STEEVENS, GEORGE (1736-1800), English Shakespear ian commentator, was born at Poplar on May io, 1736, the son of an East India captain, afterwards a director of the company. He was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge. Leaving the university (1756) without a degree, he settled in chambers in the Temple, removing later to a house on Hampstead Heath, where he collected a valuable library, rich in Elizabethan literature. He 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 book sellers' shops, returned to Hampstead. He published in 1766 re prints of the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays, entitled Twenty of the Plays of Shakespeare. . . . Dr. Johnson sug gested to him the preparation of a complete edition of Shakes peare. The result, known as Johnson's and Steevens's edition, was The Works of Shakespeare with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators (io vols., 1773), Johnson's contribu tions to which were very slight. This early attempt at a variorum edition was revised and reprinted in 1778, and further edited in 1785 by Isaac Reed; but in 1793 Steevens, who had asserted that he was now a "dowager-editor," was persuaded by his jealousy of Edmund Malone to prepare an edition of fifteen volumes. He
made somewhat reckless emendations, but the edition showed a wide knowledge of Elizabethan literature. Steevens was one of the foremost in exposing the Chatterton-Rowley and the Ireland forgeries. He wrote an entirely fictitious account of the Java upas tree, derived from an imaginary Dutch traveller, which im posed on Erasmus Darwin, and he hoaxed the Society of Anti quaries 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. He died at Hampstead on Jan. 22, 1800. A monument to his memory is in Poplar Chapel.
Steevens's Shakespeare was re-issued by Isaac Reed in 5803, in 21 volumes, with additional notes left by Steevens. This, which is known as the "first variorum" edition, was reprinted in 1813. Steevens's notes are also incorporated in the edition of 1821, begun by Edmund Malone and completed by James Boswell the younger.