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This book may be of more interest to eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scholars than to Shakespeareans (unless they happen to be editing one of the plays). What Sherbo has done is to rescue from near oblivion seven rather important Shakespeare scholars active between 1775 and 1821, giving something of their lives and numerous examples of their interpretations and observations on Shakespeare's plays, most of which have been unknown to, or ignored by, subsequent scholars and editors. For most Shakespeareans, the chief interest may be, as I found, in the devotion given to the bard during this period of history, the masses of notes and commentary in the huge editions as well as elsewhere.
Sherbo devotes a chapter to each of the seven scholars. The first is Thomas Tyrwhitt (1730-86), best known perhaps for the earliest scholarly edition of The Canterbury Tales. But the year after Samuel Johnson's edition of Shakespeare in 1775, Tyrwhitt also wrote a book of observations on Shakespeare. Sherbo carefully has checked both the New Variorum and the New Arden editions of the plays and finds that many of these interpretations have been either ignored or else credited to later scholars who got them from Tyrwhitt. One embarrassing omission which Sherbo notes is that the editor of the New Arden Measure for Measure cites Tyrwitt's bad guess at an interpretation but neglects his later correction of it.
The second scholar is George Tollet (1725-79), gentleman-farmer, who contributed more than four hundred notes to the 1778 Johnson-Steevens edition of Shakespeare. Many of these explain country references which city editors would not recognize, from the "unbolted mortar" of Lear to the "backed like...