At Stratford, the Birthplace, which was acquired
by the public in 1846 and converted into a museum, is with Anne Hathaway’s cottage (which was acquired by the Birthplace Trustees in 1892), a place of pilgrimage for visitors from all parts of the globe. The 27,038 persons who visited it in 1896 and the 26,510 persons who visited it in 1897 represented over forty nationalities. The site of the demolished New Place, with the gardens, was also purchased by public subscription in 1861, and now forms a public garden. Of a new memorial building on the river-bank at Stratford, consisting of a theatre, picture-gallery, and library, the foundation-stone was laid on April 23, 1877. The theatre was opened exactly two years later, when ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ was performed, with Helen Faucit (Lady Martin) as Beatrice and Barry Sullivan as Benedick. Performances of Shakespeare’s plays have since been given annually during April. The library and picture-gallery were opened in 1881. [298] A memorial Shakespeare library was opened at Birmingham on April 23, 1868, to commemorate the tercentenary of 1864, and, although destroyed by fire in 1879, was restored in 1882; it now possesses nearly ten thousand volumes relating to Shakespeare.
XIX—BIBLIOGRAPHY
Quartos of the poems in the poet’s lifetime.
Only two of Shakespeare’s works—his narrative poems ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’—were published with his sanction and co-operation. These poems were the first specimens of his work to appear in print, and they passed in his lifetime through a greater number of editions than any of his plays. At the time of his death in 1616 there had been printed in quarto seven editions of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593, 1594, 1596, 1599, 1600, and two in 1602), and five editions of his ‘Lucrece’ (1594, 1598, 1600, 1607, 1616). There was only one lifetime edition of the ‘Sonnets,’ Thorpe’s surreptitious venture of 1609; [299] but three editions were issued of the piratical ‘Passionate Pilgrim,’ which was fraudulently assigned to Shakespeare by the publisher William Jaggard, although it contained only a few occasional poems by him (1599, 1600 no copy known, and 1612).
Posthumous quartos of the poems.
Of posthumous editions in quarto of the two narrative poems in the seventeenth century, there
were two of ‘Lucrece’—viz. in 1624 (‘the sixth edition’) and in 1655 (with John Quarles’s ‘Banishment of Tarquin’)—and there were as many as six editions of ‘Venus’ (1617, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, and 1636), making thirteen editions in all in forty-three years. No later editions of these two poems were issued in the seventeenth century. They were next reprinted together with ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ in 1707, and thenceforth they usually figured, with the addition of the ‘Sonnets,’ in collected editions of Shakespeare’s works.
The ‘Poems’ of 1640.
A so-called first collected edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640 (London, by T. Cotes for I. Benson) was mainly a reissue of the ‘Sonnets,’ but it omitted six (Nos. xviii., xix., xliii., lvi., lxxv., and lxxvi.) and it included the twenty poems of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim,’ with some other pieces by other authors. Marshall’s copy of the Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece. There were prefatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address ‘to the reader’ signed with the initials of the publisher. There Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ were described as ‘serene, clear, and elegantly plain; such gentle strains as shall re-create and not perplex your brain. No intricate or cloudy stuff to puzzle intellect. Such as will raise your admiration to his praise.’ A chief point of interest in the volume of ‘Poems’ of 1640 is the fact that the ‘Sonnets’ were printed then in a different order from that which was followed in the volume of