1793. As he grew older, he made some reckless changes
in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those
engaged in the same field. With a malignity that was not without humour,
he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he
pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly
respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames
were in each instance appended. He had known and quarrelled with both.
Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied
to him of 'the Puck of Commentators.'

Edmund Malone, 1741-1812.

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens's quick wit and incisive style, was a
laborious and amiable archaeologist, without much ear for poetry or
delicate literary taste. He threw abundance of new light on
Shakespeare's biography, and on the chronology and sources of his works,
while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new
chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history. To Malone
is due the first rational 'attempt to ascertain the order in which the
plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.' His earliest results on
the topic were contributed to Steevens's edition of 1778. Two years
later he published, as a supplement to Steevens's work, two volumes
containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur
Brooke's 'Romeus and Juliet,' Shakespeare's Poems, and the plays falsely
ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios. A quarrel with Steevens
followed, and was never closed. In 1787 Malone issued 'A Dissertation on
the Three Parts of King Henry VI,' tending to show that those plays were
not originally written by Shakespeare. In 1790 appeared his edition of
Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts.

Variorum editions.

What is known among booksellers as the 'First Variorum' edition of
Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens's friend, Isaac Reed, after
Steevens's death. It was based on a copy of Steevens's work of 1793,
which had been enriched with numerous manuscript additions, and it
embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors. It was
published in twenty-one volumes in 1803. The 'Second Variorum' edition,
which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one
volumes in 1813. The 'Third Variorum' was prepared for the press by
James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson's biographer. It was