SOURCE: Kliman, Bernice W. “Samuel Johnson and Tonson's 1745 Shakespeare: Warburton, Anonymity, and the Shakespeare Wars.” In Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Joanna Gondris, pp. 299-317. Madison N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Kliman examines Warburton's role in the eighteenth-century competition among various literary figures to provide the definitive edition of Shakespeare's plays.

Conjectures being the very stuff of eighteenth-century Shakespeare editing, perhaps one of my own will not be amiss. I would like to advance the idea that bookseller Jacob Tonson hired Samuel Johnson in 1745 to write attributive notes, anonymously, in an inexpensive reproduction of the elegant 1744 Oxford University edition. The appearance of two textually identical editions by different publishers marks a tactical scrimmage in the complex moves of competition and collaboration that distinguish the editorial work of Johnson, Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, Thomas Hanmer—and, above...