Steevens

Steevens, GEORGE, Shakespearian commentator, was born at Stepney in 1736, the son of an East India Company director, and became a foundation at Eton and scholar of King's College, Cambridge. He was kept in hot water all his days through his meddlesome and sarcastic temper and his dishonourable habit of making bitter attacks on his friends from behind the anonymity of newspapers like the St James's Chronicle and the Critical Review. Johnson's judgment was almost too lenient when once, in reply to Beauclerk's assertion 'He is very malignant,' he said, 'No sir, he is not malignant. He is mischievous, if you will. He would do no man an essential injury; he may indeed love to make sport of people by vexing their vanity.' At another time Johnson hit him off in the phrase, 'He lives like an outlaw.' Another favourite trick of Steevens was to set up mock commentators, as Amner and Collins, on whom to father dirty annotations he did not wish to own. Steevens died at Hampstead, 22d January 1800, and was buried at Poplar under one of Flaxman's monuments. He began his literary life in 1766 with a reprint from the original quartos of Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare (4 vols.). This work caused him to be employed as collaborator with Johnson in his edition (1773). Of this latter work a second edition appeared in 1778, to which Malone had contributed, and the latter printed in 1780 by way of supplement the doubtful plays and the poems, an act of independence which the jealous Steevens could not endure. Steevens now set to work, with the help of Isaac Reed, upon a completely new edition of Shakespeare (1793; 1803), in which 'instead of a timid and servile adherence to ancient copies,' is adopted the 'expulsion of useless and supernumerary syllables, and an occasional supply of such as might fortuitously have been omitted.' This doctored text held its authority till the publication of Malone's posthumous edition, the famous Variorum Shakespeare (ed. by Boswell, 21 vols. 1821). In his great edition Steevens did not print the poems of Shakespeare, 'because the strongest act of parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.'