Modernizing Shakespeare: Nicholas Rowe and The Tempest

Abstract

TN THE LONDON GAZETTE FOR 30 MAY TO 2 JUNE 1709 the publisher Jacob Tonson lannounced: There is this day Publish'd . . . the Works of Mr. William Shakespear, in six Vols. 8vo. Adorn'd with Cuts, Revis'd and carefully Corrected: With an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by N.Rowe, Esq; Price 30s51 In recent years there has been no shortage of studies of eighteenth-century editing,2 but Nicholas Rowe's edition for Tonson in 1709, the first and, in many respects, the most significant of the sequence, has received comparatively little attention.3 Whatever the limitations in Rowe's consultation of early printings, Rowe established a practice of presentation and modernization of Shakespeare's text that continues to exert exceptional influence. It is the detail of his treatment of the orthography and punctuation of the early texts of Shakespeare that has been substantially ignored and with which this article is concerned. I shall be exploring the stages by which Rowe arrived at his mode of modernization and the implications of the set of conventions he established, especially as it affects punctuation. As Stanley Wells rightly comments, at the outset of his definition of a set of principles for modernization, [t]he practice of modernizing the spelling of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is an ancient one. It was followed to some extent as early as the First Folio, purely as a matter of printing-house practice.4 But