XI
THE FIRST FOLIO
“The First Folio” is the name commonly given to the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The volume includes a Preface signed by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr. Greenwood.
The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that all the contents are published “according to the true original copies.” If only MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface (and certainly it looks like his work), [207a] speaking in the name of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare’s friends “have collected and published” the plays, have so published them “that whereas you were abus’d with divers stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors that exposed them: even those” (namely, the pieces previously ill-produced by pirates) “are now offered to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest” (that is, all the plays which had not been piratically debased), “absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.” So obscure is the Preface that not all previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be stolen and deformed, but “divers stolen copies” are denounced. Mr. Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2 (1909).
Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from manuscripts. Some quartos, like that of Hamlet of 1604, are excellent, and how they came to be printed from good texts, and whether or not the texts were given to the press by Shakespeare’s Company, or were sold, or stolen, is the question. Mr. Pollard argues, on grounds almost certain, that “we have strong prima facie evidence that the sale to publishers of plays afterwards duly entered on the Stationers’ Registers was regulated by their lawful owners.” [208a]
The Preface does not explicitly deny that some of the separately printed texts were good, but says that “divers” of them were stolen and deformed. My view of the meaning of the Preface is not generally held. Dr. H. H. Furness, in his preface to Much Ado about Nothing (p. vi), says, “We all know that these two friends of Shakespeare assert in their Preface to the Folio that they had used the Author’s manuscripts, and in the same breath denounce the Quartos as stolen and surreptitious.” I cannot see, I repeat, that the Preface denounces all the Quartos. It could be truly said that divers stolen and maimed copies had been foisted on “abused” purchasers, and really no more is said. Dr. Furness writes, “When we now find them using as ‘copy’ one of these very Quartos” (Much Ado about Nothing, 1600), “we need not impute to them a wilful falsehood if we suppose that in using what they knew had been printed from the original text, howsoever obtained, they held it to be the same as the manuscript itself . . . ” That was their meaning, I think, the Quarto of Much Ado had not been “maimed” and “deformed,” as divers other quartos, stolen and surreptitious, had been.
Shakspere, unlike most of the other playwrights, was a member of his Company. I presume that his play was thus the common good of his Company and himself. If they sold a copy to the press, the price would go into their common stock; unless they, in good will, allowed the author to pocket the money.
It will be observed that I understand the words of the Preface otherwise than do the distinguished Editors of the Cambridge edition. They write, “The natural inference to be drawn from this statement” (in the Preface) “is that all the separate editions of Shakespeare’s plays were ‘stolen,’ ‘surreptitious’ and imperfect, and that all those published in the Folio were printed from the author’s own manuscripts” (my italics). The Editors agree with Dr. Furness, not with Mr. Pollard, whose learned opinion coincides with my own.
Perhaps it should be said that I reached my own construction of the sense of this passage in the Preface by the light of nature, before Mr. Pollard’s valuable book, based on the widest and most minute research, came into my hands. By the results of that research he backs his opinion (and mine), that some of the quartos are surreptitious and bad, while others are good “and were honestly obtained.” [210a] The Preface never denies this; never says that all the quartos contain maimed and disfigured texts. The Preface draws a distinction to this effect, “even those” (even the stolen and deformed copies) “are now cured and perfect in their limbs,”—that is, have been carefully edited, while “all the rest” are “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” This does not allege that all the rest are printed from Shakespeare’s own holograph copies.
Among the plays spoken of as “all the rest,” namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All’s Well, Twelfth Night, Winter’s Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have, moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon, Julius Cæsar, All’s Well, and Henry VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever Shakespeare thought, “he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.” But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare’s own handwriting. After “as he conceived them,” it goes on, “Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”