of the verse. He is to be credited also with discernment in rejecting
the seven plays added to the Shakespearean canon in the third Folio, of
which only _Pericles_ has since been restored.

The weaknesses of Pope's edition did not long remain hidden. In the
spring of 1726 appeared "Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the
many Errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late
edition of this Poet. Designed not only to correct the said edition, but
to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet
publish'd." Lewis Theobald, the author, was a translator and scholar,
much better equipped than Pope for the work of editing, and his
merciless exposure of Pope's defects gave a foretaste of the critical
ability later displayed in the edition of Shakespeare which he published
in 1734. Lovers of Shakespeare discerned at the time the service
performed by Theobald in this attack on Pope, but the publication in
1728 of the first edition of the _Dunciad_, with Theobald as hero, gave
Pope his revenge, and cast over the reputation of his critic a cloud
which is only now dispersing. Modern scholarship, however, has come to
recognize the primacy of Theobald among emendators of Shakespeare's
text, and the most famous of his contributions, his correction of "a
table of green fields" to "'a babled of green fields," in Quickly's
account of the death of Falstaff in _Henry V_, II. iii. 17, is only a
specially brilliant example of the combination