Shakespeare available to the general reader in the reign of Anne; Rowe's
editorial, biographical, and critical work helped to make him
comprehensible within the framework of contemporary taste.

When Rowe's edition appeared twenty-four years had passed since the
publication of the Fourth Folio. As Allardyce Nicoll has shown, Tonson
owned certain rights in the publication of the plays, rights derived
ultimately from the printers of the First Folio. Precisely when he
decided to publish a revised octavo edition is not known, nor do we know
when Rowe accepted the commission and began his work. McKerrow has
plausibly suggested that Tonson may have been anxious to call attention
to his rights in Shakespeare on the eve of the passage of the copyright
law which went into effect in April, 1710.[2] Certainly Tonson must have
felt that he was adding to the prestige which his publishing house had
gained by the publication of Milton and Dryden's Virgil.

In March 1708/9 Tonson was advertising for materials "serviceable to
[the] Design" of publishing an edition of Shakespeare's works in six
volumes octavo, which would be ready "in a Month." There was a delay,
however, and it was on 2 June that Tonson finally announced: "There is
this day Publish'd ... the Works of Mr. William Shakespear, in six Vols.
8vo. adorn'd with Cuts, Revis'd and carefully Corrected: With an Account
of the Life and Writings of the Author, by N. Rowe, Esq; Price 30s."
Subscription copies on large paper, some few to be bound in nine
volumes, were to be had at his shop.[3]

The success of the venture must have been immediately apparent. By 1710
a second edition, identical in title page and typography with the first,
but differing in many details, had been printed,[4] followed in 1714 by
a third in duodecimo. This so-called second edition exists in three