10 Facts About George Steevens

George Steevens was an English Shakespearean commentator.

George Steevens was born at Poplar, the son of a captain and later director of the East India Company.

George Steevens was educated at Eton College and at King's College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1753 to 1756.

George Steevens accumulated a large collection of Hogarth prints, and his notes on the subject were incorporated in John Nichols's Genuine Works of Hogarth.

George Steevens walked from Hampstead to London every morning before seven o'clock, discussed Shakespearian questions with his friend, Isaac Reed, and, after making his daily round of the booksellers shops, returned to Hampstead.

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George Steevens began his work as a Shakespearean editor with reprints of the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays, entitled Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare.

George Steevens made changes in the text sometimes apparently with the sole object of showing how much abler he was as an emendator than Malone, but his wide knowledge of Elizabethan literature stood him in good stead, and subsequent editors have gone to his pages for parallel passages from contemporary authors.

George Steevens was one of the foremost in exposing the Chatterton-Rowley and the Ireland forgeries.

George Steevens wrote an entirely fictitious account of the Java upas tree, derived from an imaginary Dutch traveller, which imposed on Erasmus Darwin, and he hoaxed the Society of Antiquaries with the tombstone of Hardicanute, supposed to have been dug up in Kennington, but really engraved with an Anglo-Saxon inscription of his own invention.

George Steevens's Shakespeare was re-issued by Reed in 1803, in 21 volumes, with additional notes left by George Steevens.