William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online

prepared for the press in the way that, for instance, Ben Jonson clearly prepared some of his plays. John Marston, introducing the printed text of his play The Malcontent in 1604, wrote: ‘Only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read.’ Perhaps Shakespeare was similarly afflicted.
    In 1616, the year of Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson published his own collected plays in a handsome Folio. It was the first time that an English writer for the popular stage had been so honoured (or had so honoured himself), and it established a precedent by which Shakespeare’s fellows could commemorate their colleague and friend. Principal responsibility for this ambitious enterprise was undertaken by John Heminges and Henry Condell, both long-established actors with Shakespeare’s company; latterly, Heminges had been its business manager. They, along with Richard Burbage, had been the colleagues whom Shakespeare remembered in his will: he left each of them 26s. 8d. to buy a mourning ring. Although the Folio did not appear until 1623, they may have started planning it soon after—or even before—Shakespeare died: big books take a long time to prepare. And they undertook their task with serious care. Most importantly, they printed eighteen plays that had not so far appeared in print, and which might otherwise have vanished. Their decision not to include Edward III suggests at least that they did not believe Shakespeare to have written all of it. They omitted (so far as we can tell) only Pericles, Cardenio (now vanished), The Two Noble Kinsmen —perhaps because these three were collaborative—and the mysterious Love’s Labour’s Won ( see p. 337). And they went to considerable pains to provide good texts. They had no previous experience as editors; they may have had help from others (including Ben Jonson, who wrote commendatory verses for the Folio): anyhow, although printers find it easier to set from print than from manuscript, they were not content simply to reprint quartos whenever they were available. In fact they seem to have made a conscious effort to identify and to avoid making use of the quartos now recognized as unauthoritative. In their introductory epistle addressed ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ they declare that the public has been ‘abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors’. But now these plays are ‘offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’.
    None of the quartos believed by modern scholars to be unauthoritative was used unaltered as copy for the Folio. As men of the theatre, Heminges and Condell had access to theatre copies, and they made considerable use of them. For some plays, such as Titus Andronicus (which includes a whole scene not present in the quarto), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the printers had a copy of a quarto (not necessarily the first) marked up with alterations made as the result of comparison with a theatre manuscript. For other plays (the first four to be printed in the Folio— The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona , The Merry Wives of Windsor , and Measure for Measure —along with The Winter’s Tale and probably Othello ) they employed a professional scribe, Ralph Crane, to transcribe papers in the theatre’s possession. For others, such as Henry V and All’s Well That Ends Well , they seem to have had authorial papers; and for yet others, such as Macbeth , a theatre manuscript. We cannot always be sure of the copy used by the printers, and sometimes it may have been mixed: for Richard III they seem to have used pages of the third quarto mixed with pages of the sixth quarto combined with passages in manuscript; a copy of the third quarto of Richard II , a copy of the fifth quarto, and a theatre manuscript all contributed to the Folio text of