Dr%20Carly%20Watson: List of publications

Lewis Theobald made his name as a Shakespearean textual critic in 1726 with Shakespeare Restored, but it was not until 1733 that his edition of Shakespeare’s plays was published. This article traces Theobald’s development as a Shakespearean scholar and editor during this period. Drawing on his surviving correspondence with William Warburton and on an extant portion of the printer’s copy for his edition, the article shows how Theobald continued his work on Shakespeare’s text after 1726 and how he used the materials he amassed to prepare his edition. This leads to a reassessment of Theobald’s treatment of his copy text, Alexander Pope’s edition of the plays. An analysis of Theobald’s editing of King Lear makes clear that, far from rejecting Pope’s conjectures and improvements, Theobald chose to appropriate many of them as part of his mission to produce a more intelligible text of Shakespeare.

Invited talk given at the Researching the Eighteenth Century seminar, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), University of Oxford, UK.

The eighteenth century was an age of miscellanies; thousands of miscellaneous collections containing verse appeared in print over the course of the century. This article considers miscellanies as a distinct kind of verse collection; whereas anthologies promote authorship as a category of literary definition, miscellanies invite readers to sample a variety of poetic forms and genres and often include poems without authorial attribution. The eighteenth-century tradition of miscellanies devoted exclusively to poetry has its roots in the late seventeenth century, and many aspects of seventeenth-century miscellany culture persisted well into the next century. This article looks at a number of ways in which verse miscellanies offer fresh perspectives on eighteenth-century literary culture. The popularity and reception of particular poems and poets, the formation of the English literary canon, and the status of authorship are all areas in which miscellanies make a significant contribution to critical understanding.

Paper delivered at the 46th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Paper delivered at a conference on 'Text and Book in the Age of Swift' held at St Peter's College, Oxford, UK.

Paper delivered at the symposium 'Unlocking the Private Library', held at Winchester College, Hampshire, UK.

Paper delivered at the symposium "What Signifies A Theatre?”: Private Theatricals, 1780–1820", held at Chawton House, Hampshire, UK.