TABLE OF QUARTO EDITIONS BEFORE 1623

Entries in
Stationers'
Register		Dates OfSource of
Q Text		Source of
F1 Text
Q1Q2Q3Q4Q5Q6
T. A.Feb. 6, 1594159416001611 PlayhouseQ3 completed and
corrected
R. IIAug. 29, 15971597159816081615 PlayhouseQ4 corrected
R. IIIOct. 19, 1597159715981602160516121622DisputedDisputed
R. J.No entry159715991609n.d. {Q1 Reported
Q2 Playhouse		Q3 from Q2
1 H. IVFeb. 25, 1598159815991604160816131622PlayhouseQ5 corrected
L. L. L.No entry1598 PlayhouseQ1
Merch.
July 22, 1598
(conditional)
Oct. 28, 16001600{1600
or
1619		 PlayhouseQ1 (Heyes)
H. V.
[Aug. 4, 1600]
"to be stayed"		16001602{1608
or
1619		 ReportedIndependent
M. Ado
[Aug. 4, 1600]
"to be stayed"
Aug. 23, 1600
1600
Playhouse
Q1 corrected
2 H. IVAug. 23, 16001600 PlayhouseIndependent
M. N. D.Oct. 8, 16001600{1600
or
1619		 PlayhouseQ2 corrected
M. W.Jan. 18, 160216021619 ReportedIndependent
Hml.July 26, 160216031604,51611 {Q1 Reported
Q2 Playhouse		Independent
LearNov. 26, 16071608{1608
or
1619		 Disputed
Disputed (Q1 in
several states)
T. C.Feb. 7, 1603
(conditional)
Jan. 28, 1609		}1609 Playhouse
Independent (Q1
in two issues)
Per.May 20, 16081609160916111619 Reported
Not in F1
F3 from Q4
Oth.Oct. 6, 16211622 PlayhouseIndependent

The First FolioWe come now to the publication of the First Folio, the most important single volume in the history of the text of Shakespeare. On November 8, 1623, the following entry occurs in the Stationers' Register:

Mr. Blount: Isaak Jaggard. Entred for their copie under the hands of Mr Doctor Worrall and Mr Cole, Warden, Mr William Shakspeers Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said copyes as are not formerly entred to other men vizt, Comedyes. The Tempest. The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errors. As you like it. All's well that ends well. Twelft Night. The winters tale. Histories. The thirde part of Henry the sixt. Henry the eight. Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius Cæsar. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline.

One notes here the omission of 1 and 2 Henry VI, King John, and The Taming of the Shrew, which had neither been previously entered nor issued in Quarto. This is probably due to the fact that three of these are based on older plays of which Quartos exist, which may have seemed to the publishers reason enough to save their sixpences. If we assume that "The thirde part of Henry the sixt" is a misprint for "The first part," the explanation covers the whole case. The registration of Antony and Cleopatra was superfluous, as it had been entered, though not printed, so far as we know, on May 20, 1608.

There are thus in the First Folio, the publication of which immediately followed this entry in 1623, twenty plays not before issued, for which the text of this volume is our sole authority. The emphasis so commonly placed on the supreme value of the text of the First Folio is justified with regard to these twenty plays; as for the remaining seventeen, its importance is shared, in proportions varying from play to play, with the texts of the Quartos. The sources from which the compilers of the Folio obtained their new material were in all probability playhouse copies, as in the case of the better Quartos. Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare's actor colleagues and friends, who sign the Address to the Readers,[9] would obviously be the instruments for obtaining such copies. As for the so-called "private transcripts" which some have postulated as a source of material, there is no evidence that at this date any such existed. Whether any of the playhouse manuscripts provided by Heminge and Condell were in Shakespeare's autograph we can neither affirm nor deny, but it is well to be cautious in accepting at its face value the implication contained in their words that they had "scarce received from him a blot in his papers."

The Title Page of the First Folio
(From the copy in the New York Public Library.)

The First FolioThe First Folio is a large volume of 908 pages, measuring in the tallest extant copy 13⅜ x 8½ inches. A reduced facsimile of the title page with the familiar wood-cut portrait appears on the opposite page. The text is printed in two columns with sixty-six lines to a column. The typography is only fairly good, and many mistakes occur in the pagination. Extant copies, of which there are at least 156, vary in some respects, on account of the practice of making corrections while the sheets were being printed. The printer was William Jaggard, and his associates in the publishing enterprise were his son Isaac and the booksellers, William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount. Estimates of the size of the edition vary from five to six hundred.

Many of the causes which made the text of these early editions inaccurate are common to all the plays, while some are peculiar to those obtained by reporters in the theater. Of the first, the most fundamental is, of course, the illegibility or ambiguity of the author's original manuscript. Such flaws were perpetuated and multiplied with each successive transcript, and when the manuscript copy came into the printer's hands, the errors of the compositor—confusion of words sounding alike, of words looking alike, unconscious substitution of synonyms, mere manual slips, and the like—were added to those already existing. The absence of any uniform spelling, and carelessness in punctuation, which led to these being freely modified by the printer, increased the risk of corruption. The punctuation of both Quartos and Folio, though by no means without weight, cannot be regarded as having the author's sanction, and all modernized editions re-punctuate with greater or less freedom. Most nineteenth-century editors carry on with minor modifications the punctuation of Pope, so that their texts show a composite of sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century methods; the text used in the Tudor edition is frankly punctuated, as far as the syntax permits, according to modern methods, with, it is believed, no loss in authority. There is no clear evidence that, in such productions as plays, proof was read outside of the printing-office. The theory, insisted on by Dr. Furness in successive volumes of the New Variorum Shakespeare, that the Elizabethan compositor set type to dictation is without foundation, the phenomena which he seeks to explain by it occurring commonly to-day when there is no question of such a practice.

Another class of variation in text arose from the treatment of the manuscript in the playhouse. Cuts, additions, and alterations were made for acting purposes, stage directions were added with or without the assistance of the author, revivals of the play called for revision by the original writer or another. The majority of stage directions in modern editions, except exits and entrances, are due to editors from Rowe onwards, and these unauthorized additions are distinguished in the Tudor edition by brackets. Almost Corruptions of Textall notes of place at the beginnings of scenes belong to this class.

The defects to which the texts of the surreptitiously obtained Quartos are particularly subject include omissions and alterations due to lapse of memory on the part of the actors, additions due to the tendency to improvise which Shakespeare censures in Hamlet, omissions due to the reporter's failure to hear or to write quickly enough, garbled paraphrases made up to supply such omissions, and the writing of prose as verse and verse as prose.

Such are the most important of the causes of the corruptions which the long series of editors of Shakespeare have devoted their study and their ingenuity to remedying. The series really begins with the second Folio of 1632 and is continued with but slight improvements in the third Folio of 1663, reprinted with the addition of Pericles and six spurious plays in 1664, and in the fourth Folio of 1685. The emendations made in the seventeenth-century editions are mainly modernizations in spelling and such minor changes as occurred to members of the printing staff. In no case do they have any authority except such as may be supposed to belong to a man not far removed from Shakespeare in date; and they add about as many mistakes as they remove.

The difficulty of the task of the modern editor varies greatly from play to play. It is least in the twenty plays for which the First Folio is the sole authority, greater in the eight in which the Folio reprints a Quarto with some variations, greatest in the nine in which Folio and Quarto represent rival versions. In these last cases, it is the duty of the editor to decide from all the accessible data which version has the best claim to represent the author's intention, and to make that a basis to be departed from only in clear cases of corruption. The temptation, which no editor has completely resisted, is naturally towards an eclecticism which adopts the reading that seems most plausible in itself, without giving due weight to the general authority of the text chosen as a basis. If carried far, such eclecticism results in a patchwork quite distinct from any version that Shakespeare can have known.

The first editor of Shakespeare, in the modern sense, was Nicholas Rowe, poet laureate under Queen Anne. He published in 1709 an edition of the plays in six octavo volumes, preceded by the first formal memoir of the dramatist, and furnished with notes. The poems were issued in the following year in similar form, with essays by Gildon. Rowe based his text upon that of the fourth Folio, with hardly any collation of previous editions. He corrected a large number of the more obvious corruptions, the most notable of his emendations being perhaps the phrase in Twelfth Night, "Some are become great," which he changed to "Some are born great." On the external aspect of the plays Rowe has left a deeper mark than any subsequent editor. In the Folios only eight of the Rowe and Popeplays had lists of dramatis personæ; Rowe supplied them for the rest. In the Folios the division into acts and scenes is carried out completely in only seventeen cases, it is partially done in thirteen, and in six it is not attempted at all. Rowe again completed the work, and though some of his divisions have been modified and others should be, he performed this task with care and intelligence. He modernized the spelling and the punctuation, completed the exits and entrances, corrected many corrupt speech-tags, and arranged many passages where the verse was disordered. In virtue of these services, he must, in spite of his leaving much undone, be regarded as one of the most important agents in the formation of our modern text.

A second edition of Rowe's Shakespeare was published in 1714, and in 1725 appeared a splendid quarto edition in six volumes, edited by Alexander Pope. In his preface Pope made strong professions of his good faith in dealing with the text. "I have discharged," he said, "the dull duty of an editor to my best judgment, with more labor than I expect thanks, with a religious abhorrence of all innovation, and without any indulgence to my private sense or conjecture.... The various readings are fairly put in the margin, so that anyone may compare 'em; and those I have preferred into the text are constantly ex fide codicum, upon authority.... The more obsolete or unusual words are explained." Hardly one of these statements is entirely true. Pope possessed copies of the first and second Folios, and at least one Quarto of each play that had been printed before 1623, except Much Ado, but these he consulted only occasionally, and seldom registered the variants as he said he had done. When he did, he gave no clue to their source. He constantly inserted his private conjectures without notice, and his explanations of difficult expressions are few and frequently wrong. Passages considered by him inferior or spurious he relegated to the foot of the pages; others he merely omitted without notice. His ear was often jarred by the freedom of Shakespeare's verse, and he did his best to make it "regular" by eighteenth-century standards. Yet Pope spent much ingenuity in striving to better the text, and no small number of restorations and emendations are to be credited to him, especially in connection with the arrangement of the verse. He is to be credited also with discernment in rejecting the seven plays added to the Shakespearean canon in the third Folio, of which only Pericles has since been restored.

The weaknesses of Pope's edition did not long remain hidden. In the spring of 1726 appeared "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 yet publish'd." Lewis Theobald, the author, was a translator and scholar, Theobald and Hanmermuch better equipped than Pope for the work of editing, and his merciless exposure of Pope's defects gave a foretaste of the critical ability later displayed in the edition of Shakespeare which he published in 1734. Lovers of Shakespeare discerned at the time the service performed by Theobald in this attack on Pope, but the publication in 1728 of the first edition of the Dunciad, with Theobald as hero, gave Pope his revenge, and cast over the reputation of his critic a cloud which is only now dispersing. Modern scholarship, however, has come to recognize the primacy of Theobald among emendators of Shakespeare's text, and the most famous of his contributions, his correction of "a table of green fields" to "'a babled of green fields," in Quickly's account of the death of Falstaff in Henry V, II. iii. 17, is only a specially brilliant example of the combination of acuteness, learning, and sympathy which made his edition a landmark in the history of the text. For many of his troubles, however, Theobald was himself to blame; he attacked his opponents with unnecessary vehemence, as he expressed his appreciation of his own work with unnecessary emphasis; he was not always candid as to what he owed to others, even to the despised edition of Pope, from which he printed; and he indulged his appetite for conjecture at times beyond reasonable bounds.

Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by that of Sir Thomas Hanmer in six beautifully printed volumes. This edition is based on that of Pope, and even goes farther than Pope's in relegating to the foot of the page passages supposed unworthy. Hanmer performed no collating worth mentioning, but made some acute conjectures.

The student is apt to be prejudiced against the work of William Warburton on account of the extravagance of his claims and his ungenerous treatment of predecessors to whom he was greatly indebted. "The Genuine Text," he announced, "(collated with all former editions and then corrected and emended) is here settled: Being restored from the Blunders of the first editors and the Interpolations of the two Last"; yet he based his text on Theobald's and joined Pope's name with his own on the title-page. Whatever value belongs to Warburton's edition (1747) lies in a number of probable conjectural emendations, some of which he had previously allowed Theobald to use, and in the amusing bombast and arrogance of many of his notes. The feeble support that lay behind the pretensions of this editor was exposed by a number of critics such as John Upton, Zachary Grey, Benjamin Heath, and Thomas Edwards, who did not issue new editions, but contributed a considerable number of corrections and interpretations.

The value of Dr. Johnson's edition (1765) does not lie in his emendations, which are usually, though not always, poor, or in his collation of older editions, for which he was too indolent, but in the sturdy common-sense of his interpretations and the consummate skill Johnson and Capellfrequently shown in paraphrases of obscure passages. His Preface to the edition was the most weighty general estimate of Shakespeare so far produced, and remains a valuable piece of criticism. In scientific treatment of the text, involving full use of all the Quartos and Folios then accessible, Johnson and his predecessors were far surpassed by Edward Capell, who issued his edition in ten volumes in 1768. Unfortunately, the enormous labor Capell underwent did not bear its full fruit, for he suppressed much of his textual material in the interests of a well-printed page, and his preface and notes are written in a crabbed style that obscures the acuteness of his editorial intelligence. He elaborated stage directions, and carried farther the correction of disarranged meter; but, like most of his fellow-editors in that century, he did less than justice to his predecessors and was too indulgent to his own conjectures. This edition was supplemented by volumes of notes published in 1775 (1 vol.) and 1779-1783 (3 vols.).

Before the publication of Capell's text, the antiquary George Steevens had issued in 1766 reprints of twenty of the early Quartos; and in 1773 he produced, in association with Johnson, an edition with a good text in which he benefited from Capell's labors (though he denies this). Through his knowledge of Elizabethan literature he made substantial contributions to the interpretation of difficult passages. He restored Pericles to a place in the canon, but excluded the Poems, because "the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service." To the second edition of Johnson and Steevens's text (1778) Edmund Malone contributed his famous "Essay on the Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays," which began modern investigation of this subject. The third edition was revised in 1785 by Isaac Reed; and this was succeeded by the edition of Malone in 1790, in which the vast learning and conscientious care of that scholar combined to produce the most trustworthy text so far published. Malone was not brilliant, but he was extremely erudite and candid, and his so-called "Third Variorum" edition in twenty-one volumes, brought out after his death by James Boswell in 1821, is a mine of information on theatrical history and cognate matters, which will probably always be of value to students of the period. The name of "First Variorum Edition" is given to the fifth edition of Johnson and Steevens, revised by Reed in 1803, and "Second Variorum" to the sixth edition of the same, 1813. Meantime occasional critiques of complete editions contributed something to the text. Johnson's edition called forth comment by Kendrick in 1765 and Tyrwhitt in 1766, and the Johnson and Steevens text was criticized by Joseph Ritson in 1783 and 1788, and by J. Monck Mason in 1785. The first American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1795-1796 from Johnson's text; the first continental edition at Brunswick in 1797-1801 by C. Wagner.

Nineteenth-Century EditorsThe editions of the nineteenth century are too numerous for detailed mention here. Passing by the "family" Shakespeare of T. Bowdler, 1807 and 1820, and the editions of Harness, 1825, and Singer, 1826, we note the editions of 1838-1842, and 1842-1844 in which Charles Knight resorted to the text of the First Folio as an exclusive authority. J. P. Collier in his edition of 1844 leaned, on the other hand, to the side of the Quartos, but later became a clever if somewhat rash emendator, who spoiled his reputation by seeking to obtain authority for his guesses by forging them in a seventeenth-century hand in a copy of the second Folio. The colossal volumes of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's edition, 1853-1865, contain stores of antiquarian illustration; and in the edition of Delius, 1854-1861, we have the chief contribution of Germany to the text of Shakespeare. Delius, like Knight, though not to the same extreme, exaggerated the authority of the First Folio; but for the plays for which that is the sole source, his text has earned high respect. Alexander Dyce, wisest of Elizabethan scholars, produced in 1857 a characteristically sane text, on the whole the best to this date; while in America in 1857-1860 and 1859-1865 the brilliant but erratic Richard Grant White produced editions which show a commendable if puzzling openness to conviction in successive changes of opinion.

From 1863 to 1866 appeared the first issue of the Cambridge Shakespeare, edited originally by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The responsibility for the later revised edition of 1891-3 is Dr. Wright's. The exceedingly careful and exhaustive collation of all previous textual readings in the notes of this edition make it indispensable for the serious student, and its text, substantially reprinted in the Globe edition, is the most widely accepted form of the works of Shakespeare which has ever been circulated. The over-emphasis on the First Folio which has been noted in Knight and Delius is no longer found here, and in general the comparative value of Quarto and Folio is weighed in the case of each play. Occasionally, in cases like that of Richard III, where both Quarto and Folio are good but vary widely, the Cambridge editors seem more eclectic than their general theory warrants, and the punctuation is still archaic, clinging to the eighteenth-century tradition. But the acceptance of this careful and conservative text has been a wholesome influence in Shakespearean study.

The only completely reëdited texts which have been issued since the revised Cambridge edition are that of the Oxford Shakespeare, by W. J. Craig, on principles very similar to the Cambridge, and the Neilson text, originally published in one volume in 1906 and revised and reprinted in the Tudor Shakespeare. The massive volumes of Dr. H. H. Furness's New Variorum Shakespeare, begun in 1871 (17 volumes issued), now reprint the text of the First Folio, and show marked traces of the tendency to follow this authority Recent Editorswithout due discrimination. This monumental abstract of all previous criticism is of great value to the professional student of Shakespeare, and its textual apparatus has the advantage over the Cambridge edition of recording not only the first occurrence of a reading, but the names of the chief editors who have adopted it. It thus gives a compendious history of editorial judgment on all disputed points.

The conjectural emendation of Shakespeare still goes on, but since Dyce, comparatively few suggestions find general acceptance. More progress has been made in interpretation through the greater accessibility of contemporary documents and the advance in recent years in our knowledge of Elizabethan theatrical conditions. But, in view of the circumstances under which the original editions were printed, there will always be room for variations of individual opinion in many cases, both as to what Shakespeare wrote and as to what he meant.