Lewis Theobald

“In an age so obsessed with the idea of correcting and so prodigal of praise, as well as blame, for the corrector, it was only natural that sooner or later that critical spirit should break through classical bounds and seek unconquered worlds beyond. Shakespeare was the first to attract attention. In spite of the attacks of the Aristotelians and the predilection of the age for classical regularity, he was the most highly admired of English poets. Furthermore, the progress of the originally poor text through four folios had left the plays in a worse condition that many manuscripts of the classics. Here, then, was a rich field for the textual critic, and the reward promised to be proportional to the popularity of the poet” (61).

Lewis Theobald was born in 1688 in Sittingbourne, Kent. He originally started his career as a lawyer like his father, but Theobald was mainly known for his translations. As Jones states, “his knowledge of the classics was sufficient to recommend him to Bernard Lintot,” who was a well-known bookseller at the time (2). Theobald entered into a contract with Lintot, originally just for the purpose of translating Greek. However, by 1736, Theobald was toying with the idea of publishing the text with his own notes and revisions on the opposite page of the translations.

In the preface of his 1726 Shakespeare Restored, Theobald states that Shakespeare’s text was in a “corrupt state” and that he “had always expressed the wish that some one would retrieve its original purity” (65). However, Theobald was disappointed in Pope’s effort, so he took a stab at it himself. The reason I found Theobald so interesting was the fact that he was said to be “unusually well equipped for the office of a textual critic on Shakespeare” (66). I found the reasoning behind this very amusing; it the fact that Theobald was such a bad poet made him a talented critic. Jones writes, “the very fact that his poetic genius was slight served him in good stead” as it “prevented him from seeking to merge his own ideas with those of the work under consideration, and restrained him from relying too much upon his own judgment of the poetic value of a passage” (66). So, not only did Theobald have great knowledge of Sheakspeare’s thoughts and diction, but his lack of poetic genius also allowed him to be an unbiased critic who didn’t try to replace Shakespeare’s original ideas with his own. I thought that this was a very interesting point, as before reading about Theobald, I had assumed that a Shakespeare critic would probably have to be a talented writer in order to  critique Shakespeare’s poetry. I think Theobald was different than many of Shakespeare’s other critics because he was mostly concerned with keeping the “original purity” of Shakespeare’s written work.



Lewis Theobald, his contribution to English scholarship by Richard Foster Jones