g in
the writer's period tried to bring all relevant, ascertainable fact to
bear on the establishment of the author's text and the explication of
his obscurities. For Theobald was the first editor of Shakespeare who
displayed a well grounded knowledge of Shakespeare's language and
metrical practice and that of his contemporaries, the sources and
chronology of his plays, and the broad range of Elizabethan-Jacobean
drama as a means of illuminating the work of the master writer. Thus
both in the edition itself and in his Preface, which stands as the first
significant statement of a scholar's editorial duties and methods in
handling an English classic, Theobald takes his place as an important
progenitor of modern English studies.

It is regrettable, though it was perhaps historically inevitable, that
this pioneer of English literary scholarship should have been tagged
"piddling Theobald" by Pope and crowned the first king of _The Dunciad_.
Pope's edition of Shakespeare was completed by 1725, and in the
following year Theobald made the poet his implacable enemy when he
issued his _Shakespeare Restored_, which demolished Pope's pretensions
as an editor by offering some two hundred corrections. But the conflict
was not merely strife between two writers: it was a clash between two
kinds of criticism in which the weight of tradition and polite taste
were all on the side of Pope. What Theobald had done, in modern
terms, was to open the rift between criticism and scholarship or, in
eighteenth-century terms, to proclaim himself a "literal critic" and to
insist upon the need for "literal criticism" in the understanding and
just appreciation of an older writer. The new concept, which Theobald
owed largely to Richard Bentley as primate of the classical scholars,
was of course the narrower one--implicit in it was the idea of
specialization--and Theobald's opponents among the literati were
quick to assail him as a mere "Word-catcher" (cf. R.F. Jones, _Lewis
Theobald_, 1919, p. 114).

His own edition of Shakespeare, therefore, was the work of a man and a
method on trial. At first Theobald had proposed simply to write further
commentary on Shakespeare's plays, but by 1729 he determined to issue a
new edition and in October of that year signed a contract with Tonson.
From the first Theobald found warm support for his project among
booksellers, incipient patrons, and men of learning. His work went
forward steadily; subscribers, including