THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE
The main difficulties that stand in the way of determining the actual
form in which Shakespeare left his plays are due, first, to the total
absence of manuscripts, and, secondly, to the fact that he, like his
contemporaries, regarded dramatic literature as material for performance
on the stage, not as something to be read in the library. The most
obvious evidence of this lies in his having himself issued with every
appearance of personal attention his poems of _Venus and Adonis_ and
_Lucrece_, while he permitted his plays to find their way into print
without any trace of supervision and, in some cases, apparently without
his consent. When the author sold a play to the theatrical company which
was to perform it, he appears to have regarded himself as having no
longer any rights in it; and when a play was published, we are in
general justified in supposing either that it had been obtained
surreptitiously, or that it had been disposed of by the company.
Exceptions to this begin to appear in the first half of the seventeenth
century, notably in the case of Heywood, who defended his action on the
plea of protecting the text from mutilation, and in that of Ben Jonson,
who issued in 1616, in the face of ridicule for his presumption, a
folio volume of his "Works." But, though Shakespeare is reported to have
felt annoyance at the pirating of his productions, there is no evidence
of his having been led to protect himself or the integrity of his
writings by departing from the usual practice in his profession.
Among the various documents which make us aware of this situation, so
general then, but so strongly in contrast with modern methods, three
explicit statements by Heywood are so illuminating that they deserve
quotation. One occurs in the preface to his _Rape of Lucrece_, 1630:
To the Reader.--It hath beene no custome in mee of all other men
(courteous Reader) to commit my plaies to the presse: the reason
though some may attribute to my owne insufficiencie, I had rather
subscribe in that to their seuare censure then by seeking to auoide
the imputation of weaknes to incurre greater suspition of honestie:
for though some haue vsed a double sale of their labours, first to
the Stage, and after to the presse, For my owne part I heere
proclaime my selfe euer faithfull in the first, and neuer guiltie of
the last: yet since some of my plaies haue (vnknowne to me, and
without any of my direction) accidentally come into the Printers
hands, and therefore so corrupt and mangled, (coppied only by the
eare) that I have bin as vnable to know them, as ashamed to chalenge
them, This therefore, I was the willinger to furnish out in his
natiue habit: first being by consent, next because the rest haue
beene so wronged in being publisht in such sauadge and ragged
ornaments: accept it courteous Gentlemen, and prooue as fauorable
Readers as we haue found you gratious Auditors. Yours T. H.
[Page Heading: The Right to Print]
The second is in Heywood's _Pleasant Dialogues and Dramas_, 1637, the
prologue to _If you know not me, you know no bodie; Or, The troubles of
Queen Elizabeth_. It is as follows:
A Prologve to the Play of Queene Elizabeth as it was last revived at
the Cock-pit, in which the Author taxeth the most corrupted copy now
imprinted, which was published without his consent.
PROLOGUE
Playes have a fate in their conception lent,
Some so short liv'd, no sooner shew'd than spent;
But borne to-day, to morrow buried, and
Though taught to speake, neither to goe nor stand.
This: (by what fate I know not) sure no merit,
That it disclaimes, may for the age inherit.
Writing 'bove one and twenty: but ill nurst,
And yet receiv'd as well performed at first,
Grac't and frequented, for the cradle age,
Did throng the Seates, the Boxes, and the Stage
So much: that some by Stenography drew
The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew:)
And in that lamenesse it hath limp't so long,
The Author now to vindicate that wrong
Hath tooke the paines, upright upon its feete
To teache it walke, so please you sit, and see't.
The third passage occurs in the address to the reader prefixed to _The
English Traveller_, 1633:
True it is that my plays are not exposed to the world in volumes, to
bear the titles of Works (as others). One reason is that many of
them by shifting and changing of companies have been negligently
lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors
who think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in
print; and a third that it was never any great ambition in me in
this kind to be voluminously read.
From these passages we gather that Heywood considered it dishonest to
sell the same play to the stage and to the press; that some of his plays
were stolen through stenographic reports taken in the theater and were
printed in corrupt forms; that, in order to counteract this, he obtained
the consent of the theatrical owners to his publication of a correct
edition; that some actors considered the printing of plays against their
interest (presumably because they thought that if a man could read a
play, he would not care to see it acted); and that many plays were lost
through negligence and the changes in the theatrical companies. That we
are here dealing with the conditions of Shakespeare's time is clear
enough, since the edition of _If you know not me_ on which Heywood casts
reflections was published in 1605, and in 1604 Marston supplies
corroboration in the preface to his _Malcontent_:
I would fain leave the paper; only one thing afflicts me, to think
that scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively
published to be read, and that the least hurt I can receive is to do
myself the wrong. But since others otherwise would do me more, the
least inconvenience is to be accepted. I have myself, therefore, set
forth this comedy; but so, that my enforced absence must much rely
upon the printer's discretion: but I shall entreat slight errors in
orthography may be as slightly overpassed, and that the unhandsome
shape which this trifle in reading presents, may be pardoned for
the pleasure it once afforded you when it was presented with the
soul of lively action.
[Page Heading: Pirated Editions]
The only form in which any of Shakespeare's plays found their way into
print during his lifetime was that of small pamphlets, called Quartos,
which were sold at sixpence each.[7] In the case of five of these there
is general agreement that they came to the press by the surreptitious
method of reporting described by Heywood: the first Quarto versions of
_Romeo and Juliet_, _Henry V_, _The Merry Wives_, _Hamlet_, and
_Pericles_. All of these bear clear traces of the effects of such
mutilation as would naturally result from the attempt to write down the
dialogue during the performance, and patch up the gaps later. The first
Quartos of _Richard III_ and _King Lear_, though much superior to the
five mentioned, yet contain so many variants from the text of the Folio
which seem to be due to mistakes of the ear and to slips of memory on
the part of the actors, that probably they should also be included in
the list of those surreptitiously obtained.
[7] For facsimile reproductions see Bibliography, Appendix D.
Redress for such pirating as is implied in these publications was
difficult on account of the absence of a law of copyright. The chief
pieces of legislation affecting the book trade were the law of licensing
and the charter of the Stationers' Company. According to the first, all
books, with a few exceptions, such as academic publications, had to be
licensed before publication by the Bishop of London or the Archbishop
of Canterbury. This was an unworkable provision, and in fact the
responsibility for all books not likely to raise political or
theological controversy was left to the Stationers' Company. This close
corporation of printers and publishers exercised its powers for the
protection of its members rather than of authors. A publisher wishing to
establish a monopoly in a book he had acquired entered it on the
Stationers' Register, paying a fee of sixpence, and was thereby
protected against piracy. When the copy so registered was improperly
acquired, the state of the case is not so clear. At times the officials
showed hesitation about registering a book until the applicant "hath
gotten sufficient authoritye for yt," and _As You Like It_, for example,
appears in the Register only "to be staied," which it was until the
publication of the first Folio. Further, the pirated _Romeo and Juliet_
and _Henry V_ were never entered at all; the pirated _Hamlet_ and
_Pericles_ were entered, but to other publishers, who in the case of
_Hamlet_ brought out a more correct text in the following year; the
pirated _Merry Wives_ was transferred from one publisher to another on
the day of entry, and actually issued by the second. Thus this group of
plays does not support the view that the Stationers' Company stood ready
to give perpetual copyright to their members even for obviously stolen
goods. It is to be noted, too, that the previous publication of these
surreptitious copies formed no hindrance to the later issue of an
authentic copy. The second Quarto of _Hamlet_, printed from a complete
manuscript, followed, as has been said, the first the next year, and the
same thing happened in the case of _Romeo and Juliet_.
[Page Heading: Publisher's Copyright]
On the other hand, the great majority of the Quartos printed from
playhouse copies of the plays were regularly entered, and the rights of
the original publisher preserved to him. The appearance of groups of
plays in the market following interference with theatrical activity such
as came from the plague in 1594, from the breaking up of companies, or
from Puritan attempts at restriction, confirm the belief that these
better Quartos were honorably acquired by the publishers from the
companies owning them, when the actors thought that there was more to
gain than to lose by giving them to the press.
[Page Heading: Table of Quarto Editions]
The accompanying "Table of Quarto Editions" gives the names of all the
Shakespearean plays issued in this form before the publication of the
collected edition in 1623, known as the First Folio. In the cases of
_Romeo and Juliet_, _1 Henry IV_, _Love's Labour's Lost_, _Merchant of
Venice_, _Much Ado_, _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, and _Richard II_, a
Quarto, usually the most recent, provided the text from which the
version in the Folio was printed. Hence, though in several cases the
copy of the Quarto thus employed seems to have been one used by the
actors and containing corrections of some value, the extant Quarto
rather than the Folio is the prime authority for the text to-day. The
same is true of _Titus Andronicus_, except that in this case the Folio
restores from some manuscript source a scene which had been dropped from
the Quarto. If, as some hold, the Folio texts of _Richard III_ and _King
Lear_ were printed from Quartos, there must have been available also a
manuscript version, which is so heavily drawn upon that the Folio text
virtually represents an independent source, as it does in the case of
four of the five plays acknowledged to be due to surreptitious
reporting. _Pericles_, the fifth of these, was first admitted to the
collected works in the third Folio, and is the only "reported" text
forming our sole authority.[8]
TABLE OF QUARTO EDITIONS BEFORE 1623
Transcriber's Note:
The following abbreviations are used in the "SOURCE OF Q TEXT" column:
D--Disputed;
P--Playhouse;
R--Reported.
==========================================================================
| | DATES OF | |
| ENTRIES IN |--------------------------------|SOURCE|
| STATIONERS' | | | | | | | OF Q | SOURCE OF
| REGISTER |Q1 | Q2 |Q3 |Q4 |Q5 |Q6 | TEXT | F1 TEXT
| | | | | | | | |
------+--------------+----+------+-----+----+----+----+------+------------
T.A. |Feb. 6, 1594 |1594| 1600| 1611| | | |P |Q3 completed
| | | | | | | | | & corrected
| | | | | | | | |
R. II |Aug. 29, 1597 |1597| 1598| 1608|1615| | |P |Q4 corrected
| | | | | | | | |
R. III|Oct. 19, 1597 |1597| 1598| 1602|1605|1612|1622|D |Disputed
| | | | | | | | |
R.J. |No entry |1597| 1599| 1609|n.d.| | |{Q1 R |Q3 from Q2
| | | | | | | |{Q2 P |
| | | | | | | | |
1 H.IV|Feb. 25, 1598 |1598| 1599| 1604|1608|1613|1622|P |Q5 corrected
| | | | | | | | |
L.L.L.|No entry |1598| | | | | |P |Q1
| | | | | | | | |
Merch.|July 22, 1598 | | | | | | | |
|(conditional) | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | {1600| | | | | |
|Oct. 28, 1600 |1600| { or | | | | |P |Q1 (Heyes)
| | | {1619| | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | |{1608| | | | |
H.V. |[Aug. 4, 1600]|1600| 1602|{ or | | | |R |Independent
|"to be stayed"| | |{1619| | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
M.Ado |[Aug. 4, 1600]| | | | | | | |
|"to be stayed"| | | | | | | |
|Aug. 23, 1600 |1600| | | | | |P |Q1 corrected
| | | | | | | | |
2 H.IV|Aug. 23, 1600 |1600| | | | | |P |Independent
| | | | | | | | |
| | | {1600| | | | | |
M.N.D.|Oct. 8, 1600 |1600| {or | | | | |P |Q2 corrected
| | | {1619| | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |
M.W. |Jan. 18, 1602 |1602| 1619| | | | |R |Independent
| | | | | | | | |
Hml. |July 26, 1602 |1603|1604,5| 1611| | | |{Q1 R |Independent
| | | | | | | |{Q2 P |
| | | | | | | | |
| | | {1608| | | | | |Disputed (Q1
Lear |Nov. 26, 1607 |1608| { or | | | | |D | in several
| | | {1619| | | | | | states)
| | | | | | | | |
T.C. |Feb. 7, 1603 }| | | | | | | |Independent
|(conditional)}|1609| | | | | |P | (Q1 in two
|Jan. 28, 1609}| | | | | | | | issues)
| | | | | | | | |
Per. |May 20, 1608 |1609| 1609| 1611|1619| | |R |Not in F1
| | | | | | | | |F3 from Q4
| | | | | | | | |
Oth. |Oct. 6, 1621 |1622| | | | | |P |Independent
==========================================================================
[8] In the table of Quarto editions may be noted four entries with the
words "or 1619" added to the date which appears on the title-page. These
four plays, the Roberts Quartos of _The Merchant of Venice_ and _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_ of 1600, the third Quarto of _Henry V_, 1608,
the second Quarto of _King Lear_, 1608, along with the 1619 Quartos of
_The Merry Wives_ and _Pericles_, an undated Quarto of _The Whole
Contention_ (the earlier form of _2_ and _3 Henry VI_), the Quarto of
_Sir John Oldcastle_, dated 1600, and the Quarto of _A Yorkshire
Tragedie_, dated 1619, have been shown by Mr. A. W. Pollard, with the
cooeperation of Mr. W. W. Greg, to have been put on the market at the
same time, and Mr. W. J. Neidig has proved from typographical evidence
that the title-pages of all nine were set up in succession in 1619. A
very curious problem is thus presented, and the motives for the
deception practised, apparently by the printers Pavier and Jaggard, have
not been satisfactorily cleared up; but at present it appears likely
that in the case of these nine Quartos the correct date of publication
should be 1619, and that, in the case of the first two mentioned, the
question of the comparative authority of the Heyes and Fisher Quartos
respectively as against that of the Roberts Quartos should be settled
against the latter. This last point is the only part of this remarkable
discovery which is of importance in determining the text, as the Quartos
dated 1608 and 1619 were already known to be mere reprints of earlier
ones.
[Page Heading: The First Folio]
We come now to the publication of the First Folio, the most important
single volume in the history of the text of Shakespeare. On November 8,
1623, the following entry occurs in the Stationers' Register:
Mr. Blount: Isaak Jaggard. Entred for their copie under the hands of
M^r Doctor Worrall and M^r Cole, Warden, M^r William Shakspeers
Comedyes, Histories and Tragedyes, soe manie of the said copyes as
are not formerly entred to other men viz^t, Comedyes. The Tempest.
The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of
Errors. As you like it. All's well that ends well. Twelft Night. The
winters tale. Histories. The thirde part of Henry the sixt. Henry
the eight. Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius Caesar.
Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline.
One notes here the omission of _1_ and _2 Henry VI_, _King John_, and
_The Taming of the Shrew_, which had neither been previously entered nor
issued in Quarto. This is probably due to the fact that three of these
are based on older plays of which Quartos exist, which may have seemed
to the publishers reason enough to save their sixpences. If we assume
that "The thirde part of Henry the sixt" is a misprint for "The first
part," the explanation covers the whole case. The registration of
_Antony and Cleopatra_ was superfluous, as it had been entered, though
not printed, so far as we know, on May 20, 1608.
There are thus in the First Folio, the publication of which immediately
followed this entry in 1623, twenty plays not before issued, for which
the text of this volume is our sole authority. The emphasis so commonly
placed on the supreme value of the text of the First Folio is justified
with regard to these twenty plays; as for the remaining seventeen, its
importance is shared, in proportions varying from play to play, with the
texts of the Quartos. The sources from which the compilers of the Folio
obtained their new material were in all probability playhouse copies, as
in the case of the better Quartos. Heminge and Condell, Shakespeare's
actor colleagues and friends, who sign the Address to the Readers,[9]
would obviously be the instruments for obtaining such copies. As for the
so-called "private transcripts" which some have postulated as a source
of material, there is no evidence that at this date any such existed.
Whether any of the playhouse manuscripts provided by Heminge and Condell
were in Shakespeare's autograph we can neither affirm nor deny, but it
is well to be cautious in accepting at its face value the implication
contained in their words that they had "scarce received from him a blot
in his papers."
[9] For this and other prefatory matter from the First Folio, see
Appendix A.
[Illustration: THE TITLE PAGE OF THE FIRST FOLIO
(_From the copy in the New York Public Library._)]
[Page Heading: The First Folio]
The First Folio is a large volume of 908 pages, measuring in the tallest
extant copy 13-3/8 x 8-1/2 inches. A reduced facsimile of the title page
with the familiar wood-cut portrait appears on the opposite page. The
text is printed in two columns with sixty-six lines to a column. The
typography is only fairly good, and many mistakes occur in the
pagination. Extant copies, of which there are at least 156, vary in some
respects, on account of the practice of making corrections while the
sheets were being printed. The printer was William Jaggard, and his
associates in the publishing enterprise were his son Isaac and the
booksellers, William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount.
Estimates of the size of the edition vary from five to six hundred.
Many of the causes which made the text of these early editions
inaccurate are common to all the plays, while some are peculiar to those
obtained by reporters in the theater. Of the first, the most fundamental
is, of course, the illegibility or ambiguity of the author's original
manuscript. Such flaws were perpetuated and multiplied with each
successive transcript, and when the manuscript copy came into the
printer's hands, the errors of the compositor--confusion of words
sounding alike, of words looking alike, unconscious substitution of
synonyms, mere manual slips, and the like--were added to those already
existing. The absence of any uniform spelling, and carelessness in
punctuation, which led to these being freely modified by the printer,
increased the risk of corruption. The punctuation of both Quartos and
Folio, though by no means without weight, cannot be regarded as having
the author's sanction, and all modernized editions re-punctuate with
greater or less freedom. Most nineteenth-century editors carry on with
minor modifications the punctuation of Pope, so that their texts show a
composite of sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century
methods; the text used in the Tudor edition is frankly punctuated, as
far as the syntax permits, according to modern methods, with, it is
believed, no loss in authority. There is no clear evidence that, in such
productions as plays, proof was read outside of the printing-office. The
theory, insisted on by Dr. Furness in successive volumes of the _New
Variorum Shakespeare_, that the Elizabethan compositor set type to
dictation is without foundation, the phenomena which he seeks to explain
by it occurring commonly to-day when there is no question of such a
practice.
Another class of variation in text arose from the treatment of the
manuscript in the playhouse. Cuts, additions, and alterations were made
for acting purposes, stage directions were added with or without the
assistance of the author, revivals of the play called for revision by
the original writer or another. The majority of stage directions in
modern editions, except exits and entrances, are due to editors from
Rowe onwards, and these unauthorized additions are distinguished in the
Tudor edition by brackets. Almost all notes of place at the beginnings
of scenes belong to this class.
[Page Heading: Corruptions of Text]
The defects to which the texts of the surreptitiously obtained Quartos
are particularly subject include omissions and alterations due to lapse
of memory on the part of the actors, additions due to the tendency to
improvise which Shakespeare censures in _Hamlet_, omissions due to the
reporter's failure to hear or to write quickly enough, garbled
paraphrases made up to supply such omissions, and the writing of prose
as verse and verse as prose.
Such are the most important of the causes of the corruptions which the
long series of editors of Shakespeare have devoted their study and their
ingenuity to remedying. The series really begins with the second Folio
of 1632 and is continued with but slight improvements in the third Folio
of 1663, reprinted with the addition of _Pericles_ and six spurious
plays in 1664, and in the fourth Folio of 1685. The emendations made in
the seventeenth-century editions are mainly modernizations in spelling
and such minor changes as occurred to members of the printing staff. In
no case do they have any authority except such as may be supposed to
belong to a man not far removed from Shakespeare in date; and they add
about as many mistakes as they remove.
The difficulty of the task of the modern editor varies greatly from play
to play. It is least in the twenty plays for which the First Folio is
the sole authority, greater in the eight in which the Folio reprints a
Quarto with some variations, greatest in the nine in which Folio and
Quarto represent rival versions. In these last cases, it is the duty of
the editor to decide from all the accessible data which version has the
best claim to represent the author's intention, and to make that a basis
to be departed from only in clear cases of corruption. The temptation,
which no editor has completely resisted, is naturally towards an
eclecticism which adopts the reading that seems most plausible in
itself, without giving due weight to the general authority of the text
chosen as a basis. If carried far, such eclecticism results in a
patchwork quite distinct from any version that Shakespeare can have
known.
The first editor of Shakespeare, in the modern sense, was Nicholas Rowe,
poet laureate under Queen Anne. He published in 1709 an edition of the
plays in six octavo volumes, preceded by the first formal memoir of the
dramatist, and furnished with notes. The poems were issued in the
following year in similar form, with essays by Gildon. Rowe based his
text upon that of the fourth Folio, with hardly any collation of
previous editions. He corrected a large number of the more obvious
corruptions, the most notable of his emendations being perhaps the
phrase in _Twelfth Night_, "Some are become great," which he changed to
"Some are born great." On the external aspect of the plays Rowe has left
a deeper mark than any subsequent editor. In the Folios only eight of
the plays had lists of _dramatis personae_; Rowe supplied them for the
rest. In the Folios the division into acts and scenes is carried out
completely in only seventeen cases, it is partially done in thirteen,
and in six it is not attempted at all. Rowe again completed the work,
and though some of his divisions have been modified and others should
be, he performed this task with care and intelligence. He modernized the
spelling and the punctuation, completed the exits and entrances,
corrected many corrupt speech-tags, and arranged many passages where the
verse was disordered. In virtue of these services, he must, in spite of
his leaving much undone, be regarded as one of the most important agents
in the formation of our modern text.
[Page Heading: Rowe and Pope]
A second edition of Rowe's Shakespeare was published in 1714, and in
1725 appeared a splendid quarto edition in six volumes, edited by
Alexander Pope. In his preface Pope made strong professions of his good
faith in dealing with the text. "I have discharged," he said, "the dull
duty of an editor to my best judgment, with more labor than I expect
thanks, with a religious abhorrence of all innovation, and without any
indulgence to my private sense or conjecture.... The various readings
are fairly put in the margin, so that anyone may compare 'em; and those
I have preferred into the text are constantly _ex fide codicum_, upon
authority.... The more obsolete or unusual words are explained." Hardly
one of these statements is entirely true. Pope possessed copies of the
first and second Folios, and at least one Quarto of each play that had
been printed before 1623, except _Much Ado_, but these he consulted only
occasionally, and seldom registered the variants as he said he had done.
When he did, he gave no clue to their source. He constantly inserted his
private conjectures without notice, and his explanations of difficult
expressions are few and frequently wrong. Passages considered by him
inferior or spurious he relegated to the foot of the pages; others he
merely omitted without notice. His ear was often jarred by the freedom
of Shakespeare's verse, and he did his best to make it "regular" by
eighteenth-century standards. Yet Pope spent much ingenuity in striving
to better the text, and no small number of restorations and emendations
are to be credited to him, especially in connection with the arrangement
of the verse. He is to be credited also with discernment in rejecting
the seven plays added to the Shakespearean canon in the third Folio, of
which only _Pericles_ has since been restored.
The weaknesses of Pope's edition did not long remain hidden. In the
spring of 1726 appeared "Shakespeare Restored: or, a Specimen of the
many Errors, as well committed, as unamended, by Mr. Pope in his late
edition of this Poet. Designed not only to correct the said edition, but
to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet
publish'd." Lewis Theobald, the author, was a translator and scholar,
much better equipped than Pope for the work of editing, and his
merciless exposure of Pope's defects gave a foretaste of the critical
ability later displayed in the edition of Shakespeare which he published
in 1734. Lovers of Shakespeare discerned at the time the service
performed by Theobald in this attack on Pope, but the publication in
1728 of the first edition of the _Dunciad_, with Theobald as hero, gave
Pope his revenge, and cast over the reputation of his critic a cloud
which is only now dispersing. Modern scholarship, however, has come to
recognize the primacy of Theobald among emendators of Shakespeare's
text, and the most famous of his contributions, his correction of "a
table of green fields" to "'a babled of green fields," in Quickly's
account of the death of Falstaff in _Henry V_, II. iii. 17, is only a
specially brilliant example of the combination of acuteness, learning,
and sympathy which made his edition a landmark in the history of the
text. For many of his troubles, however, Theobald was himself to blame;
he attacked his opponents with unnecessary vehemence, as he expressed
his appreciation of his own work with unnecessary emphasis; he was not
always candid as to what he owed to others, even to the despised edition
of Pope, from which he printed; and he indulged his appetite for
conjecture at times beyond reasonable bounds.
[Page Heading: Theobald and Hanmer]
Theobald's edition was followed in 1744 by that of Sir Thomas Hanmer in
six beautifully printed volumes. This edition is based on that of Pope,
and even goes farther than Pope's in relegating to the foot of the page
passages supposed unworthy. Hanmer performed no collating worth
mentioning, but made some acute conjectures.
The student is apt to be prejudiced against the work of William
Warburton on account of the extravagance of his claims and his
ungenerous treatment of predecessors to whom he was greatly indebted.
"The Genuine Text," he announced, "(collated with all former editions
and then corrected and emended) is here settled: Being restored from the
Blunders of the first editors and the Interpolations of the two Last";
yet he based his text on Theobald's and joined Pope's name with his own
on the title-page. Whatever value belongs to Warburton's edition (1747)
lies in a number of probable conjectural emendations, some of which he
had previously allowed Theobald to use, and in the amusing bombast and
arrogance of many of his notes. The feeble support that lay behind the
pretensions of this editor was exposed by a number of critics such as
John Upton, Zachary Grey, Benjamin Heath, and Thomas Edwards, who did
not issue new editions, but contributed a considerable number of
corrections and interpretations.
The value of Dr. Johnson's edition (1765) does not lie in his
emendations, which are usually, though not always, poor, or in his
collation of older editions, for which he was too indolent, but in the
sturdy common-sense of his interpretations and the consummate skill
frequently shown in paraphrases of obscure passages. His Preface to the
edition was the most weighty general estimate of Shakespeare so far
produced, and remains a valuable piece of criticism. In scientific
treatment of the text, involving full use of all the Quartos and Folios
then accessible, Johnson and his predecessors were far surpassed by
Edward Capell, who issued his edition in ten volumes in 1768.
Unfortunately, the enormous labor Capell underwent did not bear its full
fruit, for he suppressed much of his textual material in the interests
of a well-printed page, and his preface and notes are written in a
crabbed style that obscures the acuteness of his editorial intelligence.
He elaborated stage directions, and carried farther the correction of
disarranged meter; but, like most of his fellow-editors in that century,
he did less than justice to his predecessors and was too indulgent to
his own conjectures. This edition was supplemented by volumes of notes
published in 1775 (1 vol.) and 1779-1783 (3 vols.).
[Page Heading: Johnson and Capell]
Before the publication of Capell's text, the antiquary George Steevens
had issued in 1766 reprints of twenty of the early Quartos; and in 1773
he produced, in association with Johnson, an edition with a good text in
which he benefited from Capell's labors (though he denies this). Through
his knowledge of Elizabethan literature he made substantial
contributions to the interpretation of difficult passages. He restored
_Pericles_ to a place in the canon, but excluded the _Poems_, because
"the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to
compel readers into their service." To the second edition of Johnson and
Steevens's text (1778) Edmund Malone contributed his famous "Essay on
the Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays," which began modern investigation
of this subject. The third edition was revised in 1785 by Isaac Reed;
and this was succeeded by the edition of Malone in 1790, in which the
vast learning and conscientious care of that scholar combined to produce
the most trustworthy text so far published. Malone was not brilliant,
but he was extremely erudite and candid, and his so-called "Third
Variorum" edition in twenty-one volumes, brought out after his death by
James Boswell in 1821, is a mine of information on theatrical history
and cognate matters, which will probably always be of value to students
of the period. The name of "First Variorum Edition" is given to the
fifth edition of Johnson and Steevens, revised by Reed in 1803, and
"Second Variorum" to the sixth edition of the same, 1813. Meantime
occasional critiques of complete editions contributed something to the
text. Johnson's edition called forth comment by Kendrick in 1765 and
Tyrwhitt in 1766, and the Johnson and Steevens text was criticized by
Joseph Ritson in 1783 and 1788, and by J. Monck Mason in 1785. The first
American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1795-1796 from
Johnson's text; the first continental edition at Brunswick in 1797-1801
by C. Wagner.
[Page Heading: Nineteenth-Century Editors]
The editions of the nineteenth century are too numerous for detailed
mention here. Passing by the "family" Shakespeare of T. Bowdler, 1807
and 1820, and the editions of Harness, 1825, and Singer, 1826, we note
the editions of 1838-1842, and 1842-1844 in which Charles Knight
resorted to the text of the First Folio as an exclusive authority. J. P.
Collier in his edition of 1844 leaned, on the other hand, to the side of
the Quartos, but later became a clever if somewhat rash emendator, who
spoiled his reputation by seeking to obtain authority for his guesses by
forging them in a seventeenth-century hand in a copy of the second
Folio. The colossal volumes of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's edition,
1853-1865, contain stores of antiquarian illustration; and in the
edition of Delius, 1854-1861, we have the chief contribution of Germany
to the text of Shakespeare. Delius, like Knight, though not to the same
extreme, exaggerated the authority of the First Folio; but for the plays
for which that is the sole source, his text has earned high respect.
Alexander Dyce, wisest of Elizabethan scholars, produced in 1857 a
characteristically sane text, on the whole the best to this date; while
in America in 1857-1860 and 1859-1865 the brilliant but erratic Richard
Grant White produced editions which show a commendable if puzzling
openness to conviction in successive changes of opinion.
From 1863 to 1866 appeared the first issue of the Cambridge Shakespeare,
edited originally by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The
responsibility for the later revised edition of 1891-3 is Dr. Wright's.
The exceedingly careful and exhaustive collation of all previous textual
readings in the notes of this edition make it indispensable for the
serious student, and its text, substantially reprinted in the Globe
edition, is the most widely accepted form of the works of Shakespeare
which has ever been circulated. The over-emphasis on the First Folio
which has been noted in Knight and Delius is no longer found here, and
in general the comparative value of Quarto and Folio is weighed in the
case of each play. Occasionally, in cases like that of _Richard III_,
where both Quarto and Folio are good but vary widely, the Cambridge
editors seem more eclectic than their general theory warrants, and the
punctuation is still archaic, clinging to the eighteenth-century
tradition. But the acceptance of this careful and conservative text has
been a wholesome influence in Shakespearean study.
The only completely reedited texts which have been issued since the
revised Cambridge edition are that of the Oxford Shakespeare, by W. J.
Craig, on principles very similar to the Cambridge, and the Neilson
text, originally published in one volume in 1906 and revised and
reprinted in the Tudor Shakespeare. The massive volumes of Dr. H. H.
Furness's _New Variorum Shakespeare_, begun in 1871 (17 volumes issued),
now reprint the text of the First Folio, and show marked traces of the
tendency to follow this authority without due discrimination. This
monumental abstract of all previous criticism is of great value to the
professional student of Shakespeare, and its textual apparatus has the
advantage over the Cambridge edition of recording not only the first
occurrence of a reading, but the names of the chief editors who have
adopted it. It thus gives a compendious history of editorial judgment on
all disputed points.
[Page Heading: Recent Editors]
The conjectural emendation of Shakespeare still goes on, but since Dyce,
comparatively few suggestions find general acceptance. More progress has
been made in interpretation through the greater accessibility of
contemporary documents and the advance in recent years in our knowledge
of Elizabethan theatrical conditions. But, in view of the circumstances
under which the original editions were printed, there will always be
room for variations of individual opinion in many cases, both as to what
Shakespeare wrote and as to what he meant.