Complete Plays, The (72 page)

The title-pages of the quartos of Shakespeare bear convincing testimony, not only to the genuineness of his plays, but also to his rise in reputation. Only six of his plays were printed in quartos not bearing his name. Of these, two—
Romeo and Juliet
and
Henry V
—
began with pirated editions not bearing the author's name. Three—
Richard II, Richard III, I Henry IV
—
were all followed by quartos with the poet's name upon them. The sixth play,
Titus Andronicus
, was one of his earliest works, and its authorship is even now not absolutely certain.

Since the name of a popular dramatist on the  title-page was a distinct source of revenue to the publisher after 1598, it was to be expected that anonymous plays should be ascribed in some cases to William Shakespeare by an unscrupulous or a misinformed printer. Here arose the Shakespeare 'apocrypha,' which is discussed in a following chapter.

A new problem in the history of Shakespearean quartos has been presented since 1903 by a study of the quartos of 1619. Briefly summarized, the theory which is best defended at the present time is, that in that year Thomas Pavier and William Jaggard, two printers of London, decided at first to get up a collected quarto edition of Shakespeare's plays, but on giving up this idea, they issued nine plays in a uniform size and on paper bearing identical watermarks, which were either at that time or later bound up together as a collected set of Shakespeare's plays in a single volume.[
2
] These plays are the
Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses of Lancaster and York
, "printed for T. P.";
A Yorkshire Tragedie
, "printed for T. P., 1619";
Pericles
, "printed for T. P. 1619";
Merry Wives
, "printed for Arthur Johnson, 1619";
Sir John Oldcastle
, "printed for T. P., 1600";
Henry V
, "printed for T. P., 1608";
Merchant of Venice
, "printed by J. Roberts, 1600";
King Lear
, "printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1608";
Midsummer Night's Dream
, "printed for Thomas Fisher, 1600."

Of these plays, the
Whole Contention
, the
Yorkshire  Tragedie
, and
Sir John Oldcastle
are spurious, but had been attributed to Shakespeare in earlier quartos. The five plays dated 1600 or 1608 in each case duplicated a quarto actually printed in the year claimed by the Pavier reprint; so that this earlier dating was an attempt to deceive the public into believing they were purchasing the original editions.

Under the date of the 8th of November, 1623, Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered for their copy in the Stationers' Register "Mr. 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. Twelfth Night. The winter's tale. Histories The third parte of Henry the sixth. Henry the eight. Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens. Julius Caesar. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline." This entry preluded the publication of the First Folio. Associated with Blount and Jaggard were Jaggard's son Isaac, who had the contract for the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. Aspley. Smethwick owned at this time the rights of
Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet
, and
Hamlet
, and also the
Taming of a Shrew
, which latter right apparently carried with it the right to print Shakespeare's adaptation of it, the
Taming of the Shrew
. Aspley owned the rights to
Much Ado About Nothing
, and to
II Henry IV
. These four printers, making arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who apparently had the rights of
I Henry IV, Richard II
,  and
Richard III
, and others, were thus able to bring out an apparently complete edition of Shakespeare's plays. One play,
Troilus and Cressida
, was evidently secured only at the last moment and printed very irregularly.[
3
] Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manuscripts of the sixteen plays on the Register from members of Shakespeare's company, two of whom, John Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their names to the Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the volume. It will be remembered that these men received by Shakespeare's bequest a gold ring as a token of friendship. Their intimacy with the dramatist must have been both strong and lasting. Their actual share in the editing of the volume cannot be ascertained. It may be that all the claims are true which are made above their names in the Address to the Reader as to their care and pains in collecting and publishing his works "so to have publish'd them as where before you were abused with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest absolutely in their parts as he conceived them who as he was a happie imitator of nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together and what he thought he told with that easinesse that wee have scarse received from him a  blot in his papers." On the other hand, scholarship has discovered more in the life of Edward Blount to justify his claim to the chief work of editing this volume. Whoever they were, the editors' claim to diligent care in their work was sincere. Throughout the volume there are proofs that they employed the best text which they could get, even when others were in print.

It is owing to this volume, in all probability, that we possess twenty of the best of Shakespeare's plays and the best texts of a number of the others. We are therefore glad to hear that the edition was a success and was considered worth reprinting within nine years. It is not improbable that this edition ran to five hundred copies. Among the most interesting work of the editors of the volume was the prefixing of the Droeshout engraved portrait on the title-page, and an attempt to improve the stage directions, as well as the division of most of the plays, either in whole or in part, into acts and scenes.

The twenty plays which appeared in print for the first time in the First Folio were taken in all probability directly from copies in the possession of Shakespeare's company. Their texts are, upon the whole, excellent. In the case of the sixteen other plays the editors substituted for eight of the plays already in print in quartos, independent texts from better manuscripts. This act must have involved considerable expense and difficulty, and deserves the highest praise. Five of the printed quartos were used with additions and corrections. In the case of
Titus Andronicus
a whole scene was added. In three cases only  of the sixteen plays already printed did the editors follow a quarto text without correcting it from a later theatrical copy. This conscientious effort to give posterity the best text of Shakespeare deserves our gratitude.

The Second Folio, 1632, was a reprint of the First; the Third Folio, 1663, a reprint of the Second; the Fourth Folio, 1685, a reprint of the Third. This practice of copying the latest accessible edition has been adopted by editors down to a very late period. Between 1629 and 1632 six quartos of Shakespearean plays were printed,—a fact which indicates that the First Folio edition had been exhausted and that there was a continued market. A man named Thomas Cotes acquired through one Richard Cotes the printing rights of the Jaggards, and added to them other rights derived from Pavier. The old publishers, Smethwick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in publishing the Second Folio. Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard Meighen, who owned the rights of
Othello
and
Merry Wives
, were allowed to take shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right, others as obviously wrong.

Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 1634 and 1639. Between 1652 and 1655 two other  quartos were published. The Third Folio, 1664, was published by Philip Chetwind, who had married the widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights in the Second Folio. Chetwind's Folio is famous, not only for the addition of
Pericles
, which alone it was his first intention to include, but also for the addition of six spurious plays—
Sir John Oldcastle, The Yorkshire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, The Tragedie of Locrine, Thomas, Lord Cromwell
, and
The Puritaine
, or
The Widdow of Watling Streete
. Chetwind's reason for thus adding these plays was that they had passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their earliest prints. The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere reprint of the Third.

With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how Shakespeare got into print. From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare. Their ideal has been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their presumed primitive integrity. Constant study of his works, and of other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the words and grammatical usages of that day which go far to make Elizabethan English a foreign tongue to us. On the other hand, more knowledge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's time has helped the editors very greatly in their attempts to set right a passage which was misprinted in the earliest printed text, or a line of which two early texts give different versions.

An example of the difficulties that still confront editors may be given from
II Henry IV
, IV, i, 94-96:—

"
Archbishop
. My brother general, the commonwealth,
To brother born, an household cruelty.
I make my quarrel in particular."

Nobody knows what Shakespeare meant to say in this passage, and no satisfactory guess has ever been made as to what has happened to these lines.

A knowledge of Elizabethan English has cleared up the following passage perfectly. According to the First Folio, the only early print, Antony calls Lepidus, in
Julius Caesar
, IV, i, 36-37:—

"A barren-spirited fellow; one that feeds
On objects, arts, and imitations...."

This has been corrected to read in the second line

"On abjects, orts, and imitations."

Abjects here means outcasts, and orts, scraps, or leavings; but no one unfamiliar with the language of that time could have solved the puzzle.

A different sort of problem is offered by such plays as
King Lear
, of which the quartos furnish three hundred lines not in the Folio, while the Folio has one hundred lines not in the quartos, and is, on the whole, much more carefully copied. The modern editor gives all the lines in both versions, so that we read a
King Lear
which is probably longer than Shakespeare's countrymen read or ever saw acted. The modern editor selects, however, when Folio and quartos differ, the reading which seems best.

FOLIO. "Cordelia. Was this a face
To be opposed against the
jarring
winds?"

QUARTOS. "Was this a face
To be opposed against the
warring
winds?"

In such a difference as this, the personal taste of the editor is apt to govern his text.

We cannot here go farther in explaining the problems of the Shakespeare text. To those who would know more of them, the
Variorum
edition of Dr. H. H. Furness offers a full history. In the light of the knowledge which he and other scholars have thrown upon textual criticism, it is unlikely that there will ever be poor texts of Shakespeare reprinted. The work of the Shakespeare scholars has not been in vain.

Later Editions
.—Nicholas Rowe in 1709 produced the first edition in the modern sense. He modernized the spelling frankly, repunctuated, corrected the grammar, made out lists of the dramatis personae, arranged the verse which was in disorder, and made a number of good emendations in difficult places. He added also exits and entrances, which in earlier prints were only inserted occasionally. Further, he completed the division of the plays into acts and scenes. Perhaps his most important work was writing a full life of Shakespeare in which several valuable traditions are preserved. The poems were not included in the edition, but were published in 1716 from the edition of 1640. He followed the Third and Fourth Folios in reprinting the spurious plays. The edition was reprinted in 1714, 1725, and 1728.

In 1726 Alexander Pope published his famous edition of Shakespeare. Pope possessed a splendid lot of the old quartos and the first two folios, but his edition was wantonly careless. He did, indeed, use some sense in excluding the seven spurious plays as well as
Pericles
from his edition, and he undoubtedly  worked hard on the text. He subdivided the scenes more minutely than Rowe after the fashion of the French stage division,—where a new scene begins with every new character instead of after the stage has been cleared. Pope's explanations of the words which appeared difficult in Shakespeare's text were often laughably far from the truth. The word 'foison,' meaning 'plenty,' Pope defined as the 'natural juice of grass.' The word 'neif,' meaning 'fist,' Pope thought meant 'woman.' Pistol is thus made to say, "Thy woman will I take." Phrases that appeared to be vulgar or unpoetical he simply dropped out, or altered without notice. He rearranged the lines in order to give them the studied smoothness characteristic of the eighteenth century. In fact, he tried to make Shakespeare as near like Pope's poetry as he could.

In 1726 Lewis Theobald published
Shakespeare Restored
, with many corrections of Pope's errors. In this little pamphlet most of the material was devoted to
Hamlet
. Theobald's corrections were taken by Pope in very bad part; and the latter tried to destroy Theobald's reputation by writing satires against him and by injuring him in every possible way in print. The first of these publications,
The Dunciad
, appeared in 1728; and this, the greatest satire in the English language, was so effective as to have obscured Theobald's real merit until our own day. Theobald's edition of Shakespeare followed in 1734, and was reprinted in 1740. It is famous for his corrections and improvements of the text, many of which are followed by all later editors of Shakespeare. The most notable of these is Mrs. Quickly's remark in Falstaff's deathbed scene, "His nose was as sharp as a pen and a' babbled of green fields." The previous texts had given "and a table of green fields." Pope had said that this nonsense crept in from the name of the property man who was named Greenfield, and thus there must have been a stage direction here,—"Bring in a table of Greenfield's."