SOME @i2iw 
KMENDATIONS IN SHAKESPEHARE. 
BY E. A. MEREDITH, L.L.D. 
In 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare’s death, John 
Heming and Henry Condel “set forth” the first collected edition 
of the poet’s plays —the famous “ First Folio,” so frequently referred 
to by Shakespeare commentators. In their preface to “The great 
variety of readers from the most able to him that can spell,” as they 
quaintly phrase it, they say, ‘““you have been abused with divers 
stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds 
and stealth of injurious impostors :” ‘‘ whereas,” they add, ‘“ those 
now offered to your view are cured and perfect of their limbs, 
absolute in their members, as he (Shakespeare) conceived them.” 
After deploring the fact that Shakespeare had not lived to set forth 
and oversee his own writings, they add, by way of further recom- 
mending the accuracy of their own work, ‘‘ We have scarce received 
a blot on his papers.” From this it would naturally be supposed 
that the editors enjoyed the special advantage of printing from 
Shakespeare's own manuscript—a supposition the more likely, as 
the editors had been his intimate companions and were privileged to 
speak of the poet as their “friend and fellow.” As a matter of 
fact the editors of the “ First Folio” do not appear to have had 
any such advantage, for Professor Dowden, perhaps the highest 
authority on such a question, assures us that “several of the plays 
in the ‘ First Folio’ are in fact printed from earlier Quartos, while 
in other cases the Quartos gave a text superior to the Folio.” 
If Heming and Condel were the first Shakespeare editors to 
mourn over the corruptions and mutilations which the text of their 
author had undergone, they most certainly were not the last. From 
that day to this these corruptions have not ceased to perplex the 
editors of Shakespeare and to furnish an inexhaustible field for the 
ingenuity of his innumerable commentators. 
