ABSTRACT
Commentary is inevitably both a sociable and a progressive business. No definitive and complete commentary, on any author rich and difficult and various enough to be an object of commentary, has ever been produced at any one time by an individual scholar. This statement may still be true in an age of search engines and full-text databases. It was certainly true when Samuel Johnson memorably told his readers, in the preface to his 1765 Shakespeare, that “the compleat explanation of an author not systematick and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast” (103). The issue is partly of human capacity. No single mind, working on its own, may be expected to match or map the complex and extensive range of reference and allusion to be found in the writings of a Shakespeare, or a Swift, or a George Eliot. It is partly, too, an issue of history, of the varied explanatory encounters that Hamlet or A Tale of a Tub or Middlemarch make as they swim down the gutter of time. The editor may feel justified in leaving at least some cruces to the hands of a later age. As Johnson puts it, in the preface to the Dictionary, “when … Aristotle doubts whether oureus, in the Iliad, signifies a mule, or muleteer, I may freely, without shame, leave some obscurities to happier industry, or future information.” And future editors may similarly feel able, as they shed light on some of those obscurities, to draw on a past, and now common, stock of scholiastic knowledge. The community of annotation in fact is both synchronic and diachronic, subsisting both amongst contemporaries, and amongst annotators and their predecessors and successors.
