The Shakespeare-Expositor: An Aid to the Perfect Understanding of Shakespeare's Plays

In Short

Thomas Keightley’s 1867 volume serves as an exhaustive, line-by-line guide for readers who want to restore precision to Shakespeare’s text. Working across thirty-two genuine plays, Keightley investigates corrupted passages, metrical defects, misplaced words, and obscure early modern vocabulary. He organizes his findings through chronological overviews, specific textual notes, and a concluding glossary. By challenging past editors and grounding his corrections in sixteenth-century syntax, poetic cadence, and printer habits, Keightley crafts a comprehensive manual designed to make simple, unannotated editions of the plays completely clear and fully intelligible.

The Story

Keightley opens his volume with a clear purpose: to equip readers who possess plain, unannotated texts of Shakespeare’s plays with the critical tools necessary to understand them. He begins by outlining his own editorial history, noting that his specific textual corrections are available nowhere else and arguing that reading Shakespeare without such demonstrations leaves the reader blind to why alterations occur. Before entering the individual plays, Keightley defends Shakespeare’s supreme genius against competing contemporary dramatists like Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger. He specifically counters historical critics like Gifford, asserting that Shakespeare possessed unmatched wit and supreme rhythmical modulation, even if his dense language occasionally obscured his meaning to casual audiences.

To establish a logical framework, Keightley divides thirty-two genuine plays into four distinct chronological phases based on stylistic shifts, rhyming patterns, and sentence structures. The first phase reflects early development, while the second moves toward simpler, highly direct language. The third phase, spanning from 1603 to 1609, introduces dense, complex syntax, ellipses, and line-ending prepositions, seen in works like Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus. The final phase returns toward simpler language while retaining advanced structural variations.

With this structure in place, the book transitions into its primary work: a systematic, scene-by-scene examination of individual plays. Keightley moves sequentially through works such as Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, the history plays, Richard III, and Hamlet. In each section, he isolates specific lines that suffer from printer errors, metric corruption, or awkward transpositions. He routinely shifts words across line breaks, restores missing negatives, replaces misprinted words with contextually sensible alternatives, and re-arranges line structures to preserve a strict decasyllabic standard. He also identifies "Metric Prose"—passages printed as prose that are secretly metrical—and cleans up printer mistakes caused by dictation or misread manuscripts.

In its closing section, the work pivots from textual emendations to a detailed glossary of archaic terms, cultural references, and early modern customs. Keightley defines obscure expressions like "Nine men's morris," explains forgotten games, unpacks regional words, and corrects historical misinterpretations regarding Elizabethan folklore and natural history. The entire progression moves systematically from broad critical theory down to the finest granular detail, leaving the reader with a fully repaired text and a rich understanding of Shakespeare's language.

How It Unfolds

Establishing the editorial mission Keightley introduces his project as an essential companion to any standard edition of Shakespeare, asserting that unannotated texts leave readers entirely ignorant of why textual changes are made. He defends Shakespeare's unique brilliance in rhythm and wit over his dramatist contemporaries, arguing that the poet's occasional obscurity stems from dense phrasing rather than a lack of skill.

Charting the stylistic evolution The author divides thirty-two authentic plays into four distinct chronological eras based on metrical habits, sentence structures, and language complexity. He highlights how Shakespeare shifted from early rhyming forms to a middle period of intense, elliptical phrasing, before finally settling into a late style characterized by simpler language mixed with unique line endings.

Systematic line-by-line emendation Moving directly through the plays scene by scene, Keightley identifies corrupted lines, printer transpositions, and broken meters. He proposes precise word substitutions, shifts words across line breaks to restore ten-syllable rhythms, and corrects long-standing errors made by earlier editors like Pope, Theobald, Singer, and Collier.

Unlocking early modern language The book concludes with an alphabetical glossary that unpacks obscure sixteenth-century vocabulary, popular games, traditional devotionals, and regional phrasing. Keightley explains forgotten cultural terms like country sports, historical card games, and unique idioms, clearing away centuries of linguistic drift to make the plain text fully understandable.

The People

Thomas Keightley The editor and author whose central desire is to present a completely coherent, strictly metrical text of Shakespeare's plays. Stood in the way are centuries of printer mistakes, misplaced lines, and flawed corrections by previous literary critics. He ends up asserting his own authority through hundreds of original textual emendations and a rigorous defense of Shakespeare's poetic rhythm.

William Shakespeare The central poet under examination, characterized as an unmatched genius of wit, human emotion, and harmonious verse. What stands in the way of his genius being fully appreciated is the extreme density of his middle-period syntax and the physical corruption of his printed texts. Across Keightley's analysis, he emerges not as a flawed rhythmist, but as a master craftsman whose original words must be carefully rescued from historical neglect.

The Early Printers and Copyists The historical figures responsible for producing the early Quartos and Folios, whose mental slips, line transpositions, and accidental omissions created the textual errors that confuse readers. Standing in their way was the sheer speed of publication and complex manuscripts. In Keightley's narrative, they end up exposed as the primary source of confusion, continually dropping words, mishearing dictations, and misreading original lines.

The Historical Critics and Editors A loose collective of rival scholars—including Gifford, Pope, Theobald, Singer, Hanmer, and Collier—who previously attempted to explain or alter Shakespeare's plays. Their desire was to clarify the text, but their lack of metrical insight or overuse of awkward guesses stood in the way. Keightley continually challenges their conclusions, positioning his own corrections as the superior, common-sense resolution.

In Its Own Voice

"I may here make the boast that mine is the only edition of these plays in which the text is strictly metrical throughout."

In his preliminary notes on poetic structure, Keightley confidently asserts the absolute uniqueness and metrical rigor of his editorial work.

"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling; doth glance / From heaven to earth, from earth to heaven..."

When discussing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Keightley displays how early printers botched line arrangements, forcing subsequent editors to repair the verse.

"I see it in my motion, have it not in my tongue."

Analyzing a passage from Antony and Cleopatra, Keightley points out a probable printer's slip, arguing that "notion" was the true word intended by the author.

What It's Really About

At its core, this volume argues that Shakespeare's original poetic vision was strictly logical and metrically flawless, but became obscured by human error in the printing house. Keightley contends that modern readers do not need speculative interpretations, but rather a disciplined restoration of meter, grammar, and early modern vocabulary. The book addresses fundamental questions of literary preservation: how textual corruption happens, how a scholar can logically reconstruct an author's original intent, and whether poetic meter serves as a reliable guide to truth. Underneath its technical notes lies a passionate defense of Shakespeare's unmatched literary standing, demonstrating that even his most obscure passages become lucid once printer slips, faulty transpositions, and forgotten idioms are properly corrected.

Why Read It Today

The Shakespeare-Expositor offers a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking art of nineteenth-century textual criticism. It will deeply appeal to Shakespeare enthusiasts, literary historians, linguists, and anyone curious about how the plays we read today were pieced together from corrupted early printings. Reading it feels like sitting at a desk beside a sharp, uncompromising editor who examines every single syllable with a magnifying glass, passionately debating comma placements, syllable counts, and printer mistakes.

What stays with the reader is a heightened appreciation for the fragility of printed literature and the immense effort required to preserve it. Keightley makes you realize how easily a single sleepy typesetting assistant in the seventeenth century could scramble a line of timeless poetry.

The book does present real difficulties for a casual reader. It is structured entirely as an dense reference manual, filled with brief, highly technical notes, archaic spelling discussions, and long lists of textual variations. It assumes the reader already possesses an intimate familiarity with Shakespeare's plots and characters. Yet for those willing to engage with its granular focus, it provides an unbeatable lesson in close reading and editorial craft.