But, although Shakspeare's first plays were written thus early, it by no means follows that they were also published,—at least that there were any authentic copies of them,-partly, (and here we leave Mr. Knight for Mr. Collier,) because the associations of actors who bought dramas of their authors were averse to their publication, under the idea that the number of readers would diminish the number of auditors; and partly, lest rival companies might thus have the means of acting their plays.

It is also supposed that when Shakspeare, in or about the year 1612, returned to Stratford, he took no further thought about his works, but left them to their fate, either as caring nothing about them, or as supposing them to belong to the Theatre, and therefore to be beyond his control. It may have been so; and certainly he seems to have felt, of his superlative genius, that even the best productions of his pen were far below what they might have been; hence we find him speaking in his sonnets slightingly, and even sorrowfully, both of them and of himself as their author: for example,―

'Oh! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me that you should love;
After my death, dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove,
Unless you should devise some virtuous lie.
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart,
Oh, lest your true love may seem false in this-
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame or me or you.
For I am shamed by that I do bring forth,
And so should you to love things nothing worth.'

And again,—

Oh, for my sake, do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
Who did not better for my life provide

Than public means, which public manners breeds,
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in-like a dyer's hand,' &c.

He whose ideal conceptions of the perfect were so surpassingly high as to induce him to set such a very slight value-if any at all-on the works which should, in truth, become the delight and admiration of all ages, may have felt no great concern as to what eventually became of them; but we should remember that after all it is possible that he may have intended to revise and give them to the world at some future time; and that his intention may have been frustrated by his untimely death, at a

period when he had scarcely entered upon the autumn of his days. Be this as it may, certain it is that up to the year 1622— six years after his death-but eighteen of his plays had found their way into print, and that in a surreptitious manner; the text being formed, not from any trustworthy manuscripts, but simply from the transcriptions of short-hand writers, made either at the time of their being acted, or through the agency of inferior performers, who, having no share in the theatre, had no interest in preserving the dramas as private property; and, therefore, as might be expected, abounding in typographical mistakes. These were the following:

But in the year 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who had been actors and sharers with Shakspeare in the Blackfriars Theatre, and who are honourably mentioned with Burbage in his will, published an edition of his plays, in folio, which is commonly known as 'the first folio.' In it were contained thirty-six plays in all-the eighteen previously printed in quarto, of which their preface complains as 'copies maimed and deformed 'by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors who exposed 'them,' and eighteen then first printed; viz.

We should say that 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre,' appeared first in 1609, in quarto; and, after having run through four editions, was incorporated into the third folio of 1644, which also contains

'The London Prodigal' and the 'Life and Death of Lord Cromwell,'Sir John Oldcastle,' The Puritan Widow,' 'A Yorkshire Tragedy,' and the Tragedy of Locrine.'

Eighteen of these plays, then, were never printed before the folio; four were then first printed correctly, and of seven others of the quarto editions-viz., Richard II.,' 'Henry IV., Parts 1 and 2, 'Richard III.,' 'Love's Labour's Lost,' Much Ado,' 'Romeo and Juliet,'-Heminge and Condell had the use in forming the folio, from having admitted their publishers to a share in that edition. Over the remaining seven-Merchant of Venice,' 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' 'Troilus and Cressida,' 'Titus Andronicus,' 'Hamlet,' 'Lear,' 'Othello,'-they do not seem to have had any control, although they used the first four as the text of the folio.

. ...

But

We now approach the question of the probable value of the corrections in Mr. Collier's volume. These are made in a copy of the second folio, which is a mere reprint from the first. we must remember that the latter was published by two of Shakspeare's own personal friends, who were also actors together with him and sharers in his theatre, and they state in their address to readers that, 'the office of their care and pain has 'been so to have published them (the plays), that where 'before you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealth of 'injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now 'offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all 'the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.' Here, then, arises the question how, allowing for typographical mistakes peculiar to the second edition, could there have been room, in such an edition, for the vast multitude of corrections made by this unknown hand in the essential matter and body of the work? and, consequently, which of the two are now to be received the old readings, authoritative as they appear to be in so great a degree, or these 'Emendations?' We know on what grounds the folio claims to be considered an authentic edition, viz., as having been published by those who, and who alone, if any, could have had the autograph copies of the author; but we do not know anything positive of the anonymous emendator, or of the sources from whence he derived his readings, and whether they are true in part only, or in whole, or not at all. In other words-are we henceforth to regard the first folio as an edition of much less value as to correctness than has hitherto been supposed, or are we to reject the labour of the unknown corrector, because it so greatly impugns the authority of that edition?

We wish to state the question plainly, and to put it strongly, that our readers may have a clear idea as to how the case really

stands, and of our reasons for rejecting, as we do, the authority of the first folio-prepared, as it was, by two of Shakspeare's own friends, and hitherto thought so highly of-for the work of a nameless individual.

In truth, much of the authority hitherto attached to the first folio is illusory, and greatly diminishes on a closer view. Though the names of Heminge and Condell appear as the guarantees of the work, it is not at all certain, but rather the contrary, that they exercised any such personal editorial supervision over it as would have insured the absence of many and serious typographical mistakes,-it omits everything appertaining to 'stage-business;' and, indeed, in its omission of Pericles' a play which, if not wholly Shakspeare's, yet bears most plain and undoubted marks of his hand in more than one of its characters—it would even seem that the work is untrustworthy as a whole.

Again, it is notorious that the text of this edition was not formed in such a manner as to protect it against verbal mistakes; but, on the contrary, if any plan could have been devised above another to insure the presence of the most errata possible, that was the one pursued in this case. As to the quartos which were published before the first folio, Mr. Collicr says that all Heminge and Condell did was to put the latest editions into the hands of their printers; and, in the case of the plays first published in that edition, instead of autograph or corrected MSS. being supplied to the transcriber, the text-no doubt to save time was read to him, and what he heard, or thought he heard, he committed to paper; hence the many whimsical verbal mistakes in the quartos and folios. Nor is there any proof whatever that the superintendence of an editor, or any officer resembling him, was thought at all necessary; so that there would evidently be ample room for the corrections of one who was in a position to be able to afford them, to a work, of which the wonder rather is that it has come down to us as perfect as it is, or in fact, that it is legible at all, than that it should contain the errata that it does-numerous as they are.

Since the final decision, then, as to the reception or rejection of the emendations contained in Mr. Collier's volume must rest on their own intrinsic value, we will now turn to the book itself; and, from the few extracts which our space will allow us to offer, we think our readers will agree with us in regarding it as a priceless acquisition to the Shakspeare library -a thing to rejoice over, as he would who, in Wordsworth's phrase, should

'Seize

Some Theban fragment, or unroll
Some simple, tender-hearted scroll

Of pure Simonides.'

Yet, at the same time that as a whole we regard this volume as a priceless gem, we must say plainly-and Mr. Collier agrees with us that it is impossible to receive every one of its emendations. The author, whatever were his accidental advantages as a corrector, appears from numberless instances to have been a man of prosaic mind-one who would take infinite trouble in correcting the minutiae of missing stops, inverted letters, and the like; but who may have been wholly unable to appreciate the higher flights and bolder metaphors of him who was at once poet, philosopher, and metaphysician, and the first of each; and, in consequence, when unable to understand or feel the peculiar force of a word or metaphor, knowing that the text was, as a whole, excessively corrupt, and having perhaps no formal means adequate to its correction, he has endeavoured, under the influence of a critic's vanity, to attempt to set it right by conjectures of his own; and consequently, in many cases his conjectures may be merely his own, and as such, comparatively valueless. It appears, too, in places, as if he had omitted or forgotten to refer to the MSS., and contented himself with correcting the text to the version which was used by the actors, and that they were either deceived by their memories or, more likely, by the MS. from which they studied.

To glance at a few of the chief of his emendations, in doing which we will follow the order in which the plays stand in the first folio and in Mr. Collier's volume.

First on the list is the Tempest,' for the text of which, as there was no quarto edition of it, the folio is the sole authority. It has been the custom with some of the editors to place the scene of this play at the Bermudas, (although Prospero was Duke of Milan,) and thence to infer that the play itself was written some time between 1610 and 1611; but as Mr. Knight justly observes, If Bermuda were the scene, Ariel must have outdone himself to convey the rest of the fleet over the Atlan'tic to place them upon the Mediterranean, for in the first act ' he replies to the inquiry of Prospero, that

And for the rest o' the fleet
Which I dispersed, they are all met again,

And are upon the Mediterrancan flote.'

A passage, by the way, which, from its peculiar use of the word flote,' has greatly perplexed the editors, but which