[312a] Arber, Stationers’ Registers, iii. 242-3.
[312b] On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the Athenæum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words ‘Tho. Perkins his Booke,’ was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the ‘essential’ manuscript readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the British Museum, who in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand.
[314] The best account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by Mr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of National Biography supply useful information. I have made liberal use of these sources in the sketch given in the following pages.
[317a] Mr. Churton Collins’s admirable essay on Theobald’s textua criticism of Shakespeare, entitled ‘The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,’ is reprinted from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq.
[317b] Collier doubtless followed Theobald’s hint when he pretended to have found in his ‘Perkins Folio’ the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of ‘bisson multitude’ for ‘bosom multiplied’ in Coriolanus’s speech:
How shall this bisson multitude digest
The senate’s courtesy?—(Coriolanus, III. i. 131-2.)
[318] A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King Lear, III. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar’s enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line ‘Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].’ For the last word Hanmer substituted ‘lym,’ which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound.
[320] Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7.
[327a] Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold’s Sonnet on Shakespeare:
Others abide our question. Thou art free.