Warton writes that the anonymous notes in the glossary are of the late Mr. T. Hawkins. Several of his notes which appeared first in Johnson's appendix were now written for the glossary of the last Oxford edition. He writes that "Collins' memory failed him in the information he gave me about the chemical romance : that information however seems to show, that there was some romance which Shakespeare had made the grand work of his plot for the Tempest."

George Steevens was one of the most learned of the eighteenth-century editors of Shakespeare. Indeed, his primary concern throughout his life, when he was not perpetrating one of his learned hoaxes, was the explication of the text of Shakespeare's plays and poems. A well-to-do bachelor, friend of Samuel Johnson and a few other notables, and the enemy of somewhat more members of the intellectual life of London, he had the leisure and the energy to pursue his inclinations. Professor Sherbo traces Steevens' achievement as editor of Shakespeare and collaborator in his friend Isaac Reed's Biographea Dramatica (1782) and in his friend John Nichols' Genuine Works of William Hogarth. Without the labors of Steevens eighteenth-century scholarship would not have made the advances that it did.