George Steevens

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  George Steevens walked from Hampstead to London every morning before seven o'clock. Every day, he made his rounds of the booksellers' shops, talked Shakespeare with his friend Isaac Reed, then walked back home to his library on the heath. This daily ritual was the engine behind one of the most important editorial projects in literary history. Yet the man who helped shape how English-speaking readers understand Shakespeare was also a forger, a hoaxer, and, by Samuel Johnson's own account, someone who had come to live the life of an outlaw. How do those two portraits fit together? What drove Steevens to spend decades annotating Shakespeare while simultaneously inventing fake tombstones and imaginary Dutch travellers? The answers are complicated, and they say something surprising about the world of eighteenth-century scholarship.

• 2. Eton to Hampstead Heath

  ›

  Steevens was born at Poplar on the 10th of May 1736, the son of a man who rose to become a captain and then director of the East India Company. That background, wealthy and commercial, gave Steevens access to the best education available. He attended Eton College and then King's College, Cambridge, arriving there in 1753. He left in 1756 without taking a degree, a choice that would have marked him as an irregular figure in an age when academic credentials carried weight. He settled in chambers at the Inner Temple before eventually moving to a house on Hampstead Heath. There he built what became a library described as valuable and particularly rich in Elizabethan literature. He also assembled a large collection of prints by the painter and satirist William Hogarth. His notes on that collection were eventually folded into John Nichols's Genuine Works of Hogarth, a reminder that Steevens's scholarly instincts spread beyond a single subject.

• 3. Making Shakespeare Readable

  ›

  In 1766 Steevens published reprints of the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays under the title Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson took notice. Johnson suggested that Steevens turn those reprints into something far larger: a complete edition of Shakespeare for the modern reader. The project that followed was published in 1773 across ten volumes as The Plays of Shakespeare with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators. It appeared under both men's names, though the source is clear that Johnson's actual contributions to that edition were very slight. A first revision came out in 1778. Isaac Reed prepared a further edited version in 1785. Steevens had declared himself, in his own words, a dowager-editor, meaning he considered his active role finished. He changed his mind.

• 4. Rivalry and the Fifteen-Volume Edition

  ›

  Jealousy of Edmond Malone brought Steevens back to the editorial desk in 1793. Malone was a rival Shakespearean scholar, and Steevens found that competition impossible to ignore. The edition he produced as a result ran to fifteen volumes and became the definitive statement of his research. Some of the textual changes he made appear to have had a single purpose: demonstrating that he was a more capable emendator than Malone. Yet his broad command of Elizabethan literature gave him something that later editors genuinely needed. Scholars who came after him returned to his pages specifically for parallel passages drawn from writers contemporary with Shakespeare. His limitations as a purely literary critic show clearly in one decision he made without ambiguity. He excluded Shakespeare's sonnets and poems from the edition, writing that "the strongest act of parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service." That sentence is one of the most memorably wrong predictions in the history of literary taste. Reed eventually re-issued the edition in 1803 across 21 volumes, incorporating additional notes Steevens had left behind. That version, reprinted again in 1813, is now known as the first variorum edition of Shakespeare.

• 5. Hoaxes and Mischief

  ›

  Between 1773 and 1793, Steevens found other outlets for his energies, and they were not all benign. Johnson, who remained one of his closest friends, said Steevens had come to live the life of an outlaw. One target was the memory of Johnson himself. After Johnson died in December 1784, Steevens sent a series of anonymous items to the Public Advertiser pushing the claims of James Boswell as Johnson's official biographer. The real motive was to irritate the man who had been designated for that role, Sir John Hawkins. Steevens wrote a completely fabricated account of the Java upas tree, attributing it to an imaginary Dutch traveller. That invented story deceived Erasmus Darwin. He also produced a fake tombstone for the medieval king Hardicanute, supposedly unearthed in Kennington, but actually carved with an Anglo-Saxon inscription of his own invention. He presented it to the Society of Antiquaries, who accepted it. He was also active in exposing genuine literary fraud: he was among the leading figures who challenged the Chatterton-Rowley forgeries and the Ireland forgeries, which involved fabricated Shakespeare manuscripts. A man who manufactured deceptions was apparently well placed to spot them in others.

• 6. Legacy in Stone and Print

  ›

  Steevens died at Hampstead on the 22nd of January 1800. A monument by the sculptor John Flaxman was erected in Poplar Chapel, the inscription recording his contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. The sale catalogue of his library was preserved in the British Museum. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1767, a recognition that placed him among the leading intellectual figures of his era. The first variorum edition that bore his name, re-issued by Reed in 1803 and reprinted in 1813, set the standard format for annotated Shakespeare editions that scholars would follow for generations.