it was provided by George Steevens. Steevens' contributions to the text
and annotation of Shakespeare's plays concern students of the dramatist;
That Johnson had to say about the plays concerns Johnsonians as veil as
Shakespeareans. And it is unfortunately true that too little attention
has been paid to what is after all Johnson's final and reconsidered
judgment on a number of passages in the plays.

The decision to reprint the commentary in the 1773 edition may be
questioned. Should not the 1765 text of the notes be reprinted, since
it, after all, is nearest to the author's manuscript? Will not errors
from the second and third editions have been perpetuated and new ones
committed in 1773, an inevitable result of reprinting any large body of
material? Ideally, the 1765 edition should be the copy-text. But
Johnson made about 500 revisions in his commentary, adding eighty-four
new notes and omitting thirty-four of his original notes in the first
edition. Obviously, Johnson cannot, or should not, be condemned for a
note in the 1765 edition which he omitted in 1773. Yet in selections
from Johnson's notes to Shakespeare that appear in anthologies some of
these offending notes have been reprinted without any indication that
the editors knew of their later retraction. In seventy-three notes
Johnson adds comments to his original note; in eighty-eight, to the
notes of other editors and critics. He revises seventy-five of his
original notes and he omits ten comments on the notes of others. And
there are many other changes. Some of the revisions come from the
Appendix to the 1765 edition. I have collated the notes in the 1765 and
1773 editions for evidence of revision; changes in punctuation were
passed over, and I must admit that I do not think them important. In
the light of my collation and because of the greater clumsiness of an
apparatus to indicate revisions in the 1765 notes I have elected to use
the 1773 text of Johnson's commentary, trusting that I have not