If one reads the Account in Pope’s neat and tidy revision and then as Rowe published it, one is impressed with its Restoration quality.  It seems almost deliberately modelled on Dryden’s prefaces, for it is loosely organized, discursive, intimate, and it even has something of Dryden’s contagious enthusiasm.  Rowe presents to his reader the Restoration Shakespeare:  the original genius, the antithesis of Jonson, the exception to the rule and the instance that diminishes the importance of the rules.  Shakespeare “lived under a kind of mere light of nature,” and knowing nothing of the rules should not be judged by them.  Admitting the poor plot structure and the neglect of the unities, except in an occasional play, Rowe concentrates on Shakespeare’s virtues:  his images, “so lively, that the thing he would represent stands full before you, and you possess every part of it;” his command over the passions, especially terror; his magic; his characters and their “manners.”

Bentley has demonstrated statistically that the Restoration had little appreciation of the romantic comedies.  And yet Rowe, so thoroughly saturated with Restoration criticism, lists character after character from these plays as instances of Shakespeare’s ability to depict the manners.  Have we perhaps here a response to Shakespeare read as opposed to Shakespeare seen?  Certainly the romantic comedies could not stand the test of the critical canons so well as did the Merry Wives or even Othello; and they were not much liked on the stage.  But it seems probable that a generation which read French romances would not have felt especially hostile to the romantic comedies when read in the closet.  Rowe’s criticism is so little original, so far from idiosyncratic, that it is unnecessary to assume that his response to the characters in the comedies is unique.

Be that as it may, it was well that at the moment when the reading public began rapidly to expand in England, Tonson should have made Shakespeare available in an attractive and convenient format; and it was a happy choice that brought Rowe to the editorship of these six volumes.  As poet, playwright, and man of taste, Rowe was admirably fitted to introduce Shakespeare to a multitude of new readers.  Relatively innocent of the technical duties of an editor though he was, he none the less was capable of accomplishing what proved to be his historic mission:  the easy re-statement of a view of Shakespeare which Dryden had earlier articulated and the demonstration that the plays could be read and admired despite the objections of formal dramatic criticism.  He is more than a chronological predecessor of Pope, Johnson, and Morgann.  The line is direct from Shakespeare to Davenant, to Dryden, to Rowe; and he is an organic link between this seventeenth-century tradition and the increasingly rich Shakespeare scholarship and criticism that flowed through the eighteenth century into the romantic era.