Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet

Who was Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet?

Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet was Speaker of the House of Commons from 1714 to 1715, discharging the duties of the office with conspicuous impartiality. He is, however, perhaps best remembered as being one of the early editors of the works of William Shakespeare.

He was one of the founding governors of the Foundling Hospital, a charity set up for London's abandoned children in 1739, which also became a centre for the arts.

Hanmer's Shakespeare was published at Oxford in 1743-44, with nearly forty illustrations by Francis Hayman and Hubert Gravelot. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature states that "The print and binding were magnificent, and caused its value to rise to nine guineas, when Warburton’s edition was going for eighteen shillings."

Hanmer's editing, however, was based on his own selection of emendations from the Shakespeare editions of Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald, along with his own conjectures, without indicating for the reader what was in his source texts and what was editorially corrected.