1709.  A reprint with corrections and some emendations of the Cotes-Benson Poems Written By Wil.  Shake-speare.  Gent., 1640, it contains Charles Gildon’s “Essay on the Art, Rise, and Progress of the Stage in Greece, Rome, and England,” his “Remarks” on the separate plays, his “References to Classic Authors,” and his glossary.  With great shrewdness Curll produced a volume uniform in size and format with Rowe’s edition and equipped with an essay which opens with an attack on Tonson for printing doubtful plays and for attempting to disparage the poems through envy of their publisher.  This attack was certainly provoked by the curious final paragraph of Rowe’s introduction, in which he refused to determine the genuineness of the 1640 poems.  Obviously Tonson was perturbed when he learned that Curll was publishing the poems as an appendix to Rowe’s edition.

Once again a Shakespearian publication was successful, and Tonson incorporated the Curll volume into the third issue of the 1714 edition, having apparently come to some agreement with Curll, since the title page of Volume IX states that it was “Printed for J. Tonson, E. Curll, J. Pemberton, and K. Sanger.”  In this edition Gildon omitted his offensive remarks about Tonson, as well as the “References to Classic Authors,” in which he had suggested topics treated by both the ancients and Shakespeare.  This volume was revised by George Sewell and appeared in appropriate format as an addition to Pope’s Shakespeare, 1723-25.

Meanwhile, in July, 1709, Lintot had begun to advertise his edition of the poems, which was expanded in 1710/11 to include the sonnets in a second volume.[5] Thus within a year of the publication of Rowe’s edition, all of Shakespeare, as well as some spurious works, was on the market.  With the publication of these volumes, Shakespeare began to pass rapidly into the literary consciousness of the race.  And formal criticism of his writings inevitably followed.

Rowe’s “Some Account of the Life, &c. of Mr. William Shakespear,” reprinted with a very few trifling typographical changes in 1714, survived in all the important eighteenth-century editions, but it was never reprinted in its original form.  Pope re-arranged the material, giving it a more orderly structure and omitting passages that were obviously erroneous or that seemed outmoded.[6] It is odd that all later eighteenth-century editors seem to have believed that Pope’s revision was actually Rowe’s own re-writing of the Account for the 1714 edition.  Theobald did not reprint the essay, but he used and amplified Rowe’s material in his biography of Shakespeare; Warburton, of course, reprinted Pope’s version, as did Johnson, Steevens, and Malone.  Both Steevens and Malone identified the Pope revision as Rowe’s.[7]

Thus it came about that Rowe’s preface in its original form was lost from sight during the entire eighteenth century.  Even in the twentieth, Pope’s revision has been printed with the statement that it is taken “from the second edition (1714), slightly altered from the first edition of 1709."[8] Only D. Nichol Smith has republished the original essay in his Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare, 1903.