"Distinguished by the Letter C": Edmond Malone and Edward Capell as Rival Editors of Shake-speares Sonnets

I N HIS SUPPLEMENT TO THE EDITION OF SHAKSPEARE’S PLAYS, published in 1780, Edmond Malone included an edited text of the 1609 quarto Shake-speares Sonnets. In the advertisement, he extolled the virtues of his undertaking, claiming that it was “somewhat extraordinary, that none of [Shakespeare’s] various editors should have ... taken the trouble to compare [his poetical works] with the earliest editions.” The idea of Malone as a great Sonnets hero, rescuing the 1609 quarto from oblivion by reprinting it first in his Supplement and then in his own edition, The Plays and Poems of Shakespeare (1790), has been largely accepted by modern critics. But although Malone was the first to publish an annotated text, he was not the first to appreciate the value of the quarto or to confer on it serious editorial attention. That individual, I will argue, was Edward Capell (1713–1781), Cambridge scholar, Deputy Inspector of Plays, and friend of David Garrick, who dedicated his life to the study of Shakespeare. Capell’s importance as an editor of Shakespeare’s plays had been underestimated by modern scholars until the work of Alice Walker and Hymen Harold Hart in the 1960s. According to Walker, Capell “revolutionized