espeare had already employed in 'Hamlet' (II. ii. 529). {317b}

Sir Thomas Hanmer, 1677-1746.

The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hammer, a country gentleman without much
literary culture, but possessing a large measure of mother wit. He was
speaker in the House of Commons for a few months in 1714, and retiring
soon afterwards from public life devoted his leisure to a thorough-going
scrutiny of Shakespeare's plays. His edition, which was the earliest to
pretend to typographical beauty, was printed at the Oxford University
Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes. It contained a number of good
engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, and was long
highly valued by book collectors. No editor's name was given. In
forming his text, Hanmer depended exclusively on his own ingenuity. He
made no recourse to the old copies. The result was a mass of
common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted.
{318} Hanmer's edition was reprinted in 1770-1.

Bishop Warburton, 1698-1779.

In 1747 Bishop Warburton produced a revised version of Pope's edition in
eight volumes. Warburton was hardly better qualified for the task than
Pope, and such improvements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from
Theobald and Hanmer. On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly
heaped abuse in his preface. The Bishop was consequently criticised with
appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers;
among them, by Thomas Edwards, whose 'Supplement to Warburton's Edition
of Shakespeare' first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed 'The
Canons of Criticism' next year in the third edition, passed through as
many as seven editions by 1765.

Dr. Johnson, 1709-1783.

Dr. Johnson, the sixth editor, completed his edition in eight volumes in
1765, and a second issue followed three years later. Although he made
some independent collation of the quartos, his textual labours were
slight, and his verbal notes show little close knowledge of sixteenth and
seventeenth century literature. But in his preface and elsewhere he
displays a genuine, if occasionally sluggish, sense of Shakespeare's
greatness, and his massive sagacity enabled him to indicate convincingly
Shakespeare's triumphs of characterisation.

Edward Capell, 1713-1781.

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, advanced on his predecessors in many
respects. He was a clumsy writer, and Johnson declared, with some
ju