Talk:Lewis Theobald

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Wrong playwright or wrong titles?[edit]

"tragedies of Aeschylus (of which, only Electra and Ajax were done)": something is amiss here. Electra and Ajax are by Sophocles, not Aeschylus. Unfortunately I don't have time to research the correct info right now.

You're right. I got my info. from the DNB in that case, I think. What I think is going on is that these are two separate matters. 1. He got a commission. 2. He didn't do it, and he only did two Sophocles plays, but I promise that I preserved the mistake rather than invented it. Geogre 19:28, 23 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

WikiProject Quality rating.[edit]

Hi, I was doing a bit of housekeeping on the Shakespeare related categories and made a mistake when adding the Class rating for this article. I'd meant to just propogate the rating from WP:BIO, but set it to Stub by mistake.

However, since the rating was reverted I had occasion to go look at the article in more detail and while it's a nice article would easily have merited Start class rating otherwise, it doesn't fill the criteria (e.g. see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography/Assessment#Quality_scale) because it doesn't cite a single reliable source that I can find. --Xover (talk) 15:44, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It uses primary sources and DNB. It's not an article about Theobald's edition, and for a full length "Theobald and Shakespeare," I'd recommend one. In fact, Editions of Shakespeare should be a full length work, as it should be a full book length study. Shakespeare's reputation hints at this: the editors tell us everything about their world, rarely much about Shakespear. As for this article, it has had multiple well respected editors, been reviewed, and has had no challenges on fact at all, and therefore it doesn't resort to the tick of citing common knowledge. See when references are required. If "start class" now demands interlined citation, then it has gone a step farther down the road toward graffiti. Geogre (talk) 15:50, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:NOR, WP:V, and WP:RS. And the criteria for the various quality ratings (mostly inherited from WP:1.0/A) are what they are; if you disagree with their requirements then the relevant Talk page is probably the place to argue in favour of altering them. If it helps I could go through the article sprinkling “citation needed” all over the place. Sadly I can't help you add the missing references since it contains no way to verify the text! --Xover (talk) 16:09, 10 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note that even a single secondary source listed in a References section would be sufficient to qualify for Start class; or even C if the article is comprehensive (I can't tell, I'm not that familiar with Theobald). For B class it would also need inline citations for at least some things as well as an infobox, images, or other supporting materials. If I were to try to review it for B class I would also ask whether the article covers everything we know of him (as I would have expected there to be more information about him), but, again, I'm not that familiar with Theobald so I'd happily trust the judgement of those more so. I'd also be happy to help improve it, but I'm afraid I have no good sources on Theobald to hand. Perhaps you could suggest a few? --Xover (talk) 05:30, 12 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tone[edit]

I added the "inappropriate tone" banner to the article. "...landmark figure both in the history of Shakespearean editing and in literary satire," just to name one instance, does not seem entirely correct or appropriate. In any case, the article has a lot of weasel words and is not written in clear or concise style. Jermor (talk) 15:05, 14 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]