preference is to be given to one edition over another, it is to the earlier copies; for additional errors were the consequence of every renewed passage through the press. It may be a matter of amusement to some readers, perhaps, to witness a specimen of the titles under which such of Shakspeare's plays as appeared in quarto were recommended to the public for purchase. “The Tragedy of Richard the Third. Containing his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence : the pittieful Murder of his innocent Nephewes: his tyrannical Usurpation: with the whole of his detested Life, and most deserved Death. As it hath been lately acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlaine his servants." "A most plesaunt and excellent conceited comedie, of Syr John Falstaffe and the Merrie Wives of Windsor. Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing Humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Justice Shallow, and his wise Cousin, M. Slender. With the swaggering vaine of auncient Pistoll and Corporall Nym. By William Shakspeare. As it hath, &c. &c." "M. William Shake-speare his True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear, and his Three Daughters. With the unfortunate Life of Edgar, Sonne and Heire to the Earle of Glocester, and his sullen and assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam. As it was plaid before the King's Majesty at White-Hall, uppon S. Stephens Night; in Christmas Hollidaies. By his Majesties Servants playing usually at the Globe on the Banck-side." The art of puffing is improved, but our ancestors were not a jot behind us in intention. To remedy the defects of the quartos, and to present the world with an entire collection of Shakspeare's dramatic works, was the professed object of "Henrie Condell and John Heminge," the managers of the Globe theatre, and the friends and fellows of Shakspeare, in publishing their folio in 1623. Such plays as had already appeared were "now offer'd cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them." The pretensions were great, but the performance mean, for the folio exhibits reprints of several of those very quartos which its preface labours to depreciate; reprints encumbered too with the typographical errors which the folio accumulated as it went through the press. materials, therefore, used by the players in their edition were not of a value superior to those that had belonged to the publishers of the quarto plays. Indeed there is no doubt but that they were essentially the same:-the prompter's book, The quar where it contained the entire play, and the parts written out for the actors when the piece existed in no single manuscript. Like the tos, the folio transposes verses, assigns speeches to wrong characters, inserts the names of actors instead of those of the dramatis personæ, confounds and mixes characters together, prints verse for prose and prose for verse. It must be mentioned in praise of the folio, that most of its plays are divided into acts, and many into both acts and scenes, and the divisions were made by competent authority, if we may argue from the uniformity of principle apparent in much of the volume; but still scenes not unfrequently end without a pause in the action, and stand in an order perfectly unnatural, shuffled backwards or forwards in absurd confusion. The folio rejected the descriptive titles appended to the quartos, simply calling each play by the name which now distinguishes it; and in obedience to the statute 3 James 1. cap. 21., which prohibits, under severe penalties, the use of the sacred name in any plays or interludes, substituted general terms for the awful name of the Deity, often impiously profaned by invocation on the stage. A second folio was published in 1632, a volume described by all the editors of Shakspeare, with the exception of Steevens, as utterly worthless. It is a reprint of the former folio, with hundreds of additional errors, the productions of chance, negligence, and ignorance. A third folio appeared in 1664, exhibiting a still more miserable copy of the first edition, with seven additional plays* falsely attributed to Shakspeare. It was the good fortune of this edition to be almost entirely destroyed in the fire of London, in 1666, so that copies of it are now more rare than those of the first folio itself. A fourth folio, originating in the same source, issued from the press in 1685; it rather fell below than rose above the merit of its predecessors. Such were the only editions of Shakspeare before the world when, in 1709, Rowe's octavo edition in seven volumes apppeared. Rowe was fully aware of the degraded state of the poet's text, and acknowledged "that there was nothing left but to compare the several editions, and give the true reading as well as he could from thence;" yet he perversely neglected the performance of this important duty altogether, and printed his volumes from the latest of the folios, simply directing his attention to the correction * Locrine, The London Prodigal, Pericles, The Puritan, Sir John Oldcastle, Thomas Lord Cromwell, and the Yorkshire Tragedy. of the grossest of the printer's errors, and to the division of such plays into acts and scenes as had been hitherto undivided. Notwithstanding the imperfections of this edition, its success was so great that it was reprinted in nine volumes duodecimo in 1714. Pope was the next editor of Shakspeare. He perfectly understood the defects of the existing editions, and boldly undertook to collate the quartos themselves, professing to adopt no reading unsanctioned by their authority, or that of the early folio, and asserting his "religious abhorrence" of all innovation, or the indulgence of any private sense or conjecture. But he soon found the task he had undertaken "dull," and adopted a much more compendious mode of criticism. He took Rowe's text as the groundwork of his own, and, by a partial collation of the old copies, restored many passages to their integrity, but at the same time indulged himself in the liberty of rejecting whatever he disliked, of altering whatever he did not understand, and of revising Shakspeare with as little fearlessness and as much diligence as he would have sat down to the correction of his own poems. Pope's edition was printed in six volumes quarto, in 1725, and in ten volumes duodecimo, in 1728. In 1733 Theobald followed Pope, and by a |