The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe. 5 vols. Stephen Bernard, General Editor. Vol. 1: The Early Plays, ed. Rebecca Bullard and John McTague; Vol. 2: The Middle Period Plays, ed. Michael Caines; Vol. 3: The Late Plays, ed. Claudine van Hensbergen; Vol. 4: Poems, ed. Stephen Bernard, and Lucan’s Pharsalia (I–III), ed. Robin Sowerby; Vol. 5: Lucan’s Pharsalia (IV–X) ed. Robin Sowerby.

Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718), dramatist, translator of French and the classics, editor of the first post-Folio Shakespeare edition (1709), and briefly poet laureate near the end of his life, remains today a familiar name although of late he has been relatively little read or studied. As a writer, he is best remembered for his contributions to “she tragedy,” but there has not been an attempt at anything like a complete edition of even the original work since the eighteenth century. James Sutherland published a popular edition of the three principal plays in 1929, and there have been paperback student editions of The Fair Penitent (1703) and The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), but heretofore there has been nothing like a seriously introduced and annotated old-spelling Works or even a relatively modest Plays and Poems that eschewed the rather bulky translations. The present attempt to remedy this lack has some virtues, but also, unfortunately, suffers from some severe deficiencies.I shall offer a sober assessment of this enterprise by addressing questions in four realms. First, what governed the choice of copy text, what is the textual policy, and how mechanically accurate is the text? Second, how satisfactory is the explanatory annotation? Third, how satisfactory are the introductions to the various sorts of works—plays, poems, and translations or imitations of foreign works? Fourth, how adequate is the supporting apparatus customary in a full-dress old-spelling edition—as for example, indexes? By way of finale, I shall offer my not-very flattering verdict.The General Editor’s “A Note on the Editorial Policy for the Edition” is repeated verbatim in each volume (though inappropriate for volumes IV and V, which are not concerned with plays). Bernard states that “the last lifetime editions” have been taken as copy text for each of the plays because “collations to the plays show Rowe making significant alterations to the texts and many can therefore be treated as both authorial and significant.” I agree that the alterations are substantive and appear to be authorial, but speaking as a theater historian I would vastly prefer that the copy text be the first edition (which is almost always what most closely matches the promptbook and shows us what was being performed), with later authorial alterations duly presented in the editorial apparatus. There are known cases where additions or deletions were made to the performed text of early eighteenth-century plays, but so far as we know the theaters tended to stick to what the actors first learned unless the Master of the Revels demanded changes or deletions. Presenting Rowe’s second thoughts in the textual apparatus would certainly be desirable, but the text ought to give us what the audience heard. Using the first printed text for the mostly occasional and unrevised poetry seems perfectly reasonable, and that is what was done. The editors of the plays have not troubled with collation of multiple copies but given that Rowe is highly unlikely to have proofread later lifetime editions the omission does not seem significant.Some random collation of bits of these edited texts against copy text has turned up more unrecorded differences than ought to be the case in an expensive old-spelling edition. Many are not substantive, but they are annoying and unsettling. For example, in Act I, Scene 1 of The Fair Penitent a semicolon appears (line 75) that is not in the copytext; at line 120 we find “Subtelties” where the copy text has “Subtleties”; at line 137 a comma is missing at the end of the line; at 190 “between” should be “betwixt.” In the prologue to The Biter we are missing five triplet braces (though dozens appear elsewhere in the edition). At I.1.39 we find “fate” instead of “safe.” At line 109 we find “joy” instead of “jot.” At 145 we have “is safe” instead of “is all safe.” At 158–159 we have “the Man loves to me Folly” instead of “loves me to Folly.” At 209 we find “I cam pu-” instead of “I came a pu-.” At 254 we have “Huswify” instead of “Huswifry,” and at 262 “I want you” instead of “I warrant you.” At 277 we get “you keep him being weary” instead of “you keep him from being weary” and at 278 “having his Belly for of Merit” instead of “full of Merit” as per copytext. In Ulysses at I.107 we find “the noble Strange is thy Care” instead of “the noble Stranger is thy Care.” At line 224 we encounter “And let is serve” where we should find “And let it serve.” At 292: “Well might you hope to woe me to your Wishes” (which is what the copytext says, but should surely have been emended to “woo”); again, at line 463: “Then you wou’d have me woe her for you,” without emendation or note. In the passages I sampled, van Hensbergen was more accurate in the two last plays than her colleagues. But my point is simple. At the level of basic mechanical accuracy, large portions of this edition do not meet the standards expected of an $800 old-spelling definitive text. Where was the general editor? Where was the in-house production person charged with checking up on the contributing editors? Obviously, we all make mistakes, and sometimes they creep into proof, but one hopes they get caught there and expunged at that point—not allowed forever to blight the final product.The nature and quantity of annotation required varies enormously, of course, with the nature of the play. A historical tragedy riddled with allusions to actual people and events presents a different proposition from a made-up comedy with few or no explicit references (say) to contemporary marriage law or social practices. The proportion of space occupied by “explanatory notes” in the Rowe edition varies considerably, but I offer the comparison in the following table as an instructive one. The Behn figures are drawn from volume IV (the first to be published, and forthcoming shortly as I write) of the Cambridge University Press complete edition of the Works of Aphra Behn. I chose The City-Heiress because in my view that play would benefit from roughly the same amount of annotation.What matters in this comparative table is not the particular numbers and totals (which are governed by length, type size, leading, and page size) but rather comparative proportions. Both plays are straightforward textually: hence the relatively small proportion (3.5% and 2.3%) of the whole devoted to textual notes. But the text of the play itself occupies more than 80% of the total of the Routledge Fair Penitent, versus only 59% of the CUP City Heiress. The explanatory notes occupy more than 20% of the Behn, but only about 6% of the Rowe. (In fairness I should point out that the proportion of the Rowe edition devoted to “explanatory notes” varies widely. The Biter, Ulysses, and The Royal Convert give 2.5%, 2.2%, and 2% to such notes respectively; The Ambitious Step-mother figure is 8%; the more historical Tamerlane, Jane Shore, and Jane Gray run to 14%, 14%, and 12%.) The Behn edition’s instructions to editors call for concision in the notes, but even so the difference in the reading experience is enormous. The Rowe edition is startlingly inconsistent: the explanatory notes for volume III are quite good; those for volume I adequate; those for volume II seriously inadequate. Explanatory notes for other parts of the edition are likewise wildly variable. Part, but by no means all, of the difference can be accounted for by the varying needs of the texts.In general, the editors of the plays are sound and helpful with references to people of the time, places, and events. They seem singularly uninterested, however, in these plays as plays. References to scenery, scene changes, and stage effects generally go unremarked, though many present-day readers need help visualizing the way changeable scenery theaters worked in London after 1660. Annotation on actors is brief, formulaic, and mostly derivative from the ODNB and the 16-volume Highfill-Burnim-Langhans Biographical Dictionary of Actors . . . 1660–1800 (1973–1993). Given that Rowe was writing again and again for the same performers, more commentary on the “lines” and skills of those performers is needed—and would have been easy to supply. Several of the plays have pro forma notes on the performers (with much overlap in some cases), but no consistent policy has been followed. In volume I, we get basic notes on actors in The Ambitious Step-mother; none for Tamerlane; some repetitious commentary on the performers in The Fair Penitent. Volume II offers no annotation on actors. Volume III offers fairly extensive notes on performers in Jane Shore but supplies notes only for actors in Jane Grey who did not appear in Jane Shore. Far too much of the performer annotation is biographical, and largely irrelevant: what the reader needs help with are the kinds of roles each performer specialized in. Given that Rowe usually knew for whom he was writing each part, such information could have been an enormous help to the reader in comprehending Rowe’s intentions. Ideally, I think, the first or third volume should have had an appendix along the lines of the 22-page account of “Early Performers” to be found in the first volume of D. F. McKenzie’s edition of Congreve (2011). That would have reduced duplication while supplying much more assistance to the reader in visualizing the impact Rowe wanted.The editors’ introductions are mostly functional as far as they go, but that is usually not very far. “Sources,” “Critical Reception,” and “Performance History” for The Ambitious Step-mother, for example, occupy one printed page in toto. For the plays, one might reasonably expect some account of recent generic forebears; a bit of attention to other new plays brought on in the same season; a specific account of success or lack of same; and a brisk but far-ranging account of later reception (if any) and critical reputation. The editor really ought to tell us how the play fared in Johnson’s life of Rowe, and what was said about it in the major playlist catalogues of 1747, 1764, 1782, and 1812. How did Rowe stand with the circa World War I Cambridge History of English Literature? With the post–World War II Oxford History of English Literature (and its successor, now in progress)? What did volume II of The Cambridge History of British Theatre (1660 to 1895), edited by Joseph Donohue, have to say about him in 2004? Nothing of the sort is to be found in these volumes.Most scholars now agree that the duty of the editor does not extend to laying down the law as to a definitive “reading” of the texts at issue. But insofar as critics of the last hundred years or so have opined and differed, the editor seems to me markedly unhelpful if he or she does not at least report the opinions and differences of opinion. In the case of Rowe, the one really substantial critical account is J. Douglas Canfield’s Nicholas Rowe and Christian Tragedy (University of Florida Press, 1977). The book started life as a dissertation directed by Aubrey L. Williams, who was an exponent of the kind of radically Christianized reading of later texts popularized for medieval works by D. W. Robertson Jr. The editors of this edition list Canfield’s book in the volume V bibliography but have nothing to say about his strangely distorted readings of Rowe’s plays. Canfield’s book is on library shelves; the editors ought to have had something to say about it—if only to advise caution and skepticism concerning its tendentious interpretive approach. For coercive Christianizing, see Williams’s An Approach to Congreve (Yale, 1979). For devastating demolitions of his distortive and wrongheaded readings, the reader may usefully seek out two of the fullest assessments: Harold Love, “Was Congreve a Christian?” in James Redmond, ed., Drama and Religion (Cambridge, 1983), and Derek Hughes, “Providential Justice and English Comedy 1660–1700: A Review of the External Evidence,” Modern Language Review 81.2 (1986).Any introduction to an eighteenth-century play needs to report insofar as possible on the original reception. Decades before newspaper and magazine reviews become commonplace this can be hard to do. Sometimes letters or diary entries can be found, but often not. But where audience response can be found, whether rapturous, abusive, or merely quirky, it ought to be reported—and this the Rowe editors have mostly failed to do. The anonymous A Review of the Tragedy of Jane Shore. Consisting of Observations on the Characters, Manners, Stile, and Sentiments (1714), a pamphlet of 23 pages, is listed in the volume V bibliography and is duly used in the apparatus of volume III with the play. I can find no reference to Critical Remarks on Mr. Rowe’s last play, call’d Ulysses . . . As it was acted at the Queen’s Theatre in the Hay-Market (an anonymous 27-page pamphlet published in 1706) or the rather hostile Remarks on the Tragedy of The Lady Jane Grey; in a letter to Mr. Rowe (a 39-page response published in 1715). Why not? No vast erudition would have been required to dig up these bits of contemporary response. They are listed under “Rowe” in Arnott & Robinson, which for fifty years has been the standard resource for anyone wanting (among other things) quick and easy access to books and pamphlets bearing on reception. I note also that no mention is ever made of two important studies that would have been useful in helping establish the “context” out of which Rowe’s plays emerged: Eric Rothstein’s Restoration Tragedy: Form and the Process of Change (1967) and Geoffrey Marshall’s Restoration Serious Drama (1975).In my view, every introduction ought to contain at least a brief account of how the original performers would have impacted the meaning of the play in performance. And for the plays that lasted decades in the London repertory, some analysis of later casts and their likely effect on the play in performance seems highly desirable—a task made relatively simple late in the eighteenth century by the efflorescence of newspaper reviews. While I do not regard myself sufficiently qualified to judge Robin Sowerby’s edition of the ten books of Rowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (occupying some 483 pages of volumes IV and V), it is heavily annotated and appears to my inexpert eye to be highly professional work.What should a reader be entitled to expect by way of layout and ancillary apparatus in a five-volume, $800 “standard” edition of the sort this one claims to be? I would start with a helpful table of contents that listed each poem by title and/or first line. And I would end with an analyzed index to introductions and explanatory notes. Both are totally lacking here, which is no great problem in the first three volumes, but a nightmarish one in volume IV, where poems and some other pieces are jumbled together in a highly peculiar way. That volume’s table of contents lists “Poems Edited by Stephen Bernard” as starting on page 10 and (apparently) ending on page 20, with “The Golden Verses of Pythagoras” edited by Scott Scullion commencing on page 21. The next item in the contents is an “Appendix: The Music of Rowe’s Poetry,” helpfully supplied by Joe Lockwood, starting at page 93. In fact, the totality of “Pythagoras” in Greek and translation occupies just ten pages, after which we return to Rowe’s poems, though the running head remains “The Golden Verses of Pythagoras” all the way through page 91 (though its pertinence ends on page 30). This is a ridiculous mess such as one rarely encounters in an academic book. Where was the general editor (who was, after all, responsible for the poems occupying pages 30–80 and many of the notes on pages 80–92)? And where was the Routledge editor or copy editor charged with shepherding the edition into print? The failure to list poems in the table of contents or to supply a first-line index is no help at all to the reader trying to navigate this jumble.An oddity in the apparatus is the appendices to volumes I, II, and III reporting “the performance history” of each play as recorded in The London Stage, occupying some twenty-two pages in all. I have no objection, though I suspect that any library that buys this set will already own The London Stage (or the Adam Matthew digitized version of it), but the reportage is curiously erratic. Only volume III reports the receipts (when known), though that is surely a matter of great interest, and while various mostly insignificant details from the advertisements get reported, interesting facts sometimes get omitted. For example, Rowe’s benefits for February 4 and 8, 1714, were priced (evidently for box and pit seats) at an utterly extraordinary half guinea (10s 6d as opposed to the usual 4s and 2s 6d), but his third benefit (on February 15) was “At Common Prices”—facts not to be found in this edition.The bibliography in volume V runs to about twenty pages (roughly half primary and half secondary works). The publisher might more reasonably have done a bibliography for volumes I–III and another for IV–V. As the edition stands, Routledge gives someone wanting only the plays no access to the bibliography. Responsibility for the bibliography is not stated, but I note some oddities and errors. A Comparison Between the Two Stages is given in the original 1702 edition, without mention of the superb 1942 Princeton University Press edition, and John Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus in the original 1708 edition rather than in the heavily annotated 1987 Society for Theatre Research edition. Joseph Spence is quoted from the utterly obsolete 1820 edition instead of the superb 1966 Oxford University Press edition by James M. Osborn. The publication and terminal dates of part 2 of The London Stage, 1660–1800 are in error. Why use the 1929 first edition of Allardyce Nicoll’s History of Early Eighteenth Century Drama instead of the heavily revised third edition of 1952? These are merely oddities that caught my eye, but they do not tend to breed confidence in this enterprise. Either the general editor or the publishers’ referees (if any) should have raised some questions.What is the bottom line? To be blunt, I have to say that if I had been given an opportunity to examine this edition before the Penn State Library acquired it, I would have advised against the purchase. (Routledge sent only volume I for review. I bought volumes II and III [to my subsequent regret] and used the library copies of IV and V.) This is at best going to be a low-utilization item, and for $825 one does not expect gross textual errors, erratic annotation, narrow and inadequate introductions, preposterous messes such as those that mar volume IV, and an absence of needed indexes. This purports to be the kind of “standard” old-spelling definitive edition that Oxford and Cambridge have long championed (with considerable improvements in overall quality in the last few decades). But the result seems less a glorious monument to the not inconsiderable Nicholas Rowe than an exercise in trying to milk research libraries. To find such an enterprise sponsored by Routledge is sad. Forty years ago, Routledge and Methuen were regarded by many scholars as equivalent outlets to Cornell or Columbia or Duke University Presses—and likelier to generate more sales and paperback editions. (My wife still gets a noticeable royalty check every year for her Fantasy and Mimesis, published by Methuen in 1984.) The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe has its virtues, but it is not what the general editor and publisher should have been able to make it. I am sorry to say that I cannot recommend that scholarly studies of Rowe’s plays should cite this edition. The texts are not the performance texts, and perhaps worse, few readers will have ready library access to this edition. As of December 2020, WorldCat records only about thirty American libraries that have bought the edition. Citing first editions available via Eighteenth Century Collections Online will make following up page references far easier for most scholars.Let me conclude with an observation about heavily annotated, old-spelling “standard scholarly editions.” Increasingly these will need to be primarily (and in some cases exclusively) electronic. Giving editors a template into which to fit their texts, introductions, and explanatory and textual notes could enormously decrease the cost of making such editions available to both scholars and students. Nicholas Rowe is a writer of some historical importance, and his work is not easy for the twenty-first-century reader to comprehend and appreciate. We need a “full dress” edition, expertly executed. I am sure the editors did their best, but they did not get the direction and support they needed from the general editor and the publisher. On this point I will second Pat Rogers, whose TLS review (November 2, 2018) concludes, “Sadly the project has been badly flawed by the absence of firm editorial control at the centre.” Too true. This has been a depressing review to prepare for and write, but I need to underline a serious point. Libraries can ill afford to pour their limited resources into enterprises as badly flawed as this one.