Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/69

Editors of Shakespeare 481 down to 1836, have considerable bibliographical interest, but bibliographical interest almost exclusively. They are all de- rived, with a minimum of editorial work, from contemporary English editions. The possible exception is the Philadelphia edition of 1805-9, anonymous but pretty surely edited by Joseph Dennie, who, adopting Reed's text of 1803, made a few changes after the text of Ayscough (Dublin, 1791), suggested some conjectural emendations of his own, generally needless, and added a large number of original notes, mostly verbal. The Boston edition of 1836, edited anonymously by Oliver William Bourn Peabody (i 799-1 848), at that time an editor of The North American Review, is the first American Shakespeare which at least professes to base its text independently upon the Folio of 1623. In point of fact, Peabody's text is mainly that of Singer; there are very few avowed textual emendations; and of these about one-third "do not follow the Folio, although they would better have done so. ' ' Peabody's few notes deal with the text as such. It is his distinction to have been the first Amer- ican textual critic of Shakespeare, and to have set before him- self at least as an ideal the constitution of a text upon the early authorities. Gulian Crommelin Verplanck (i 786-1 870) issued under his own name an edition published in New York in 1 847 . He based his text upon Collier's, departing from it in several places by reason of his preference for the Folio ; he believed that the Quar- tos represent Shakespeare's early or unrevised work, while the Folios contain his work matured and revised. This in turn is linked with Verplanck's theory of the growth of Shakespeare's genius — a theory which Verplanck took as the basis of almost his entire conception of Shakespearian editorship. It is according to this theory that he attempts to fix the chronology of the plays, and prints them in supposed chronological sequence within their generic division into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. With Verplanck the subjective and aesthetic criticism of the Roman- tic School avowedly enters American Shakespearian scholarship, coinciding rather closely with transcendentalism in general, which had no Shakespearian scholar. The romantic treatment of Shakespeare reaches its culmina- tion in the essays and the editions of Henry Norman Hudson (1814-86), whose edition (1851-56) is distinctly popular rather VOL. in — 31