and praise the same qualities over and over again. The "Testimonies" also includes commendations from Pope's friends. The words of Edward Young, James Thomson and Jonathan Swift are brought together to praise Pope specifically for being temperate and timely in his charges. The conclusion asks the reader "to chuse whether thou wilt incline to the Testimonies of Authors avowed" (like Pope's friends) "or of Authors concealed" (like many of the Dunces) – in short, "of those who knew him, or of those who knew him not". "Tibbald" King of Dunces Alexander Pope had a proximal, close and long term cause for choosing Lewis Theobald as the King of Dunces for the first version of the Dunciad. The immediate cause was Theobald's publication of Shakespeare Restored, or a Specimen of the many Errors as well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his late edition of this poet; designed not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the true Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever published in 1726. Pope had published his own version of Shakespeare in 1725, and he had made a number of errors in it. He had "smoothed" some of Shakespeare's lines, had chosen readings that eliminated puns (which Pope regarded as low humour), and had, indeed, missed several good readings and preserved some bad ones. In the Dunciad Variorum, Pope complains that he had put out newspaper advertisements when he was working on Shakespeare, asking for anyone with suggestions to come forward, and that Theobald had hidden all of his material. Indeed, when Pope produced a second edition of his Shakespeare in 1728, he incorporated many of Theobald's textual readings. Pope, however, had already a quarrel with Theobald. The first mention of Theobald in Pope's writings is the 1727 "Peri Bathous", in Miscellanies, The Last Volume (which was the third volume), but Pope's attack there shows that Theobald was already a figure of fun. Regardless of the quarrels, though, Theobald was, in a sense, the nearly perfect King of Dunces. The Dunciads action concerns the gradual sublimation of all arts and letters into Dulness by the action of hireling authors. Theobald, as a man who had attempted the stage and failed, plagiarised a play, attempted translation and failed to such a degree that John Dennis referred to him as a "notorious Ideot", attempted subscription translation and failed to produce, and who had just