Mr. (Lewis) Theobald

An English textual editor, critic, and author, Lewis Theobald was baptized on April 2, 1688, and died on September 18, 1744. He is remembered above all for his work on Shakespeare, especially for bringing unusually careful attention to the wording of the plays at a time when that kind of close editorial method was still rare.

Theobald's reputation rests largely on Shakespeare Restored (1726) and on his later edition of Shakespeare, which argued that the plays deserved the same serious treatment scholars gave to classical texts. His corrections exposed flaws in Alexander Pope's edition, and Pope famously struck back by mocking him in The Dunciad. That literary quarrel helped make Theobald widely known, sometimes unfairly, as a comic figure rather than the rigorous scholar many later readers recognized.

Today, he is often seen as an important early Shakespeare editor whose patient work helped establish better texts and more responsible editorial standards. Alongside his scholarship, he also wrote plays and other literary works, but his lasting importance comes from the care he brought to Shakespeare's language and meaning.