I. That the plays, whether in the shape we now have them or not, are, at least, under the same names and with substantially the same dramatis personæ.
II. That William Shakespeare was the stage manager, or stage editor; or, at any rate, touched up the plays for representation.
III. That the acting copies of the plays, put into the hands of the players to learn their parts from, were more or less in the handwriting of William Shakespeare, and that from these acting copies the first folio of 1623 was set up and printed.
At least, the best evidence at hand seems to establish all three of these propositions. This evidence is meager and accidental, but, for that very reason, involuntary, and, therefore, not manufactured; and it establishes the above propositions, as far as it goes, as follows:
I. In a volume, "Poste, with a racket of Madde-Letters," printed in 1603, a young woman is made to say to her lover: "It is not your liustie rustie can make me afraide of your big lookes, for I saw the plaie of Ancient Pistoll, where a craking coward was well cudgelled for his knavery; your railing is so near the rascall that I am almost ashamed to bestow so good a name as the rogue upon you."
Again, Sharpham, in his "Fleire," printed in 1607, has this piece of dialogue:
"Kni.—And how lives he with 'am?
"Fie.—Faith, like This be in the play, a' has almost killed himselfe with the scabbard!"
The first author thus makes his young woman to have seen Henry V., and the second alludes to the Midsummer-Night's Dream, where the bumpkin is made to kill himself by falling on his scabbard instead of his sword. Besides, in the imperfect versions of the plays which the printers were able to make up, from such unauthorized sources as best served them, it is thought that there are unmistakable evidences that one of the sources was the shorthand of a listener, who, not catching a word or phrase distinctly, would put down something that sounded enough like it to betray the sources and his copy. For example: In the spring of 1602, a play called "The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark." was presented at the Globe theater. In 1603, two booksellers, Ling and Trundell, printed a play of that title, put William Shakespeare's name to it, and sold it. Now, in this version, we have such errors as "right done" for "write down" (Act I., Scene ii.); "invenom'd speech" for "in venom steeped" (Act I., Scene i.); "I'll provide for you a grave" for "most secret and most grave" (Act III, Scene iv.); "a beast devoid of reason" for "a beast that wants discourse of reason," and the like. Ling and Trundell, somehow or other, procured better copy, and printed a corrected edition in the following year; but the errors in their first edition were precisely such as would result from an attempt to report the play phonetically, as it was delivered by the actors on the stage. All the printers of the day seem to have made common piracy out of these plays, impelled thereto by their exceeding popularity. Hash says that the first part of King Henry VI., especially, had a wonderful run for those days, being witnessed by at least ten thousand people. *
* We take all these references from "Outlines of the Life of
Shakespeare," by I. O. Halliwell Phillips (Brighton. Printed
for the author's friends, for presents only. 1881), page 40,
to which capital volume we acknowledge our exceeding
obligation. Mr. Grant White in the Atlantic Monthly, October
1881, believes that he is able to trace the surreptitious
"copy" of this first Hamlet to the actor who took the part
of Voltimand. The inference from Mr. White's account of the
transaction, is precisely that we have noted in the text.