George Steevens

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George Steevens

George Steevens ( 10. May 1736 in London - 22. January 1800 in Hampstead ) was an English scholar and editor of a historical Shakespeare -Gesamtausgabe.

Life

Steevens was born in Poplar, London. His father was a director of the East India Company . He graduated from Eton College and studied King's College from 1753 to 1756 . He left university without a degree and lived in the Inner Temple for a while before settling on Hampstead Heath . He collected books and in the course of his life he acquired a valuable library of Elizabethan literature. He also owned a rich collection of prints by William Hogarth . In May 1767 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society . Steevens died on January 22, 1800 in Hampstead. There is a memorial in his birthplace, designed by John Flaxman , with an inscription on his work on Shakespeare.

Editorial activity

He began his work on the works of Shakespeare with reprints of the individual editions (quartos) under the title Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare. (1766). Samuel Johnson is said to have made the suggestion to Steevens to start a complete edition. This is how the so-called Johnson's and Steevens's Edition , also known as The Works of Shakespeare with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators (10 volumes, 1773) came about . This first draft of a Variorum edition was revised by him in 1778 and extended again by Isaac Reed in 1785 . Edmond Malone's 1790 edition of Shakespeare challenged his ambition and he began a new edition, which appeared in 15 volumes in 1793. This edition is downright notorious for its “daring and perverse corrections and annotations” that earned it the nickname “Puck of Commentators”. Steevens' Shakespeare edition was continued by Isaac Reed in 1803, expanded to 21 volumes. It is known as the first Variorum edition and was reissued in 1813.

literature

  • Arthur Sherbo: The Achievement of George Steevens. Peter Lang, 1991.
  • Paul Tankard: Boswell, George Steevens, and the Johnsonian Biography Wars. In: The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual. 22, 2012, pp. 73-95.
  • The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. § 17. Johnson and Steevens's text.
  • FE Halliday : George Steevens In: A Shakespeare Companion 1550-1950. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. London 1952, p. 625.
  • Michael Dobson, Stanley Wells: George Steevens. In: The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. OUP 2001, p. 449.
  • Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor: William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. General Introduction, Oxford 1987, p. 55.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Steevens, George . In: John Archibald Venn (Ed.): Alumni Cantabrigienses . A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900. Part 2: From 1752 to 1900 , Volume 6 : Square – Zupitza . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1954, pp. 23 ( venn.lib.cam.ac.uk Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ Entry on Steevens; George (1736–1800) in the Archives of the Royal Society , London
  3. ↑ FE Halliday: George Steevens. In: A Shakespeare Companion 1550–1950. 1952, p. 625.
personal data
SURNAME Steevens, George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English scholar and editor of a historical complete edition of Shakespeare
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1736
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1800
Place of death Hampstead