GENERAL INTRODUCTION I Editions of Shakespeare multiply; but it is now many years since the last attempt was made at a complete recension of Shakespeare's text, based upon a study and comparison, line by line, of the existing materials. In the interval scholars have made many discoveries, and not a few worthy to be called illuminating; since the new light they shed on these materials exhibits them (as we believe) in truer proportions with truer relative values. We shall indicate, by and by, the most important of these discoveries, as justifying a belief that since the day, some three hundred years ago, when preparations were begun in the printing-house of William Jaggard and his son Isaac for the issue of the First Folio, no moment has been more favourable for auspicating a text of the plays and poems than that which begets the occasion of this new one. But no time must be lost in assuring the reader that we enter upon our task diffidently, with a sense of high adventure tempered by a consciousness of grave responsibility; and that at the outset we have chosen for phylactery these wise words by one of Shakespeare's wisest editors, William Aldis Wright-'After a considerable experience I feel justified in saying that in most cases ignorance and conceit are the fruitful parents of conjectural emendation.' To have done with excuses, we desire lastly that the reader will not take offence at this or that which seems at first sight an innovation upon the 'Shakespeares' to which he is accustomed: that he will refrain at any rate from condemning us before making sure that we are not cutting Shakespeare free from the accretions of a long line of editors. II But we have designed these volumes also for the pocket of the ordinary lover of Shakespeare, because time alters the catholic approach to him, if by insensible degrees, no less thoroughly than it deflects that of the esoteric student. 'What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared: and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour.' So wrote Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his edition of the Plays of Shakespeare, published in 1765; adding that these plays have 'passed through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission.... The sand heaped by one flood is scattered by another, but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of Time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabricks of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare.' 'In the fine arts'-writes a later critic, Professor Barrett Wendell, also of Shakespeare'a man of genius is he who in perception and in expression alike, in thought and in phrase, instinctively so does his work that his work remains significant after the conditions in which he actually produced it are past. The work of any man of genius, then, is susceptible of endless comment and interpretation, varying as the generations of posterity vary from his and from one another.' Thus, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two critics among many have echoed the line which Ben Jonson penned for the First Folio of 1623, prescient and yet (one may assert) not fully awake to his own prescience He was not of an age, but for all time! For, obscure and mostly insignificant as are the collected details of Shakespeare's life and career, the vicissitudes of his reputation have never lacked evidence from the first, and in later times have rather suffered from a cloud of witness. In the beginning, having come up from Stratford-on-Avon to London (about 1586) to try his fortune, this youth managed to open the back door of Burbage's Theatre and gain employment as an actor. Burbage must soon have set him the additional task of furbishing and 'bumbasting out' old plays for revivalwith results at which the original authors very naturally took offence: for as early as 1592 Robert Greene utters (from his death-bed) his famous invective upon our young man as 'an upstart Crow beautified with our feathers'; warning his literary fellow-playwrights, 'it is pittee men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.' Greene's contemptuous language may pass. Its vehement anger pretty plainly proves that, even so early, our dramatic apprentice had learnt to make himself formidable. We may start from the previous year 1591, and take the ensuing twenty as the period covering Shakespeare's career as a dramatist. Did his fame grow as nowadays in retrospect we can see his poetical power maturing from Love's Labour's Lost up to King Lear and on to The Tempest? The little contemporary evidence is curious, and tells us at once that it did and that it did not. For example in 1598 we have Francis Meres, a learned graduate of Cambridge, asserting that 'among the English he is the most excellent in both kinds [Tragedy and Comedy] for the Stage,' rivalling the fame of Seneca in the one kind and of Plautus in the other. As against this we find, at the same date and in Meres' University, the authors of The Pilgrimage to Parnassus attempting more than one laugh at him as belonging to a tribe of playwrights fashionable but unlettered. Vaguely, yet with some certainty, the early Elizabethan dramatists fall for us into two opponent camps; the University wits and 'literary' tribesmen coming to recognise (or being bullied into recognising) Ben Jonson for their champion, while Shakespeare almost at unawares grows to his stature as chief challenger on behalf of the theatre-men who worked for the stage and its daily bread, with no hankering side-glance after the honours and diuturnity of print. His election to this eminence is nowhere, in so many words, asserted. When the two parties became publicly and violently embroiled in the wordy stage-war-which started between Jonson on the one side and Dekker and Marston on the other, and lasted from 1599 to 1602-he neither lent his name to the battle nor apparently deigned to participate in it. As we interpret the story, he could not help being intellectually head-and-shoulders above all who made his party: but he enjoyed no quarrel, and was, in fact, by nature too generously indolent, and withal too modest, and yet again too busy with his work, to worry himself with contention. Gentle and 'sweet' (his own favourite word), or some equivalent for these, are steady epithets of all who knew him or had heard his contemporaries talk about him. De forti dulcedo 'a handsome wellshaped man' Aubrey tells us of report; 'very good company and of a readie and pleasant smooth witt.' There is no evidence at all that he set an exorbitant price on himself: rather, out of silence and contrast, we get a cumulative impression that he claimed a most modest one. There are hints enough that the generation for which he worked recognised him for a man of parts and promise; but again out of silence and contrast we insensibly gather the conviction that it never occurred to his fellows to regard him as a mountainous man, 'outtopping knowledge'; and that he himself, could he have foreseen Matthew Arnold's famous sonnet, would have found in it a modest gratification combined with something like amazement. His death (in middle age) provoked no such general outburst of lamentation as Sidney's did; his life no such running fire of detraction as did Jonson's. He retired and died, moderately well-to-do, in the country town of his birth. The copyright (as we call it) of his plays belonged to the theatre or Company for which they were written: and he never troubled himself or anybody to collect, correct, and print them. They were first gathered and given to the world by two fellow-actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, late in 1623, or more than seven-and-a-half years after his death. Again we must not make too much of this: for one only of the Elizabethan dramatists had hitherto sought what fame might come of printing his plays for a secondary judgment by the reader; and not one in Shakespeare's life-time. The exception of course was Ben Jonson, who in 1616 had brought together and issued nine pieces in a folio volume. Some may argue that between the date of his death and that of the First Folio of 1623 Shakespeare's fame had vastly grown, quoting Jonson's splendid and expressly written encomium which follows the Folio Preface, with its allusion to Basse's elegy lamenting that our 'rare Tragedian' had not been laid to rest beside Chaucer and Spenser and Beaumont in Westminster Abbey: Renowned Spenser lye a thought more nye upon which Jonson retorts in apostrophe: My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by |