Droeshout’s engraving.

The engraved portrait—nearly a half-length—which was printed on the title-page of the folio of 1623, was by Martin Droeshout.  On the opposite page lines by Ben Jonson congratulate ‘the graver’ on having satisfactorily ‘hit’ the poet’s ‘face.’  Jonson’s testimony does no credit to his artistic discernment; the expression of countenance, which is very crudely rendered, is neither distinctive nor lifelike.  The face is long and the forehead high; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears.  There is a scanty moustache and a thin tuft under the lower lip.  A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck.  The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders.  The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as compared with those of the body.  In the unique proof copy which belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps (now with his collection in America) the tone is clearer than in the ordinary copies, and the shadows are less darkened by cross-hatching and coarse dotting.  The engraver, Martin Droeshout, belonged to a Flemish family of painters and engravers long settled in London, where he was born in 1601.  He was thus fifteen years old at the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, and it is consequently improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the dramatist.  The engraving was doubtless produced by Droeshout very shortly before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year.  It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver’s professional career, in which he never achieved extended practice or reputation.  A copy of the Droeshout engraving, by William Marshall, was prefixed to Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640, and William Faithorne made another copy for the frontispiece of the edition of ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ published in 1655.

There is little doubt that young Droeshout in fashioning his engraving worked from a painting, and there is a likelihood that the original picture from which the youthful engraver worked has lately come to light.  As recently as 1892 Mr. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a private gentleman with artistic tastes residing at Peckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent Shakespeare.  The picture, which was faded and somewhat worm-eaten, dated beyond all doubt from the early years of the seventeenth century.  It was painted on a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the upper left-hand corner was the inscription ‘Will^m Shakespeare, 1609.’  Mr. Clements purchased the portrait of an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip of paper when he acquired it.  The note that he then wrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the picture, ran as follows: ‘The original portrait of Shakespeare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his death.  The picture was painted nine [verè seven] years before his death, and consequently sixteen [verè fourteen] years before it was published. . . .  The picture was publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and many thousands went to see it.’  In all its details and in its comparative dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the size of the head and that of the body, this picture is identical with the Droeshout engraving.  Though coarsely and stiffly drawn, the face is far more skilfully presented than in the engraving, and the expression of countenance betrays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the print.  Connoisseurs, including Sir Edward Poynter, Mr. Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Cust, have almost unreservedly pronounced the picture to be anterior in date to the engraving, and they have reached the conclusion that in all probability Martin Droeshout directly based his work upon the painting.  Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school are plainly discernible in the picture, and it is just possible that it is the production of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droeshout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this country on January 25, 1608, when he was described as a ‘painter of Brabant.’  Although the history of the portrait rests on critical conjecture and on no external contemporary evidence, there seems good ground for regarding it as a portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime—in the forty-fifth year of his age.  No other pictorial representation of the poet has equally serious claims to be treated as contemporary with himself, and it therefore presents features of unique interest.  On the death of its owner, Mr. Clements, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs.  No attempt at restoration has been made.  A photogravure forms the frontispiece to the present volume. [290]

Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although less closely resembling it than the picture just described, is the ‘Ely House’ portrait (now the property of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford), which formerly belonged to Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, and it is inscribed ‘Æ. 39 x. 1603.’ [291a]  This painting is of high artistic value.  The features are of a far more attractive and intellectual cast than in either the Droeshout painting or engraving, and the many differences in detail raise doubts as to whether the person represented can have been intended for Shakespeare.  Experts are of opinion that the picture was painted early in the seventeenth century.

Early in Charles II’s reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in his house in St. James’s.  Mention is made of it in a letter from the diarist John Evelyn to his friend Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Clarendon’s collection was dispersed at the end of the seventeenth century and the picture has not been traced. [291b]

Later portraits.

Of the numerous extant paintings which have been described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the ‘Droeshout’ portrait and the Ely House portrait, both of which are at Stratford, bear any definable resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in the church. [291c]  In spite of their admitted imperfections, those presentments can alone be held indisputably to have been honestly designed to depict the poet’s features.  They must be treated as the standards of authenticity in judging of the genuineness of other portraits claiming to be of an early date.

Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most famous and interesting is the ‘Chandos’ portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery.  Its pedigree suggests that it was intended to represent the poet, but numerous and conspicuous divergences from the authenticated likenesses show that it was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years after his death.  The face is bearded, and rings adorn the ears.  Oldys reported that it was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare’s fellow-actor, who had some reputation as a limner, [292] and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare.  These rumours are not corroborated; but there is no doubt that it was at one time the property of D’Avenant, and that it subsequently belonged successively to the actor Betterton and to Mrs. Barry the actress.  In 1693 Sir Godfrey Kneller made a copy as a gift for Dryden.  After Mrs Barry’s death in 1713 it was purchased for forty guineas by Robert Keck, a barrister of the Inner Temple.  At length it reached the hands of one John Nichols, whose daughter married James Brydges, third duke of Chandos.  In due time the Duke became the owner of the picture, and it subsequently passed, through Chandos’s daughter, to her husband, the first Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose son, the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, sold it with the rest of his effects at Stowe in 1848, when it was purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere.  The latter presented it to the nation.  Edward Capell many years before presented a copy by Ranelagh Barret to Trinity College, Cambridge, and other copies are attributed to Sir Joshua Reynolds and Ozias Humphrey (1783).  It was engraved by George Vertue in 1719 for Pope’s edition (1725), and often later, one of the best engravings being by Vandergucht.  A good lithograph from a tracing by Sir George Scharf was published by the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in 1864.  The Baroness Burdett-Coutts purchased in 1875 a portrait of similar type, which is said, somewhat doubtfully, to have belonged to John lord Lumley, who died in 1609, and to have formed part of a collection of portraits of the great men of his day at his house, Lumley Castle, Durham.  Its early history is not positively authenticated, and it may well be an early copy of the Chandos portrait.  The ‘Lumley’ painting was finely chromo-lithographed in 1863 by Vincent Brooks.

Plaster-cast of bust of William Shakespeare

The ‘Soest’ portrait.

The ‘Soest’ or ‘Zoust’ portrait—in the possession of Sir John Lister-Kaye of the Grange, Wakefield—was in the collection of Thomas Wright, painter, of Covent Garden in 1725, when John Simon engraved it.  Soest was born twenty-one years after Shakespeare’s death, and the portrait is only on fanciful grounds identified with the poet.  A chalk drawing by John Michael Wright, obviously inspired by the Soest portrait, is the property of Sir Arthur Hodgson of Clopton House, and is on loan at the Memorial Gallery, Stratford.

A bust, said to be of Shakespeare, was discovered in 1845 bricked up in a wall in Spode and Copeland’s china warehouse in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  The warehouse had been erected on the site of the Duke’s Theatre, which was built by D’Avenant in 1660.  The bust, which is of black terra cotta, and bears traces of Italian workmanship, is believed to have adorned the proscenium of the Duke’s Theatre.  It was acquired by the surgeon William Clift, from whom it passed to Clift’s son-in-law, Richard (afterwards Sir Richard) Owen the naturalist.  The latter sold it to the Duke of Devonshire, who presented it in 1851 to the Garrick Club, after having two copies made in plaster.  One of these copies is now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford, and from it an engraving has been made for reproduction in this volume.

The Kesselstadt death-mask was discovered by Dr. Ludwig Becker, librarian at the ducal palace at Darmstadt, in a rag-shop at Mayence in 1849.  The features resemble those of an alleged portrait of Shakespeare (dated 1637) which Dr. Becker purchased in 1847.  This picture had long been in the possession of the family of Count Francis von Kesselstadt of Mayence, who died in 1843.  Dr. Becker brought the mask and the picture to England in 1849, and Richard Owen supported the theory that the mask was taken from Shakespeare’s face after death, and was the foundation of the bust in Stratford Church.  The mask was for a long time in Dr. Becker’s private apartments at the ducal palace, Darmstadt. [296a]  The features are singularly attractive; but the chain of evidence which would identify them with Shakespeare is incomplete. [296b]

Memorials in sculpture.

A monument, the expenses of which were defrayed by public subscription, was set up in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1741.  Pope and the Earl of Burlington were among the promoters.  The design was by William Kent, and the statue of Shakespeare was executed by Peter Scheemakers. [297]  Another statue was executed by Roubiliac for Garrick, who bequeathed it to the British Museum in 1779.  A third statue, freely adapted from the works of Scheemakers and Roubiliac, was executed for Baron Albert Grant and was set up by him as a gift to the metropolis in Leicester Square, London, in 1879.  A fourth statue (by Mr. J. A. Q. Ward) was placed in 1882 in the Central Park, New York.  A fifth in bronze, by M. Paul Fournier, which was erected in Paris in 1888 at the expense of an English resident, Mr. W. Knighton, stands at the point where the Avenue de Messine meets the Boulevard Haussmann.  A sixth memorial in sculpture, by Lord Ronald Gower, the most elaborate and ambitious of all, stands in the garden of the Shakespeare Memorial buildings at Stratford-on-Avon, and was unveiled in 1888; Shakespeare is seated on a high pedestal; below, at each side of the pedestal, stand figures of four of Shakespeare’s principal characters: Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Prince Hal, and Sir John Falstaff.

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

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.

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 1609.  Thus the poem numbered lxvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning

Two of the plays, published thus, reached five editions before 1616, viz. ‘Richard III’ (1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612) and ‘1 Henry IV’ (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1615).

Three years after Shakespeare’s death—in 1619—there appeared a second edition of ‘Merry Wives’ (again imperfect) and a fourth of ‘Pericles.’  ‘Othello’ was first printed posthumously in 1622 (4to), and in the same year sixth editions of ‘Richard III’ and ‘I Henry IV’ appeared. [302]  The largest collections of the original quartos—each of which survives in only four, five, or six copies—are in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the British Museum, and Trinity College, Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library. [303]  All the quartos were issued in Shakespeare’s day at sixpence each.

The First Folio.  The publishing syndicate.

In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays.  Two of the dramatist’s intimate friends and fellow-actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, were nominally responsible for the venture, but it seems to have been suggested by a small syndicate of printers and publishers, who undertook all pecuniary responsibility.  Chief of the syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 1611 to the City of London, who was established in business in Fleet Street at the east end of St. Dunstan’s Church.  As the piratical publisher of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ he had long known the commercial value of Shakespeare’s work.  In 1613 he had extended his business by purchasing the stock and rights of a rival pirate, James Roberts, who had printed the quarto editions of the ‘Merchant of Venice’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in 1600 and the complete quarto of ‘Hamlet’ in 1604.  Roberts had enjoyed for nearly twenty years the right to print ‘the players’ bills,’ or programmes, and he made over that privilege to Jaggard with his other literary property.  It is to the close personal relations with the playhouse managers into which the acquisition of the right of printing ‘the players’ bill’ brought Jaggard after 1613 that the inception of the scheme of the ‘First Folio’ may safely be attributed.  Jaggard associated his son Isaac with the enterprise.  They alone of the members of the syndicate were printers.  Their three partners were publishers or booksellers only.  Two of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had already speculated in plays of Shakespeare.  Aspley had published with another in 1600 the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ and ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ and in 1609 half of Thorpe’s impression of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets.’  Smethwick, whose shop was in St. Dunstan’s Churchyard, Fleet Street, near Jaggard’s, had published in 1611 two late editions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and one of ‘Hamlet.’  Edward Blount, the fifth partner, was an interesting figure in the trade, and, unlike his companions, had a true taste in literature.  He had been a friend and admirer of Christopher Marlowe, and had actively engaged in the posthumous publication of two of Marlowe’s poems.  He had published that curious collection of mystical verse entitled ‘Love’s Martyr,’ one poem in which, ‘a poetical essay of the Phœnix and the Turtle,’ was signed ‘William Shakespeare.’ [304]

The First Folio was doubtless printed in Jaggard’s printing office near St. Dunstan’s Church.  Upon Blount probably fell the chief labour of seeing the work through the press.  It was in progress throughout 1623, and had so far advanced by November 8, 1623, that on that day Edward Blount and Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained formal license from the Stationers’ Company to publish sixteen of the twenty hitherto unprinted plays that it was intended to include.  The pieces, whose approaching publication for the first time was thus announced, were of supreme literary interest.  The titles ran: ‘The Tempest,’ ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As you like it,’ ‘All’s Well,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘3 Henry VI,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘Timon,’ ‘Julius Cæsar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Cymbeline.’  Four other hitherto unprinted dramas for which no license was sought figured in the volume, viz. ‘King John,’ ‘1 and 2 Henry VI,’ and the ‘Taming of the Shrew;’ but each of these plays was based by Shakespeare on a play of like title which had been published at an earlier date, and the absence of a license was doubtless due to an ignorant misconception on the past either of the Stationers’ Company’s officers or of the editors of the volume as to the true relations subsisting between the old pieces and the new.  The only play by Shakespeare that had been previously published and was not included in the First Folio was ‘Pericles.’

Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together.  The volume consisted of nearly one thousand double-column pages and was sold at a pound a copy.  Steevens estimated that the edition numbered 250 copies.  The book was described on the title-page as published by Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard, and in the colophon as printed at the charges of ‘W. Jaggard, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley,’ as well as of Blount. [306]  On the title-page was engraved the Droeshout portrait.  Commendatory verses were supplied by Ben Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges, and I. M., perhaps Jasper Maine.  The dedication was addressed to the brothers William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, the lord chamberlain, and Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery, and was signed by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow-actors, Heming and Condell.  The same signatures were appended to a succeeding address ‘to the great variety of readers.’  In both addresses the two actors made pretension to a larger responsibility for the enterprise than they really incurred, but their motives in identifying themselves with the venture were doubtless irreproachable.  They disclaimed (they wrote) ‘ambition either of selfe-profit or fame in undertaking the design,’ being solely moved by anxiety to ‘keepe the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.’  ‘It had bene a thing we confesse worthie to haue bene wished,’ they inform the reader, ‘that the author himselfe had liued to haue set forth and ouerseen his owne writings. . . .’  A list of contents follows the address to the readers.

The value of the text.

The title-page states that all the plays were printed ‘according to the true originall copies.’  The dedicators wrote to the same effect.  ‘As where (before) we were abus’d with diuerse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of incurious impostors that expos’d them: even those are now offer’d to your view cur’d and perfect in their limbes, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.’  There is no doubt that the whole volume was printed from the acting versions in the possession of the manager of the company with which Shakespeare had been associated.  But it is doubtful if any play were printed exactly as it came from his pen.  The First Folio text is often markedly inferior to that of the sixteen pre-existent quartos, which, although surreptitiously and imperfectly printed, followed playhouse copies of far earlier date.  From the text of the quartos the text of the First Folio differs invariably, although in varying degrees.  The quarto texts of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Richard II,’ for example, differ very largely and always for the better from the folio texts.  On the other hand, the folio repairs the glaring defects of the quarto versions of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and of ‘Henry V.’  In the case of twenty of the plays in the First Folio no quartos exist for comparison, and of these twenty plays, ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘All’s Well,’ and ‘Macbeth’ present a text abounding in corrupt passages.

The plays are arranged under three headings—‘Comedies,’ ‘Histories,’ and ‘Tragedies’—and each division is separately paged.  The arrangement of the plays in each division follows no principle.  The comedy section begins with the ‘Tempest’ and ends with the ‘Winter’s Tale.’  The histories more justifiably begin with ‘King John’ and end with ‘Henry VIII.’  The tragedies begin with ‘Troilus and Cressida’ and end with ‘Cymbeline.’  This order has been usually followed in subsequent collective editions.

Three copies are known which are distinguished by more interesting irregularities, in each case unique.  The copy in the Lenox Library in New York includes a cancel duplicate of a leaf of ‘As You Like It’ (sheet R of the comedies), and the title-page bears the date 1622 instead of 1623; but it is suspected that the figures were tampered with outside the printing office. [308]  Samuel Butler, successively headmaster of Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, possessed a copy of the First Folio in which a proof leaf of ‘Hamlet’ was bound up with the corrected leaf. [309a]

The Sheldon copy.

The most interesting irregularity yet noticed appears in one of the two copies of the book belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.  This copy is known as the Sheldon Folio, having formed in the seventeenth century part of the library of Ralph Sheldon of Weston Manor in the parish of Long Compton, Warwickshire. [309b]  In the Sheldon Folio the opening page of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ of which the recto or front is occupied by the prologue and the verso or back by the opening lines of the text of the play, is followed by a superfluous leaf.  On the recto or front of the unnecessary leaf [309c] are printed the concluding lines of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in place of the prologue to ‘Troilus and Cressida.’  At the back or verso are the opening lines of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ repeated from the preceding page.  The presence of a different ornamental headpiece on each page proves that the two are not taken from the same setting of the type.  At a later page in the Sheldon copy the concluding lines of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are duly reprinted at the close of the play, and on the verso or back of the leaf, which supplies them in their right place, is the opening passage, as in other copies, of ‘Timon of Athens.’  These curious confusions attest that while the work was in course of composition the printers or editors of the volume at one time intended to place ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ with the prologue omitted, after ‘Romeo and Juliet.’  The last page of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is in all copies numbered 79, an obvious misprint for 77; the first leaf of ‘Troilus’ is paged 78; the second and third pages of ‘Troilus’ are numbered 79 and 80.  It was doubtless suddenly determined while the volume was in the press to transfer ‘Troilus and Cressida’ to the head of the tragedies from a place near the end, but the numbers on the opening pages which indicated its first position were clumsily retained, and to avoid the extensive typographical corrections that were required by the play’s change of position, its remaining pages were allowed to go forth unnumbered. [310]

Estimated number of extant copies.

It is difficult to estimate how many copies survive of the First Folio, which is intrinsically the most valuable volume in the whole range of English literature, and extrinsically is only exceeded in value by some half-dozen volumes of far earlier date and of exceptional typographical interest.  It seems that about 140 copies have been traced within the past century.  Of these fewer than twenty are in a perfect state, that is, with the portrait printed (not inlaid) on the title-page, and the flyleaf facing it, with all the pages succeeding it, intact and uninjured.  (The flyleaf contains Ben Jonson’s verses attesting the truthfulness of the portrait.)  Excellent copies in this enviable state are in the Grenville Library at the British Museum, and in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the Earl of Crawford, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and Mr. A. H. Huth.  Of these probably the finest and cleanest is the ‘Daniel’ copy belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts.  It measures 13 inches by 8¼, and was purchased by its present owner for £716 2s. at the sale of George Daniel’s library in 1864.  Some twenty more copies are defective in the preliminary pages, but are unimpaired in other respects.  There remain about a hundred copies which have sustained serious damage at various points.

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 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.

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 entrances and exits of the characters.  Spelling, punctuation, and grammar he corrected and modernised.

Pope found a rigorous critic in Lewis Theobald, who, although contemptible as a writer of original verse and prose, proved himself the most inspired of all the textual critics of Shakespeare.  Pope savagely avenged himself on his censor by holding him up to ridicule as the hero of the ‘Dunciad.’  Theobald first displayed his critical skill in 1726 in a volume which deserves to rank as a classic in English literature.  The title runs ‘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.’  There at page 137 appears Theobald’s great emendation in Shakespeare’s account of Falstaff’s death (Henry V, II. iii. 17): ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and a’ babbled of green fields,’ in place of the reading in the old copies, ‘His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.’  In 1733 Theobald brought out his edition of Shakespeare in seven volumes.  In 1740 it reached a second issue.  A third edition was published in 1752.  Others are dated 1772 and 1773.  It is stated that 12,860 copies in all were sold.  Theobald made the First Folio the basis of his text, although he failed to adopt all the correct readings of that version, but over 300 corrections or emendations which he made in his edition have become part and parcel of the authorised canon.  Theobald’s principles of textual criticism were as enlightened as his practice was triumphant.  ‘I ever labour,’ he wrote to Warburton, ‘to make the smallest deviation that I possibly can from the text; never to alter at all where I can by any means explain a passage with sense; nor ever by any emendation to make the author better when it is probable the text came from his own hands.’  Theobald has every right to the title of the Porson of Shakespearean criticism. [317a]  The following are favourable specimens of his insight.  In ‘Macbeth’ (I. vii. 6) for ‘this bank and school of time,’ he substituted the familiar ‘bank and shoal of time.’  In ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the old copies (v. ii. 87) made Cleopatra say of Antony:

                    For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an Anthony it was
That grew the more by reaping.

For the gibberish ‘an Anthony it was,’ Theobald read ‘an autumn ’twas,’ and thus gave the lines true point and poetry.  A third notable instance, somewhat more recondite, is found in ‘Coriolanus’ (II. i. 59-60) where Menenius asks the tribunes in the First Folio version ‘what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?’  Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet ‘besom’ by ‘bisson’ (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in ‘Hamlet’ (II. ii. 529). [317b]

Sir Thomas Hanmer, 1677-1746.

The fourth editor was Sir Thomas Hammer, a country gentleman without much literary culture, but possessing a large measure of mother wit.  He was speaker in the House of Commons for a few months in 1714, and retiring soon afterwards from public life devoted his leisure to a thorough-going scrutiny of Shakespeare’s plays.  His edition, which was the earliest to pretend to typographical beauty, was printed at the Oxford University Press in 1744 in six quarto volumes.  It contained a number of good engravings by Gravelot after designs by Francis Hayman, and was long highly valued by book collectors.  No editor’s name was given.  In forming his text, Hanmer depended exclusively on his own ingenuity.  He made no recourse to the old copies.  The result was a mass of common-sense emendations, some of which have been permanently accepted. [318]  Hanmer’s edition was reprinted in 1770-1.

Bishop Warburton, 1698-1779.

In 1747 Bishop Warburton produced a revised version of Pope’s edition in eight volumes.  Warburton was hardly better qualified for the task than Pope, and such improvements as he introduced are mainly borrowed from Theobald and Hanmer.  On both these critics he arrogantly and unjustly heaped abuse in his preface.  The Bishop was consequently criticised with appropriate severity for his pretentious incompetence by many writers; among them, by Thomas Edwards, whose ‘Supplement to Warburton’s Edition of Shakespeare’ first appeared in 1747, and, having been renamed ‘The Canons of Criticism’ next year in the third edition, passed through as many as seven editions by 1765.

The seventh editor, Edward Capell, advanced on his predecessors in many respects.  He was a clumsy writer, and Johnson declared, with some justice, that he ‘gabbled monstrously,’ but his collation of the quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his predecessors not excepting Theobald.  His industry was untiring, and he is said to have transcribed the whole of Shakespeare ten times.  Capell’s edition appeared in ten small octavo volumes in 1768.  He showed himself well versed in Elizabethan literature in a volume of notes which appeared in 1774, and in three further volumes, entitled ‘Notes, Various Readings, and the School of Shakespeare,’ which were not published till 1783, two years after his death.  The last volume, ‘The School of Shakespeare,’ consisted of ‘authentic extracts from divers English books that were in print in that author’s time,’ to which was appended ‘Notitia Dramatica; or, Tables of Ancient Plays (from their beginning to the Restoration of Charles II).’

George Steevens, whose saturnine humour involved him in a lifelong series of literary quarrels with rival students of Shakespeare, made invaluable contributions to Shakespearean study.  In 1766 he reprinted twenty of the plays from the quartos.  Soon afterwards he revised Johnson’s edition without much assistance from the Doctor, and his revision, which embodied numerous improvements, appeared in ten volumes in 1773.  It was long regarded as the standard version.  Steevens’s antiquarian knowledge alike of Elizabethan history and literature was greater than that of any previous editor; his citations of parallel passages from the writings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, in elucidation of obscure words and phrases, have not been exceeded in number or excelled in aptness by any of his successors.  All commentators of recent times are more deeply indebted in this department of their labours to Steevens than to any other critic.  But he lacked taste as well as temper, and excluded from his edition Shakespeare’s sonnets and poems, because, he wrote, ‘the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service.’ [320]  The second edition of Johnson and Steevens’s version appeared in ten volumes in 1778.  The third edition, published in ten volumes in 1785, was revised by Steevens’s friend, Isaac Reed (1742-1807), a scholar of his own type.  The fourth and last edition, published in Steevens’s lifetime, was prepared by himself in fifteen volumes in 1793.  As he grew older, he made some reckless changes in the text, chiefly with the unhallowed object of mystifying those engaged in the same field.  With a malignity that was not without humour, he supplied, too, many obscene notes to coarse expressions, and he pretended that he owed his indecencies to one or other of two highly respectable clergymen, Richard Amner and John Collins, whose surnames were in each instance appended.  He had known and quarrelled with both.  Such proofs of his perversity justified the title which Gifford applied to him of ‘the Puck of Commentators.’

Edmund Malone, who lacked Steevens’s quick wit and incisive style, was a laborious and amiable archæologist, without much ear for poetry or delicate literary taste.  He threw abundance of new light on Shakespeare’s biography, and on the chronology and sources of his works, while his researches into the beginnings of the English stage added a new chapter of first-rate importance to English literary history.  To Malone is due the first rational ‘attempt to ascertain the order in which the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written.’  His earliest results on the topic were contributed to Steevens’s edition of 1778.  Two years later he published, as a supplement to Steevens’s work, two volumes containing a history of the Elizabethan stage, with reprints of Arthur Brooke’s ‘Romeus and Juliet,’ Shakespeare’s Poems, and the plays falsely ascribed to him in the Third and Fourth Folios.  A quarrel with Steevens followed, and was never closed.  In 1787 Malone issued ‘A Dissertation on the Three Parts of King Henry VI,’ tending to show that those plays were not originally written by Shakespeare.  In 1790 appeared his edition of Shakespeare in ten volumes, the first in two parts.

What is known among booksellers as the ‘First Variorum’ edition of Shakespeare was prepared by Steevens’s friend, Isaac Reed, after Steevens’s death.  It was based on a copy of Steevens’s work of 1793, which had been enriched with numerous manuscript additions, and it embodied the published notes and prefaces of preceding editors.  It was published in twenty-one volumes in 1803.  The ‘Second Variorum’ edition, which was mainly a reprint of the first, was published in twenty-one volumes in 1813.  The ‘Third Variorum’ was prepared for the press by James Boswell the younger, the son of Dr. Johnson’s biographer.  It was based on Malone’s edition of 1790, but included massive accumulations of notes left in manuscript by Malone at his death.  Malone had been long engaged on a revision of his edition, but died in 1812, before it was completed.  Boswell’s ‘Malone,’ as the new work is often called, appeared in twenty-one volumes in 1821.  It is the most valuable of all collective editions of Shakespeare’s works, but the three volumes of preliminary essays on Shakespeare’s biography and writings, and the illustrative notes brought together in the final volume, are confusedly arranged and are unindexed; many of the essays and notes break off abruptly at the point at which they were left at Malone’s death.  A new ‘Variorum’ edition, on an exhaustive scale, was undertaken by Mr. H. Howard Furness of Philadelphia, and eleven volumes have appeared since 1871 (‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Hamlet,’ 2 vols., ‘King Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Merchant of Venice,’ ‘As You Like It,’ ‘Tempest,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Winter’s Tale’).

Alexander Dyce was almost as well read as Steevens in Elizabethan literature, and especially in the drama of the period, and his edition of Shakespeare in nine volumes, which was first published in 1857, has many new and valuable illustrative notes and a few good textual emendations, as well as a useful glossary; but Dyce’s annotations are not always adequate, and often tantalise the reader by their brevity.  Howard Staunton’s edition first appeared in three volumes between 1868 and 1870.  He also was well read in contemporary literature and was an acute textual critic.  His introductions bring together much interesting stage history.  Nikolaus Delius’s edition was issued at Elberfeld in seven volumes between 1854 and 1861.  Delius’s text is formed on sound critical principles and is to be trusted thoroughly.  A fifth edition in two volumes appeared in 1882.  The Cambridge edition, which first appeared in nine volumes between 1863 and 1866, exhaustively notes the textual variations of all preceding editions, and supplies the best and fullest apparatus criticus.  (Of new editions, one dated 1887 is also in nine volumes, and another, dated 1893, in forty volumes.)

Other editors of the complete works of Shakespeare of the nineteenth century whose labours, although of some value, present fewer distinctive characteristics are:—William Harness (1825, 8 vols.); Samuel Weller Singer (1826, 10 vols., printed at the Chiswick Press for William Pickering, illustrated by Stothard and others; reissued in 1856 with essays by William Watkiss Lloyd); Charles Knight, with discursive notes and pictorial illustrations by F. W. Fairholt and others (‘Pictorial edition,’ 8 vols., including biography and the doubtful plays, 1838-43, often reissued under different designations); Bryan Waller Procter, i.e. Barry Cornwall (1839-43, 3 vols.); John Payne Collier (1841-4, 8 vols.; another edition, 8 vols., privately printed, 1878, 4to); Samuel Phelps, the actor (1852-4, 2 vols.; another edition, 1882-4); J. O. Halliwell (1853-61, 15 vols. folio, with an encyclopædic collection of annotations of earlier editors and pictorial illustrations); Richard Grant White (Boston, U.S.A., 1857-65, 12 vols.); W. J. Rolfe (New York, 1871-96, 40 vols.); the Rev. H. N. Hudson (the Harvard edition, Boston, 1881, 20 vols.)  The latest complete annotated editions published in this country are ‘The Henry Irving Shakespeare,’ edited by F. A. Marshall and others—especially useful for notes on stage history (8 vols.  1888-90)—and ‘The Temple Shakespeare,’ concisely edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz (38 vols. 12mo, 1894-6).

XX—POSTHUMOUS REPUTATION

Anticipating the final verdict, the editors of the First Folio wrote, seven years after Shakespeare’s death: ‘These plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals.’ [327a]  Ben Jonson, the staunchest champion of classical canons, noted that Shakespeare ‘wanted art,’ but he allowed him, in verses prefixed to the First Folio, the first place among all dramatists, including those of Greece and Rome, and claimed that all Europe owed him homage:

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes [i.e. stages] of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time.

In 1630 Milton penned in like strains an epitaph on ‘the great heir of fame:’

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thyself a lifelong monument.

A writer of fine insight who veiled himself under the initials I. M. S. [327b] contributed to the Second Folio of 1632 a splendid eulogy.  The opening lines declare ‘Shakespeare’s freehold’ to have been

Milton and I. M. S. were followed within ten years by critics of tastes so varied as the dramatist of domesticity Thomas Heywood, the gallant lyrist Sir John Suckling, the philosophic and ‘ever-memorable’ John Hales of Eton, and the untiring versifier of the stage and court, Sir William D’Avenant.  Before 1640 Hales is said to have triumphantly established, in a public dispute held with men of learning in his rooms at Eton, the proposition that ‘there was no subject of which any poet ever writ but he could produce it much better done in Shakespeare.’ [328]  Leonard Digges (in the 1640 edition of the ‘Poems’) asserted that every revival of Shakespeare’s plays drew crowds to pit, boxes, and galleries alike.  At a little later date, Shakespeare’s plays were the ‘closet companions’ of Charles I’s ‘solitudes.’ [329a]

1660-1702.  Dryden’s view.

After the Restoration public taste in England veered towards the French and classical dramatic models. [329b]  Shakespeare’s work was subjected to some unfavourable criticism as the product of nature to the exclusion of art, but the eclipse proved more partial and temporary than is commonly admitted.  The pedantic censure of Thomas Rymer on the score of Shakespeare’s indifference to the classical canons attracted attention, but awoke in England no substantial echo.  In his ‘Short View of Tragedy’ (1692) Rymer mainly concentrated his attention on ‘Othello,’ and reached the eccentric conclusion that it was ‘a bloody farce without salt or savour.’  In Pepys’s eyes ‘The Tempest’ had ‘no great wit,’ and ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was ‘the most insipid and ridiculous play;’ yet this exacting critic witnessed thirty-six performances of twelve of Shakespeare’s plays between October 11, 1660, and February 6, 1668-9, seeing ‘Hamlet’ four times, and ‘Macbeth,’ which he admitted to be ‘a most excellent play for variety,’ nine times.  Dryden, the literary dictator of the day, repeatedly complained of Shakespeare’s inequalities—‘he is the very Janus of poets.’ [330a]  But in almost the same breath Dryden declared that Shakespeare was held in as much veneration among Englishmen as Æschylus among the Athenians, and that ‘he was the man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul. . . .  When he describes anything, you more than see it—you feel it too.’ [330b]  In 1693, when Sir Godfrey Kneller presented Dryden with a copy of the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, the poet acknowledged the gift thus:

TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER.

Shakespear, thy Gift, I place before my sight;
With awe, I ask his Blessing ere I write;
With Reverence look on his Majestick Face;
Proud to be less, but of his Godlike Race.
His Soul Inspires me, while thy Praise I write,
And I, like Teucer, under Ajax fight.

Writers of Charles II’s reign of such opposite temperaments as Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, and Sir Charles Sedley vigorously argued for Shakespeare’s supremacy.  As a girl the sober duchess declares she fell in love with Shakespeare.  In her ‘Sociable Letters,’ which were published in 1664, she enthusiastically, if diffusely, described how Shakespeare creates the illusion that he had been ‘transformed into every one of those persons he hath described,’ and suffered all their emotions.  When she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life.  ‘Indeed,’ she concludes, ‘Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution.’  The profligate Sedley, in a prologue to the ‘Wary Widdow,’ a comedy by one Higden, produced in 1693, apostrophised Shakespeare thus: