The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] | Page 7

of necessity to make a selection. In the following remarks we pass briefly in review the editions which we have habitually consulted.
Whenever any commentary was known to us to exist in a separate form, we have always, if possible, procured it. In some few instances, we have been obliged to take the references at second-hand.
The first Folio (F1), 1623, contains all the plays usually found in modern editions of Shakespeare, except Pericles. It was 'published according to the True Originall Copies,' and 'set forth' by his 'friends' and 'fellows,' John Heminge and Henry Condell, the author 'not having the fate common with some to be exequutor to his own writings.'
In an address 'To the great variety of Readers' following the dedication to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, the following passage occurs:
'It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have bene wished, that the Author himselfe had liv'd to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings; But since it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care, and paine, to have collected & publish'd them; and so to have publish'd them, as where (before) you were abus'd with diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd them: even those are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, 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 uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.'
The natural inference to be drawn from this statement is, that all the separate editions of Shakespeare's plays were 'stolen,' 'surreptitious,' and 'imperfect,' and that all those published in the Folio were printed from the author's own manuscripts. But it can be proved to demonstration that several of the plays in the Folio were printed from earlier Quarto editions, and that in other cases the Quarto is more correctly printed or from a better MS. than the Folio text, and therefore of higher authority. For example, in Midsummer Night's Dream, in Love's Labour's Lost, and in Richard the Second, the reading of the Quarto is almost always preferable to that of the Folio, and in Hamlet we have computed that the Folio, when it differs from the Quartos, differs for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty at most.
As the 'setters forth' are thus convicted of a 'suggestio falsi' in one point, it is not improbable that they may have been guilty of the like in another. Some of the plays may have been printed not from Shakespeare's own manuscript, but from transcripts made from them for the use of the theatre. And this hypothesis will account for strange errors found in some of the plays--errors too gross to be accounted for by the negligence of a printer, especially if the original MS. was as unblotted as Heminge and Condell describe it to have been. Thus too we may explain the great difference in the state of the text as found in different plays. It is probable that this deception arose not from deliberate design on the part of Heminge and Condell,--whom as having been Shakespeare's friends and fellows we like to think of as honourable men,--but partly at least from want of practice in composition, and from the wish rather to write a smart preface in praise of the book than to state the facts clearly and simply. Or the preface may have been written by some literary man in the employment of the publishers, and merely signed by the two players.
Be this as it may, their duties as editors were probably limited to correcting and arranging the manuscripts and sending them to the press. The 'overseeing' of which they speak, probably meant a revision of the MSS., not a correction of the press, for it does not appear that there were any proof sheets in those days sent either to author or editor. Indeed we consider it as certain that, after a MS. had been sent to press, it was seen only by the printers and one or more correctors of the press, regularly employed by the publishers for that purpose[3].
The opinions of critics have varied very much as to the merits of the first Folio, some praising it as among the most correct, and others blaming it as one of the most incorrect editions of its time. The truth seems to be that it is of very varied excellence, differing from time to time according to the