Shakespeare. Although he had promised speedy publication, "on or before
Christmas 1757," Johnson's public had to wait until Oct. 10, 1765 for
the Shakespeare edition to appear. The first edition, largely subscribed
for, was soon exhausted, and a second edition was ready the very next
month. A third edition was published in 1768, but there were no
revisions in the notes in either of these editions. At some time after
February 1, 1766, the date of George Steevens' own proposals for an
edition of Shakespeare, and before March 21, 1770 when Johnson wrote to
Richard Farmer for some assistance in the edition (_Life_, II, 114),
Johnson decided to join forces with Steevens. The result was, of course,
the so-called 1773 Johnson-Steevens variorum from which the notes in
this reprint are taken. A second Johnson-Steevens variorum appeared in
1778, but Johnson's part in this was negligible, and I have been able to
find only fifty-one revisions (one, a definition, is a new note) which I
feel reasonably certain are his. The third variorum, edited by Isaac
Reed in 1785, contains one revision in Johnson's notes.

"Dr. Johnson has displayed, in this revisal, such ingenuity, and
accuracy of just conception, as render the present annotations a
valuable addition to his former remarks on the subject." The writer is a
reviewer for the _Critical Review_ (Dee., 1773, p. 416); the work in
question is the 1773 Johnson-Steevens edition of Shakespeare's plays.
The remark quoted is from the last paragraph of a long review beginning
in November and seems almost an afterthought, for the same reviewer had
said that the edition "deserves to be considered as almost entirely the
production of Mr. Steevens" (p. 346). In a sense this is true, but the
basis for the commentary in the 1773 edition was still the approximately
5600 notes, both his own and those of previous editors and critics, that
had appeared in Dr. Johnson's 1765 edition. The actual text of the plays
is another matter; a combination of collation and judicious borrowing,