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SOME NEW 



EMENDATIONS IN SHAKESPEABE 



BY E. A. MEREDITH, L.L.D. 



In 1623, just seven years after Shakespeare's death, John 

 Heming and Henry Conclel " 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 C'ondel were the first Shakespeare editors to 

 mourn over the corruptions and mutilations which the text of their 

 author had undergone, they most certainly wei-e 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. 



