N. Smith, _Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare_,
1903, pp. xlviii-ix). When later a break did occur between the two men,
neither was free from blame. Theobald had asked and got so much help
with the Preface that he should have acknowledged the debt, no matter
how naked it might have made him seem. Warburton, on the other hand, had
had honest warning that acknowledgement would not be made for this part
of his help; and if his synopsis were followed, as seems likely, his
condemnation of the Preface as "Theobald's heap of disjointed stuff" was
disingenuous, to say the least. Far less defensible was his assertion in
the same letter to Thomas Birch that, apart from the section on Greek
texts, virtually the entire Preface was stitched together from notes
which he had supplied (Nichols, _Illustrations_, II, 81).
Three further points concerning the Preface demand mention. First, the
section on Shakespeare's life is often dismissed as a simple recension
of Rowe's Life (1709). Actually, however, the expansion itself is a
characteristic example of Theobald's habit of exploring original
sources. To take only a single instance, Rowe says that Shakespeare's
"Family, as appears by the Register and Publick Writings relating to
that Town, were of good Figure and Fashion there, and are mention'd as
Gentlemen" (ed. S.H. Monk, Augustan Society Reprints, 1949, p. ii).
To this statement Theobald adds plentiful detail drawn from the same
Stratford records, from tombs in the Stratford Church, and from
documents in the Heralds' Office connected with the coat of arms
obtained for the playwright's father.
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