A reprint of the First Folio unwarrantably purporting to be exact was published in 1807-8. [311] The best reprint was issued in three parts by Lionel Booth in 1861, 1863, and 1864. The valuable photo-zincographic reproduction undertaken by Sir Henry James, under the direction of Howard Staunton, was issued in sixteen folio parts between February 1864 and October 1865. A reduced
photographic facsimile, too small to be legible, appeared in 1876, with a preface by Halliwell-Phillipps.
The Second Folio. The Third Folio. The Fourth Folio.
The Second Folio edition was printed in 1632 by Thomas Cotes for Robert Allot and William Aspley, each of whose names figures as publisher on different copies. To Allot Blount had transferred, on November 16, 1630, his rights in the sixteen plays which were first licensed for publication in 1623. [312a] The Second Folio was reprinted from the First; a few corrections were made in the text, but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless. Charles I’s copy is at Windsor, and Charles II’s at the British Museum. The ‘Perkins Folio,’ now in the Duke of Devonshire’s possession, in which John Payne Collier introduced forged emendations, was a copy of that of 1632. [312b] The Third Folio—for the most part a faithful reprint of the Second—was first published in 1663 by Peter Chetwynde, who reissued it next year with the addition of seven plays, six of which have no
claim to admission among Shakespeare’s works. ‘Unto this impression,’ runs the title-page of 1664, ‘is added seven Playes never before printed in folio, viz.: Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The London Prodigall. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The Tragedy of Locrine.’ The six spurious pieces which open the volume were attributed by unprincipled publishers to Shakespeare in his lifetime. Fewer copies of the Third Folio are reputed to be extant than of the Second or Fourth, owing to the destruction of many unsold impressions in the Fire of London in 1666. The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 ‘for H. Herringman, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,’ reprints the folio of 1664 without change except in the way of modernising the spelling; it repeats the spurious pieces.
Eighteenth-century editors.
Since 1685 some two hundred independent editions of the collected works have been published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many thousand editions of separate plays. The eighteenth-century editors of the collected works endeavoured with varying degrees of success to purge the text of the numerous incoherences of the folios, and to restore, where good taste or good sense required it, the lost text of the contemporary quartos. It is largely owing to a due co-ordination of the results of the efforts of the eighteenth-century editors by their successors in the present century that Shakespeare’s work has become intelligible
to general readers unversed in textual criticism, and has won from them the veneration that it merits. [314]
Nicholas Rowe, 1674-1718.
Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne’s reign, and poet laureate to George I., was the first critical editor of Shakespeare. He produced an edition of his plays in six octavo volumes in 1709. A new edition in eight volumes followed in 1714, and another hand added a ninth volume which included the poems. Rowe prefixed a valuable life of the poet embodying traditions which were in danger of perishing without a record. His text followed that of the Fourth Folio. The plays were printed in the same order, except that he transferred the spurious pieces from the beginning to the end. Rowe did not compare his text with that of the First Folio or of the quartos, but in the case of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he met with an early quarto while his edition was passing through the press, and inserted at the end of the play the prologue which is met with only in the quartos. He made a few happy emendations, some of which coincide accidentally with the readings of the First Folio; but his text is deformed by many palpable errors. His practical experience as a playwright induced him, however, to prefix for the first time a list of dramatis personæ to each play, to divide and number acts and scenes on rational principles, and to mark the