3on/ 
 
 (ij^atneU HninetBttg Hibrarg 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 PR3071.P77 1917 
 
 Shakespeare's fight with the pirates and 
 
 3 1924 013 164 581 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013164581 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S FIGHT WITH THE 
 PIRATES AND THE PROBLEMS OF 
 THE TRANSMISSION OF HIS TEXT. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S FIGHT WITH 
 THE PIRATES AND THE PRO- 
 BLEMS OF THE TRANSMISSION 
 OF HIS TEXT 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED W. POLLARD 
 
 Sandars Reader in Bibliography, 1 91 5 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ALEXANDER MORING LIMITED 
 
 1917 
 
^si^K^e-S 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE four papers here reprinted were read as Sandars 
 Reader in Bibliography in the University of Cam- 
 bridge in November, 191 5, and have already appeared in 
 the successive numbers of 'The Library' during the 
 present year. While the other three papers are here 
 printed substantially as they were read, in that on the 
 Manuscripts of Shakespeare's Plays the survey of plays 
 by his contemporaries which have come down to us in 
 manuscript has been slightly extended. That it still 
 remains very brief and inadequate is due to my conscious- 
 ness that I possess no special qualifications for investi- 
 gating the problem as to which of them are the work of 
 scriveners and which in the authors' autographs, and that 
 even if I were much more of an expert, the fadt that I 
 may be reasonably suspedted of having a thesis to prove 
 would deprive my conclusions of any real weight. That 
 this particular problem is well worth examining I am most 
 firmly convinced, and I hope sincerely that some com- 
 petent student will take it up and publish his conclusions. 
 Whether these confirm or weaken my own argument, I 
 think I can promise him a hearty welcome in 'The 
 Library ' for anything he has to say. 
 
 These leftures were written while my introduftion to 
 the facsimile reprint of the third Quarto of Shakespeare's 
 'Tragedy of King Richard the Second'' was passing 
 
 ' A new Shakespeare Quarto. The 'Tragedy of King Richard 
 II,' printed for the third time by Valentine Simmes in 1598. 
 Reproduced in facsimile from the unique copy in the library of 
 W. A. White. With an introdudtion by A. W. Pollard. B. 
 Quaritch (London, 1916). 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 through the press and while the materials for the intro- 
 du(3:ion to the ' Census of Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto" 
 by Miss Henrietta Bartlett and myself were being col- 
 lefted. They thus work out on more general lines some 
 of the conclusions forced on me while studying the text 
 of successive quartos of * Richard II,' and on the other 
 hand present the grounds of some statements which, in 
 the introduftion to the ' Census ' are offered as results. 
 In all these three attempts to deal with the subje<5t of the 
 piracy of some of Shakespeare's plays I have alluded to 
 Heywood's prologue to ' The Rape of Lucrece ' as if it 
 had been printed for the first time in the edition of 1 630. 
 Mr. W. A. White, of New York, the owner of the 
 unique quarto of ' Richard II,' kindly pointed out to me 
 that in this I was quite wrong, as it occurs also in the 
 first edition printed in 1608. On my penitently looking 
 into the matter to see how 1 came to make such a mistake, 
 I found that it arose from the fad that there was no copy 
 of the 1608 edition in the British Museum, that when 
 quoting the passage in full in my 'Shakespeare Folios 
 and Quartos' (Methuen, 1909) I had, therefore, given a 
 reference to the 1 630 edition as the source of my text, 
 and that the wealth of the Museum collection of early 
 plays subsequently misled me into a firm, but erroneous 
 belief that the reference was given to the 1630 edition, 
 not because the Museum did not possess that of 1608, 
 but because the prologue did not occur in It. A con- 
 fession of this sad story to Mr. White led to a very happy 
 result. He was the owner of two copies of the edition 
 of 1608, and generously presented one of them to the 
 British Museum to make good the gap through which I 
 had fallen. For this particular sin I now find some 
 difliculty in remaining penitent. 
 
 ' ' A Census of Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto,' 1594-1709. By 
 Henrietta C. Bartlett and Alfred W. Pollard. (New Haven: 
 Yale University Press ; London : Humphrey Milford, Oxford 
 University Press, 1916.) 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 My own powers of unimpeded utterance being restridbed 
 to five minutes at a time, these lectures were very kindly 
 read for me by Mr. Stephen Gaselee, of Magdalene 
 College, and I have to record my gratitude, not only to 
 Mr. Gaselee (to whom I am deeply in debt on many other 
 counts), but also to the University authorities for per- 
 mitting this unusual arrangement. The only addition I 
 made personally to the text here printed was in a few 
 words of preface in which I expressed my grief that, as 
 Sandars Reader for 19 15, 1 was taking the place of an old 
 friend. Professor Dr. Konrad Haebler, of the Berlin Royal 
 Library, with whom for some twenty years I had ex- 
 changed small services, and for whose learning and valu- 
 able contributions to our common studies, not even the 
 wrong which his countrymen have done to Europe could 
 lessen my respedl. It may, probably it must, be impossible 
 for the old friendly relations between English and German 
 students to be resumed for many years after the war, but 
 those who have received kindness and help and the in- 
 spiration of a fine example surely do well to treasure these 
 things in their memory as well as all that we may not 
 forget. 
 
 Alfred W. Pollard. 
 
 November, 19 16. 
 
THE REGULATION OF THE BOOK 
 TRADE IN THE SIXTEENTH 
 CENTURY.' 
 
 EGAL writers on English copyright 
 have not shown much interest in the 
 steps by which the conception of 
 literary property was gradually built 
 up, nor are any data easily accessible 
 for comparing the course of its development in 
 England and foreign countries. The accident by 
 which our first English printer was also an excep- 
 tionally prolific literary producer and possessed of 
 considerable influence at Court might well have led 
 to a very early recognition of an author's rights to 
 the fruits of his brain, had there been any competitor 
 possessed of sufficient capital to be a really for- 
 midable pirate. In Germany, Italy, and France 
 literary work of a kind for which copyright could 
 now be claimed accounted for only quite a small 
 proportion of the output of the earliest presses. 
 The demand in Germany was mainly for printed ' 
 editions of the ponderous text books of the previous 
 three centuries. Italy added to these an even 
 greater appetite for the Latin classics. In France, 
 more especially at Lyons, there was a healthy demand 
 for works, both imaginative and didaftic, in the 
 ' A lefture delivered at Cambridge as Sandars Reader, November, 
 1915. 
 
2 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 vernacular. But Caxton's fertility as a translator 
 can hardly be paralleled in the fifteenth century, and 
 this despite the fadl that he came to the task late 
 in life and burdened himself almost simultaneously 
 with the cares of a printing-house. A single book 
 from his press, the ' Chronicles of England,' which 
 happens also to contain a long piece of original, or 
 semi-original, writing probably from his pen, was 
 reprinted by both Machlinia and (with additions) 
 by the St. Albans printer. His other works may 
 have had a natural protection in the fail that, with 
 so small a market as England then offered, to 
 reprint one of them, with no hope of any help 
 such as Caxton himself received from patrons, 
 might have been but a risky adventure. In any 
 case there was no general piratical attack on 
 Caxton's publications, and thus the one -English 
 printer and man of letters who possessed the advan- 
 tage of powerful friends at Court was never driven 
 into a course of self-defence, which could hardly 
 have failed to be helpful to all other honest men 
 pursuing the same callings. 
 
 About the time of Caxton's death we begin to 
 hear, first at Venice, afterwards in other Italian 
 cities, and then, in the course of the next twenty 
 years or so, in all the chief printing centres of 
 Europe, of Privileges, by which on the petition 
 usually of a printer, sometimes of an author or 
 editor, other printers were forbidden to reprint the 
 privileged work for a period of years, mostly ten, 
 but sometimes not more than two. Of course, the 
 prohibition was only efFedtive within the dominion 
 of the issuing authority ; but the importation and 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 3 
 
 sale of reprints were also forbidden, and there was 
 a fine for every copy contumaciously produced, 
 imported, or sold. Privileges were granted most 
 frequently for works on the produdlion of which it 
 could be shown that a good deal of money had 
 been spent, whether original or not. A striking 
 instance of this is the privilege granted by the 
 Emperor for the Greek Testament edited by 
 Erasmus and printed by Froben, a privilege which 
 probably caused the otherwise unaccountable delay 
 in publishing the New Testament in the Com- 
 plutensian Polyglot for some years after it was 
 printed, and this despite the fadl that the Polyglot 
 was produced by a Cardinal and approved by the 
 Pope. 
 
 Grants of Privileges seem to entitle us to argue 
 on the one hand that there was some practical 
 danger of piracy, and on the other that there was 
 no legal recognition of literary rights by appeal to 
 which piracy could be defeated. The first appear-- 
 ance known to me of a privilege for an English 
 printed book is on the Latin sermon preached by 
 Richard Pace at St. Paul's Cathedral on the Peace 
 between England and France. This was printed by 
 Pynson, who finished it on 13th November, 15 18, 
 and stated at the end of the colophon that it was 
 issued ' cum priuilegio a rege indulto ne quis banc 
 orationem intra biennium in regno Anglise imprimat 
 aut alibi impressam et importatam in eodem regno 
 Anglias vendat.' For a sermon preached on a special 
 occasion a privilege for two years was probably as 
 good as one in perpetuity. In those attached to 
 Horman's 'Vulgaria' of 15 19, and several later 
 
4 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 works from Pynson's press, no term is mentioned, 
 the phrases used being simply ' cum priuilegio regis 
 Henrici,' or ' cum priuilegio a rege indulto,' or in 
 English, ' with priuilege to him granted by our 
 souerayne lorde the king.' 
 
 The security bestowed on a book by the grant 
 of a privilege was entirely reasonable, but the 
 method of granting it was entirely bad. Every 
 notice on a book that it was protected against 
 piracy carried with it an implication that a book 
 which possessed no privilege might be pirated with 
 impunity. If Caxton had been inspired to appeal 
 to a Court of Equity when Machlinia reprinted 
 the ' Chronicles of England,' on the principle that 
 for every wrong there is a remedy he might have 
 won his case, or rather, if we allow for the law's 
 delays in Tudor times, it might have been decided in 
 his favour many years after he and Machlinia were 
 both dead and their estates had been swallowed up by 
 the costs of the litigation. It is not certain that he 
 would have won it, because before printing made it 
 possible to put several hundred copies of a book on 
 the market at the same time, an author's ' rights ' 
 had no pecuniary value apart from the gifts which 
 he might receive in return for presentation copies. 
 The gifts, being gifts, might very probably have 
 been ignored by the Courts as uncertain and in- 
 determinate, while the profits from a printed 
 edition might have been looked on askance as 
 something too new to be recognized. Legal de- 
 cisions in the middle of the eighteenth century 
 established the doftrine that authors had always 
 possessed a natural right to the fruits of their labour, 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 5 
 
 but accompanied this declaration with the corollary 
 that as soon as Parliament legislated on the subjeft 
 by the Copyright Aft passed in 1709, the limited 
 statutory rights then conferred took the place of the 
 natural rights, and left them unenforceable. It 
 might well have been argued, though I do not 
 think it was, that the Privileges granted to "par- 
 ticular books from 1518 onwards had the same 
 effeft. 
 
 It may naturally occur to us to ask by what 
 power an English king, without consulting Par- 
 liament, could interfere by the advice of his 
 Council, with such haphazard and essentially de- 
 stru6live benevolence, with literary property. A 
 full answer to this question would take us far 
 beyond the widest limits of bibliography. A prac- 
 tical view of the matter is that what a King of 
 France or an Emperor could do a Tudor King 
 of England would naturally assume that he could 
 do also. In 1518, moreover, Luther had already 
 started on his career as a Reformer, and this soon 
 rendered almost inevitable the claim, which was 
 gradually made all over Europe, that everything 
 which concerned Printing must necessarily be under 
 Government control. In a proclamation, probably 
 issued early in 1529 (Pynson's bill for printing it 
 was passed for payment on 6th March), we find 
 a list of prohibited books. Another appeared in^ 
 June, 1530; another on ist January, 1536. On 
 1 6th November, 1538, there came yet another 
 proclamation which, after a preamble beginning : 
 ' The Kynges moste royall maiestie beinge en- 
 fourmed, that sondry contentious and sinyster 
 
6 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 opinyone[s] , haue by wronge teachynge and naughty e 
 printed bokes, encreaced and growen within this 
 his realme of Englande,' forbids the importation, 
 sale, or publication, ' without his maiesties speciall 
 licence,' of any English books printed abroad, and 
 then proceeds : 
 
 Item that no persone or persons in this realme, shall 
 from hensforth print any boke in the englyshe tdnge, onles ' 
 vpon examination madte by some of his gracis priuie coun- 
 sayle, or other suche as his highnes shall appoynte, they 
 shall haue lycence so to do, and yet so hauynge, not to put 
 these wordes Cum priuilegio regali, without addyng ad im- 
 primendum solum, and that the hole copie, or els at the least 
 thefFed: of his licence and priuilege be therwith printed, 
 and playnely declared and expressed in the Englyshe tonge 
 vnderneth them. 
 
 After this come special regulations as to printing 
 the Scriptures, which need not here be rehearsed. 
 The important point for us is that here we have the 
 first of several enactments which forbade the print- 
 ing of any book iti English except after it had been 
 examined by some (which implies two or more) of 
 the Privy Council, ' or other suche as his highnes 
 shall appoynte.' 
 
 Incidentally we may note that while a distinftion 
 appears to be drawn between a licence and a privi- 
 lege, the one word ' priuilegium ' seems to be used 
 as a Latin equivalent for both. Every book, as I 
 understand the proclamation, required a licence; 
 but this licence was not to be paraded by the use 
 of the words ' Cum priuilegio regali,' without these 
 words being limited and restricted by the addition 
 ' ad imprimendum solum.' These must therefore 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 7 
 
 be construed ' only for printing,' i.e. not for pro- 
 tection, unless this was expressly stated, in which 
 case the ' licence ' was raised to the higher rank of 
 a 'privilege.' The words 'ad imprimendum solum ' 
 have been generally interpreted as equivalent to 'for < 
 sole, or exclusive, printing.' Whether or not they 
 can legitimately bear this meaning in Tudor Latin 
 is perhaps doubtful. It seems quite clear from this 
 Proclamation that this is not the meaning they 
 were intended to bear ; but so far from the Pro- 
 clamation in this respedl attaining its end, it seems 
 pretty certain that it intensified the very miscon- 
 ception which its authors tried to remove. 
 
 On 8th July, 1546, there was issued another 
 proclamation ' to auoide and abolish suche englishe 
 bookes aslconteine pernicious and detestable errours 
 and heresies ' which, while it suggests, as we can 
 gather from other evidence, that the stringent 
 regulations of its predecessor had been inoperative, 
 is itself, as far as it relates to printing, framed on 
 more reasonable lines. The clause concerning this 
 reads : 
 
 Moreouer the kynges maiesty strayghtly chargeth and 
 commaundeth, vpon the peine aforesayde [I.e. imprison- 
 ment and fine], that from henceforth no printer do print 
 any maner of englishe boke, balet or playe, but he put in 
 his name to the same, with the name of thaUtour, and 
 daye of the printe, and shall presente the fyrst copye to 
 the mayre of the towne where he dwelleth, and not to 
 suffer any of the copies to go out of his handes within 
 two dayes next folowing. 
 
 Mayors being usually busy persons, with their 
 own trades or crafts to attend to, it was distinctly 
 
8 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 hard on them to be saddled with the task of reading 
 any book printed in their town within eight and 
 forty hours of the deposit of a copy. But as far as 
 the printer was concerned, nothing could be more 
 reasonable, and bibliographers and librarians might 
 have blessed Henry VIII if he could have ensured 
 that ' every englishe boke, balet, or playe ' should 
 bear the name of the author, the name of the printer, 
 and the day on which it was completed. Unfor- 
 tunately the proclamation came towards the very 
 close of Henry VIII's reign and had very little eflFeft. 
 Edward VI took up the subjedl, at the end of a 
 querulous proclamation of 28th April, 1551, on the 
 worst possible lines. 
 
 And forbicause diuers Printers, Bo^eselers, and Plaiers 
 of En terludes, without consideracion or regarde.to the 
 quiet of the realme, do print, sel, and play whatsoeuer 
 any light and phantastical hed listeth to inuent and deuise, 
 whereby many inconueniences hath, and dayly doth arise 
 and follow, amonge the kinges maiesties louyng and 
 faithful subieftes : His highnes therfdre stralghtly chargeth 
 and commaundeth that from hencefurth, no printer or 
 other person do print nor sel, within this Realme or any 
 other his maiestis dominions, any matter in thenglish 
 tong, nor they nor any other person, do sel, or otherwise 
 dispose abrode any matter, printed in any forreyn dominion 
 in thenglishe tongue, onles thesame be firste allowed by 
 his maiestie, or his priuie counsayl in writing signed with 
 his maiesties most gratious hand or the handes of sixe of 
 his sayd priuie counsayl, vpon payne of Imprisonment, 
 without bayle or mayneprke, and further fine at his 
 maiesties pleasor. 
 
 In the same way Queen Mary, in a proclamation 
 of 1 8th August, 1553, soon after she came to the 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 9 
 
 throne, after condemning the ' pryntynge of false 
 fonde bookes, ballettes, rymes, and other lewde 
 treatises in the englyshe tonge, concernynge doc- 
 tryne in matters now in question and controuersye, 
 touchynge the hyghe poyntes and misteries of 
 christen religion, whiche bokes, ballettes, rymes and 
 treatises are chiefly by the Prynters and Stacioners 
 sette out to sale to her graces subieftes, of an euyll 
 zeale, for lucre and couetous of vyle gayne,' charged 
 and commanded her subjects not ' to prynte any 
 bookes, matter, ballet, ryme, interlude, processe or 
 treatyse nor to playe any interlude, except they 
 haue her graces speciall licence in writynge for the 
 same, vpon payne to incurre her highnesse indig- 
 nation and displeasure.' 
 
 Probably, though it is not so stated, this ' speciall 
 licence in writynge ' was only required for books 
 dealing with religious controversies. In two sub- 
 sequent proclamations, of 13th June, 1555, and 
 6th June, 1558, heretical books were again con- 
 demned, the second proclamation going so far as to 
 declare that any one ' founde to haue any of the 
 sayde wycked and seditious bokes . . . shall be 
 reputed and taken for a rebell, and shall without 
 delay be executed for that offence accordyng to 
 thordre of marshall lawe.' 
 
 The importance of Mary's reign for our purpose 
 ^, lies not in these proclamations, but in the grant 
 of a Charter to the Stationers' Company, which 
 speedily raised it to great importance. But for 
 understanding the motives which dictated the grant 
 of a Charter, the ferocious threat which we have 
 just quoted is not without relevance. In normal 
 
lo REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 times a Tudor monarch, desiring to increase his 
 control over any trade, would have wrapped up his 
 real purpose with professions of love and care for 
 his subjedls, or complimentary remarks on the 
 efficiency of English craftsmen, such as form the 
 preamble of the A<5t of 1534, restricting, for eccle- 
 siastical and ■ political reasons, the importation of 
 books from abroad. Hence, when we find the 
 whole charter dominated by the idea of suppressing 
 prohibited books, we might suspe<5t that the initia- 
 tive had come from the Stationers, who put forward 
 the need for such an absolute control of the trade 
 in order to persuade Philip and Mary to give them 
 a monopoly. Dr. Arber, though he did not advance 
 this particular argument, was quite sure that the 
 initiative came from the Stationers. Thus he wrote 
 (' Transcript,' vol. i., xxvi.) : 
 
 The origin and occasion of the Company of Stationers 
 has been much misunderstood. It has been usually thought 
 that King Philip and Queen Mary grouped the hitherto 
 scattered Printers and Stationers into one Company and 
 in London in order to exercise a more efFedtual control 
 over all English printed books : whereas it'was the printing 
 Ni and publishing trade which had long been organized as a 
 City Craft that sought the royal incorporation and the 
 civic livery for its own greater honour and importance. 
 
 Dr. Arber based this view on a statement by 
 Christopher Barker in 1 582, in which he makes him 
 say that ' the Company procured a charter,' and itali- 
 cizes the word ' procured.' But the statement, as 
 he quotes it on his next page, does not use the word 
 ' procured.' What Barker said is : ' Moreover the 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 1 1 
 
 printer and Stacioners 6f the same obteined a 
 ch[art]re for a Corporacon by reason of the disorder 
 in pryntynge did so greatlie encrease, to the ende 
 we might restrayne many euilles which would haue 
 happened in the saide profession.' Dr. Arber con- 
 tended that the disorders and evils were trade 
 disorders and trade evils, but when Balrker goes on 
 to speak of avoiding ' the disordered behauiour of 
 prynters and suche troubles that might grow by 
 printing,' etc., we must surely interpret his language 
 by the wording of the Charter itself, which says 
 nothing about benefiting the trade, but bases the 
 whole case for a charter on the need for dealing 
 with prohibited books. Under normal circum- 
 stances, as we have said, the Charter might be 
 interpreted by inversion. But Philip and Mary 
 were already bitterly angry, and the fa6t that less 
 than a year later they are found threatening to 
 execute by martial law anyone possessing a heretical 
 book explains the absence of any smooth phrases 
 in the Charter of 1557. When they said that they 
 were aftuated by a desire to suppress (what they 
 considered) bad books, they told the truth, and 
 there is no need to go behind their own statement. 
 That the initiative in the grant of a Charter 
 came from the Crown is madp more probable by 
 the contemporary enaftments in Spain. Accord- 
 ing to Mr. Barwick (' Laws regulating Printing 
 in Spain,' Bibliographical Society's Transa6lions, 
 iv. 48) : 
 
 In 1554 ... an order was issued vesting the licensing 
 power in the Royal Council alone. In 1558 Philip II 
 forbad the sale of imported books before they were 
 
12 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 licensed, under penalty of death and confiscation of 
 property. This law was made retrospecSlive and those 
 already in stock were to be sent to the Council for approval, 
 under penalty of transportation and confiscation. In this 
 law is first introduced the system, that in the copy sub- 
 mitted to the Council, each page should be signed by one 
 of its notaries, and the errata be entered at the end, the 
 type was then corredted, and the printer was bound to 
 return the signed copy with one or two copies of the im- 
 pression, and it was likewise ordered that the names of the 
 author, printer and place of printing should be placed in 
 the book. The penalty for any contravention was banish- 
 ment and confiscation. 
 
 Dr. Arber would hardly have maintained that this 
 enaftment was prompted by love of the Spanish 
 Stationers, and although Philip was not in England 
 at the time that the Charter was granted to their 
 English brethren, it seems probable that the under- 
 lying motive was the same in each case. 
 
 The Charter begins with a preamble as to the 
 need of suppressing objeftionable books, recites the 
 names of the Master, Wardens, and Members of the 
 Company, invests the Company with all the usual 
 powers of a Corporation, such as suing in common, 
 etc., prohibits any printing by anyone not a member 
 of the Company, and gives to the Master and 
 Wardens power of imprisonment, a right of search, 
 etc. We shall have to say more about the Company 
 later on. For the moment all that we are concerned 
 ^ with is the ease with which henceforth the Crown 
 could control the whole printing trade. Henceforth 
 every printer was known and under stridl regula- 
 tion, and a body of expert deteftives was enlisted in 
 the Government service, able to make a shrewd 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 13 
 
 guess as to whence the type in which any pamphlet 
 or bill was printed had been obtained, and with 
 their own personal interest in helping to suppress 
 any illicit work. 
 
 When Elizabeth, the year after she came to 
 the throne, issued the ' Injunftions ' of 1559, *^^ 
 Stationers' Company was still in its early days, and 
 although reference is made to the Company in the 
 fifty-first Injuniflion, which deals with books and 
 printing, the attitude taken up is still that of the 
 earlier Proclamations. The Injundlion reads : 
 
 51. Item because there is a great abuse in the Printers 
 of bookes, which for couetousness cheefely, regard not 
 what they print, so that they may haue gaine, whereby 
 ariseth great disorder by publication of vnfruitefull, vaine, 
 and infamous bookes and papers, the Queenes maiestie 
 straitlye chargeth and commaundeth, that no manner of 
 person shall print any manner of booke or paper, of what 
 sort, nature or in what language soeuer it be, excepte the 
 same be firste licensed by her Maiestie, by expresse wordes 
 in writing, or by six of her priuie counsel : or be perused 
 and licensed by the Archbishops of Canterburie and Yorke, 
 the Bishop of London, the Chauncelors of both Vniuer- 
 sities, the Bishop being Ordinarye and the Archdeacon 
 also of the place, where any such shal be printed or by 
 two of them, wherof the Ordinarie of the place to be 
 alwayes one. And that the names of such as shall allowe 
 the same to bee added in the end of euery such worke, for 
 a testimonle of the alowance thereof. And because manyv 
 pamphlets, playes and ballads, bee oftentimes printed, 
 wherein regard woulde bee had, that nothing therein 
 should be either heretical, seditious, or vnseemely for 
 Christian eares : her Maiestie likewise commaundeth, that 
 no manner of person shall enterprise to print any such 
 excepte the same bee to hini licensed by suche her Maiesties 
 
14 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 Commissioners, or three of them, as be appointed in the 
 Cittie of London, to heai-e and determine diuers causes 
 Ecclesiasticall, tending to the execution of certain statutes, 
 made the last Parliament for vniformitie of order in 
 Religion. And if any shall sell or vtter any maner of 
 bookes or papers, being not licensed, as is abouesayde : 
 that the same partie shalbe punished by order of the saide 
 Commissioners, as to the qualitie of the fault shalbe 
 thought meete. And touching all other bookes of matters 
 of religion, or poUicie, or gouer nance, that hath bene 
 printed eyther on this side the Sqas, or on the other side, 
 because the diuersitie of them is great, and that there 
 nedeth good consideration to be had of the particularities 
 thereof, her Maiestie referreth the prohibition or per- 
 mission thereof, to the order whiche her sayde Commis- 
 sioners within the Cittie of L(3hdon shall take and notifie. 
 According to the whiche, her Maiestie straitly com- 
 maundeth all maner her subiedes, and especially the 
 Wardens and company of Stationers to be obedient. 
 
 Prouided that these orders doe not extende to any pro- 
 phane [i.e. classical] aufthors, and works in any language 
 that hath ben heretofore commonly receiued or allowed 
 in any of the vniuersities or schooles, but the same may be 
 printed and vsed as by good order they were accustomed. 
 
 It seems not improbable that whoever drafted this 
 Injunftion was much better acquainted with 
 Edward VI's Proclamation of 28th April, 1551, 
 which has a similar mention of six Privy Coun- 
 cillors, or Mary's of i8th August, 1553, which in 
 like manner vituperates Printers and Stationers as 
 being ' of an euyll zeale for lucre and couetous of 
 vyle gayne,' than with the Charter recently granted 
 to the Stationers. It is certainly noteworthy that 
 by the inclusion among the licensing authorities of 
 'the Bishop being Ordinarie and the Archdeacon 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 15 
 
 also of the place, where any such shal be printed, 
 or by two of them, whereof the Ordinarie of the 
 place to be alwayes one,' the writer of the Injunc- 
 tion clearly contemplated the existence of provincial 
 presses, such as had come into being in the reign 
 of Edward VI at Ipswich, Worcester, and Canter- 
 bury, whereas by the Charter granted to the London 
 stationers provincial printing had been absolutely 
 suppressed. 
 
 A still stronger argument that the draftsman of 
 the fifty-first Injun<5lion was ignorant that a much 
 better way of dealing with the book-trade had 
 already been found may seem to be the fadt that it 
 was almost universally disregarded, i This, however, 
 seems to have been the fate of the similar provisions 
 in the various proclamations of the three previous 
 reigns, and we shall make a great mistake if we 
 imagine that because they were thus disregarded 
 they were therefore inoperative. Bread has to be 
 won and the day's work got through despite of 
 risks, and just as French and Belgian peasants have 
 dug their potatoes and coUecSed their handful of 
 sticks with shells falling on the other end of the 
 field, so the Tudor printers and publishers took 
 their risks, and seldom troubled to comply with 
 impossible regulations, such as that requiring the 
 signatures of six privy councillors to authorise the 
 publication of a ballad. But the shells which an 
 old woman disregards prove the existence of guns 
 which may prevent the advance of an army, and 
 throughout the reign of Elizabeth the control of the 
 book trade by the ministers of the Crown was as 
 nearly as possible complete. 
 
1 6 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 In 1566 an Order in Council repeated some of 
 the provisions of the Injunction of 1559, and took 
 power to call upon any printer to find security for 
 his good behaviour. In 1 572 the usefulness of the 
 Stationers' Company was proved by the success 
 with which it hunted down the secret Puritan press 
 which printed Cartwright's 'Admonition to the 
 Parliament,' and it is noteworthy that throughout 
 the rest of the reign of Elizabeth we hear of only 
 two other secret presses, that in the Jesuit interest, 
 which printed Campion's ' Rationes decern ' in 
 1 58 1, and the famous Marprelate Press, which 
 defied the Government with some success in 1 588-9. 
 On the other hand, Elizabeth and her advisers 
 \ made serious trouble for themselves by continuing 
 the bad pra<3:ice of granting privileges not merely 
 for individual books, but for whole classes of books. 
 As early as 1 544, possibly to console them for 
 dropping money over their Bibles, Grafton and 
 Whitchurch had been granted such a privilege 
 for printing service books. In 1552 Tottell was 
 granted a similar privilege for law books, and in 
 that and the following year John Day had received 
 the valuable monopoly of the 'Catechism in English' 
 and 'ABC In Elizabeth's reign Thomas Marshe 
 was granted exclusive rights in printing Latin books 
 for use in schools, and Richard Watkins in English 
 almanacs. As long as Archbishop Parker lived, the 
 printing of English Bibles was, kept in the hands 
 of Richard Jugge (who, perhaps by the Arch- 
 bishop's orders, made scanty use of it), while, with 
 equal suavity and firmness, Parker rendered wholly 
 inoperative the privileges granted to Bodley and 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 17 
 
 his friends for printing the Geneva version. But 
 the breath was hardly out of Parker's body when 
 trouble began. For the first time we hear of a 
 formal compliance with the Injunftions of 1559, 
 and seven privy councillors (one more than was 
 needed) licensed Christopher Barker, a protege 
 of Sir Francis Walsingham's, to print the Geneva 
 Bible and New Testament. In 1577, moreover, 
 after a pecuniary arrangement for the benefit of 
 Sir Thomas Wilkes, a Privy Councillor of some 
 importance. Barker was appointed Printer to the 
 Queen, with a monopoly for printing Bibles, service- 
 books, statutes, proclamations, and all books ordered 
 to be printed by the Queen or Parliament. 
 
 The strife which followed the issue of this 
 patent lasted very nearly as long as the Trojan War, 
 and the details of it are beside our purpose. It 
 began with quarrels between Barker and the earlier 
 patentees, some of whose privileges, notably those 
 of Tottell for law printing, the new patent in- 
 fringed. It speedily led to a much more serious 
 X struggle between the privileged and non-privileged 
 printers, in which it is clear that popular sympathy 
 was strongly on the side of the non-privileged, or 
 the extraordinary boldness with which their leaders, 
 Roger Ward and John Wolfe, defied Queen and 
 Council, would have led to a very different result. 
 The Council insisted on the Queen's right to grant 
 privileges being maintained, and maintained it was, 
 though the Commissioners appointed to enquire 
 into the trouble had mildly deprecated the use 
 made of it. In other respefts the malcontents 
 secured notable gains. John Wolfe was bought 
 
\ 
 
 1 8 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 off by being appointed City Printer. The privi- 
 leged printers placed the right of reprinting many 
 of their books in the hands of the Stationers' Com- 
 pany, to be used to find work for the poorer printers. 
 The Company itself passed an ordinance restrifting 
 the number of copies of which an edition might 
 consist, so as to secure more work for compositors, 
 and also restridled the number of apprentices and 
 forbade their employment on work which a journey- 
 man of good charafter was ready to perform. 
 Finally, the notorious 'Newe Decrees of the Starre 
 Chamber for order in Printing' of 23rd June, 1586, 
 though prejudice against the Star Chamber has 
 caused them to be generally regarded as merely 
 repressive, were assuredly at least partly inspired 
 by an honest desire to find a remedy for these 
 economic troubles, which were felt to be dangerous. 
 The key to the situation is supplied by the faft 
 that the test-case of the struggle was the claim that 
 anyone who pleased should be allowed to print the 
 lA B C ' with the ' Little Catechism,' a book for 
 which there was a continual demand, which pre- 
 sented no difliculties, literary or typographical, for 
 which, indeed, the poorest printing would suffice, 
 and no author nor editor had to be paid. The 
 total number of men engaged in the printing trade 
 at this time was less than two hundred, but small 
 as this number may seem, it was more than there 
 was work for. The larger printers laid stress, and 
 we must take due note of it, on the fa6l that unless 
 they were secured against piracy, they could not 
 afford to pay ' a learned man ' to write or edit a 
 book. The learned men naturally took their wares 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 19 
 
 to the larger firms, who could both print better 
 and pay better, and where, as by now was mostly 
 the case, a publisher intervened, he too would 
 naturally take his books to the larger printers, 
 who printed better, and could employ him to 
 publish the books over which they, as printers, 
 possessed rights. The remedy which the Star 
 V V Chamber proposed, a redu(5lion in the number of 
 printing-presses, in so far as it was carried out, 
 must have tended to put more work into the hands 
 of any printer who possessed a press. An unused 
 press was equally obnoxious to the wealthier 
 members of the Stationers' Company and the 
 Government, for sooner or later it might be used 
 to print either the 'ABC or a more or less 
 treasonable pamphlet. Even after the ' Newe 
 Decrees' of the Star Chamber a printer with a 
 press and a handful of type, eager to make a bit 
 of bread by using them, was a potential pirate. 
 
 Having said something as to the part played by 
 the Privy Council in regulating the Printing trade, 
 and as to the genesis of Pirates, a little must be 
 added about the Stationers' Company, which thus 
 far we have considered only as the instrument of 
 the Privy Council for the suppression of incon- 
 venient literature. The Company claims to have 
 been formed, out of two earlier ones, in 1404. At 
 what date printers were first admitted to it is still 
 doubtful. Caxton was a Mercer, and had no reason 
 to become a Stationer, nor can we imagine that the 
 Stationers would have welcomed very cordially the 
 introducer of so formidable an innovation as the 
 new art of printing. As all, or nearly all, his 
 
20 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 contemporaries and immediate successors, Lettou, 
 Machlinia, Wynkyn de Worde, P'ynson and Faques, 
 possibly also Julian Notary, were foreigners, what- 
 ever prejudice existed would not lightly die out. 
 Possibly Peter Aftors, though a native of Savoy, 
 was admitted to the Company in virtue of his 
 appointment as Stationer to the King, and when 
 William Faques succeeded AcSors, though he 
 called himself Printer, not Stationer, to the King, 
 the Stationers may have accepted him also. Cer- 
 tainly Pynson, who succeeded Faques as royal 
 printer, seems to have been a member of the 
 Company, since in his will he diredts that John 
 Snowe and Richard Withers 'shall serve their 
 yeares at the assignment of my executrix. And at 
 thende of their said yeres my said executrix to 
 make them free of my craft.' Wynkyn de Worde's 
 will explicitly speaks of his executor, John Bedill 
 (or Byddell), as 'citizen & stacioner of London,' 
 and of the three overseers of the will, Henry 
 Pepwell, John Gough and Robert Copland, as 
 ' Stacioners.' Whether De Worde himself was 
 a Stationer is less certain. The freedom with 
 which he reprinted some of Pynson's books would 
 have been reprehensible in a brother of the same 
 company. 
 
 Printers are to us so much more interesting than 
 Stationers that we naturally give them precedence, 
 but it is probable that as a class the Stationers were 
 for many years the wealthier and more influential. 
 It is certainly noteworthy that, according to Mr, 
 Duff's extrafts from the Lay Subsidy Rolls of 
 1523-4 ('The Library,' 2nd Series, IX, 257 sg.) 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 21 
 
 one Stationer, John Taverner, was assessed at ^^307 
 as against De Worde's £zoi i is. id., and another, 
 Richard Nele (who was transferred to the Iron- 
 mongers in 1525) at j^ioo as against Pynson's ^60. 
 Thus, even in the first half of the sixteenth century, 
 there is no reason to think that the Stationers would 
 in any way have courted the Printers, and on the 
 other hand members of other companies, for instance, 
 Grafton who was a grocer, Whitchurch who was 
 a Haberdasher, and John Day who is said, until 
 1550 or thereabouts, to have been a Stringer, seem 
 to have been able to exercise the craft of Printing 
 without molestation from the Stationers. But be 
 this as it may, at the time that the Company was 
 granted its Charter almost all the practising printers 
 had become members of it. Some of these may have 
 rallied to it only in anticipation of that event ; but 
 on the other hand, throughout the 'forties in the 
 lessened encroachment on other men's ' copies ' and 
 in the beginning of joint-publication, as is the case 
 of the ' Chaucer ' of [ 1 545] in which four firms took 
 part, we may perhaps trace the development of 
 what may be called ' Company ' manners. 
 
 It seems clear that, although neither the in- 
 jundlions of 1559 nor the Order in Council of 
 1566 authorized such a course, the Stationers' 
 N Company from the outset, and for many years 
 afterwards, a6ted as a licensing authority. The 
 Company's years ran from July to July, and under 
 the first of them (1557-8), after it received a 
 Charter, we find a rubric (Arber, i, 74) : ' The 
 Entrynge of all such Copyes as be lycensed to be 
 printed by the Master and Waxdyifs of the mystery 
 
22 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 ofstacionersasfoloweth.' In thenext year (1558-9), 
 which included the accession of Elizabeth, its ability 
 and willingness to exercise authority is shown by 
 the entries under another rubric : ' fynes for defautes 
 for Pryntynge withoute lycense.' The printer of 
 an unlicensed ballad was only fined fourpence, and 
 in the case of an unlicensed book twelvepence, but 
 where the book was of a kind for which special 
 authority would have been expedled the fines are 
 much heavier, no less a person than John Day being 
 fined five shillings (nearly £2. in modern value) 'for 
 pryntingof a boke without lycense called an Excelent 
 treates made by Nosterdamus,' and Richard Adams 
 the same sum for printing ' the Regester of all them 
 that were burned,' a very controversial topic in 
 the early days of the new reign. An even heavier 
 punishment was inflidled on Richard Lant who had 
 printed without licence an ' Epitaph of Queen 
 Mary,' for of him it is recorded that he ' was sent 
 to warde,' i.e. to the Company's private prison. 
 As a typical entry of this period, in the case of an 
 obviously harmless book, we may cite one for 1559 : 
 
 Recevyd of John daye for his lycense for the pryntynge 
 of the governaunce of vertue the vj of august iiij''- 
 
 As an example of a specially authorized entry we 
 may take this of the year 1570-71, just before a 
 break in the Company's records : 
 
 Recevyd of Rychard Jones for his lycense for y" prynt- 
 inge of morral phelosiphe by [i.e. authorised by] 
 my lord of London. 
 
 Save that ' Lycenced to ' was frequently sub- 
 stituted for ' Recevyd for his lycense for the printing 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 23 
 
 of,' this form continued in use till 1588, and, 
 in face of it, we must admit that the Company 
 afted as a licensing authority for harmless books. 
 According, however, to a note as to the former 
 pradtise of licensing books made by Sir John Lambe 
 in 1636, on 30th June, 1588, ' the Archbishop gave 
 power to Doftor Cosin, Doftor Stallard, Dodtor 
 Wood, master Hartwell, Master Gravett, Master 
 Crowley, master Cotton and master Hutchinson, 
 or any one of them to license books to be printed : 
 Or any 2 of these following Master Judson, master 
 Trippe, master Cole and master Dickens.'" The 
 appointment of a body of accessible licensers clearly 
 superseded the informal licensing power which the 
 Stationers themselves had previously exercised. 
 Henceforth, though variants occur, the form of an 
 entry on ist July, 1588 : 
 
 Thomas Orwin. Entred to him for his copie, A booke 
 intitled the complamt of tyme Alowed vnder Doftor 
 Stallers hand as profitable to be printed vj^- 
 
 ' Arber, iii, '690. The note of Sir J. Lambe proceeds : ' From 
 19" Elizabethe till the Starrechamber Decree 28° Elizabethe, 
 many were licensed by the master and Wardens, some few by the 
 master Alone, and some by the Archbishop and more by the Bishop 
 of London. The like was in the former parte of the Quene 
 Elizabeth's time. They were made a corporation but by P. and 
 M. Master Kingston, y^ now master, sayth that before the Decree 
 the master and wardens licensed all. And that when they had any 
 Divinity booke of muche importance they would take the advise 
 of some 2 or 3 ministers of this towne.' Lambe's taking the date 
 ' 19° Elizabethe ' as a starting point suggests that he was writing 
 after glancing through the Stationers' Registers, and that the gap 
 in these from 1571 to 1576 was already there. Neither his note 
 nor Felix Kingston's assertion has any independent authority, but 
 taken together they give substantially the same account as that 
 oSeied above. 
 
24 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE 
 
 (omitting the ' as profitable to be printed ') became 
 increasingly common, until gradually it ousted all 
 others. After a time the Wardens to some extent 
 recovered their old position as informal licensers, 
 but the use of the form, 'Entred for his copy,' kept 
 the two points involved in the entry (i.) a record 
 of permission to print, and (ii.) a promise of pro- 
 tedlion from piracy, much better distinguished than 
 in the older entries. 
 
 If we take the two points just mentioned to 
 represent the advance made in the economic position 
 of the English book trade during the sixteenth 
 century, this will at first sight seem very small, and 
 smaller still if we look at it from the standpoint 
 of an author. Until the dodlrines of Luther began 
 to spread to England, no permission to print was 
 needed. Amid the religious and political upheaval 
 which resulted from the new teaching the book 
 trade suffered heavily, and doubtless its members 
 congratulated themselves in the year of the Armada 
 on the comparative ease with which a licence could 
 be procured for works which aroused no religious 
 or political objeftion. The protedlion from piracy, 
 though unless secured by a royal privilege it had 
 no legal force, but rested solely on the private 
 ordinances of the Stationers' Company, was a real 
 and obvious gain. Moreover, although the ordi- 
 nances of the Stationers' Company took no account 
 whatever of the rights of authors, it was a gain to 
 these as well as to printers and publishers. Next 
 to being able to secure perpetual copyright in his 
 writings for himself, the best thing that could 
 happen to an author was to be able to sell his books 
 
IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 25 
 
 to someone else who could do so. The copyright 
 which the Stationers' Company conferred on the 
 publisher who entered a book on its register, by 
 increasing his prospeft of profit made it possible to 
 increase also the remuneration of the author, nor 
 was there such a total absence of competition be- 
 tween rival publishers as to oblige an author to 
 accept whatever he was offered. Literary pay- 
 ments, being a new thing, could not be put 
 on a reasonable footing all at once. By Milton's 
 day, though no change in the legal 'position had 
 occurred, an author could secure by contradl a 
 promise of further payments for later editions. 
 The Elizabethan custom transferred to the pub- 
 lisher the entire property in a book for a single 
 payment, which th^ possibility of future editions 
 would and could only slightly affeft. This was 
 the publisher's gain and the author's loss, but for 
 books of which only a single edition could be sold, 
 there seems no reason to believe that the Elizabethan 
 author obtained worse terms than he would at the 
 present day. The worst payment which we hear 
 of is the twenty-six copies of his book handed over 
 to an obscure writer named Richard Robinson 
 instead of cash ; the best, the ^40 in money, with 
 maintenance for himself, two servants, and their 
 horses during nine months, which Dr. Fulke re- 
 ceived from George Bishop for his ' Confutation 
 of the Rhemish Testament.' ^2 is said to have 
 been the market-price for a popular pamphlet, 
 though Greene or Nash may have obtained double 
 this. Even the doubled sum may seem very little. 
 But parsons and schoolmasters, even fellows or 
 
26 REGULATION OF THE BOOK TRADE. 
 
 colleges, were apparently considered lucky in 
 Elizabeth's reign if they earnt more than ^20 a 
 year. These all pursued old established methods 
 of earning a living. It is no matter for wonder if 
 those who tried a newer path found it even stonier. 
 Our only point is that, whether the payments were 
 little or large, in cash, in board and lodging, or in 
 ^ books, the payment of authors had definitely become 
 a trade custom by the end of the sixteenth century. 
 We shall consider in another article how far these 
 payments were made precarious by publishers 
 obtaining security for themselves, ' notwithstanding 
 their first Coppies were purloyned from the true 
 owner or imprinted without his leave,' That they 
 did this, is the accusation brought against the 
 booksellers in the ' SchoUers Purgatory ' by George 
 Wither, whose personal grievance was his failure to 
 enforce an iniquitous grant he had obtained from 
 James I, by which no one was to be able to buy a 
 copy of ' The Psalms in Metre ' without also buying 
 Wither's ' Hymns.' The grievance makes Wither 
 a bad witness, but his charge has often been repeated, 
 and we shall have to see what substance there is in 
 it, more especially as regards the plays with which 
 we are mainly concerned. 
 
27 
 
 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 
 
 N writing on the Regulation of the 
 Book Trade in the Sixteenth Century 
 I claimed that the informal copyright 
 which the Stationers' Company was 
 able to secure to its members in the 
 case of any book duly entered on its register, though 
 it seems to us a poor substitute for a legal copyright 
 vested in the author himself, distinctly increased 
 ^ the market value of the literary wares which an 
 author might have to sell. The publisher, when 
 he was prote6ted from piracy, could afford to pay 
 more than when he was not, and authorship became 
 possible as a profession as soon as printers began . 
 to respedl each others' rights. That the money 
 received from booksellers was miserably small re- 
 sulted not so much from their rapacity as from the 
 smallness and poverty of the reading public. More- 
 over, whether little or much, it was a new income. 
 Before the invention of printing an author was 
 entirely dependent upon^ patronage for his literary 
 rewards. It took three centuries wholly to super- 
 sede patronage, and in Shakespeare's day only about 
 a third of the road had been travelled. The starve- 
 ling author, Richard Robinson, whose account of 
 his winnings Dr. McKerrow unearthed some years 
 ago, sold twenty-five of the twenty-six copies which 
 his publisher gave him instead of cash, as a rule 
 
28 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 at a shilling apiece. Only once did he obtain as 
 much as forty shillings for the lot. It was on the 
 reward he obtained for the twenty-sixth copy, the 
 one presented to the patron sele^ed- as dedicatee, 
 that the success or failure of a book depended. 
 Once the poor wretch flew too high, and making 
 the Queen herself his vi<5tim, came off empty- 
 handed. Once, on the other hand, he obtained no 
 '< less than ^3, and proudly records that for a whole 
 year thereafter he was no burden to his friends. 
 Next best to this came a reward of thirty shillings 
 from Sir Henry Sidney, supplemented by another ten 
 from his son Philip. The gifts of other dedicatees 
 were sometimes not more than a few shillings. 
 
 The system of patronage, of which Richard 
 Robinson was a produ6l, retarded the development 
 of authorship as a profession in two ways : directly, 
 by encouraging publishers to give less money on 
 
 • the plea that the patron would make it up; in- 
 directly, hj so lowering the status of authors who 
 tried to live by their pens that no one with any 
 pretension to rank or fashion could take money for 
 his writings. To escape any imputation of doing 
 so, fashionable authors avoided print altogether, 
 and circulated their writings among their friends 
 
 -in manuscript. It was this pradlice which en- 
 couraged piracy more than anything else. The 
 relatives of Sir Philip Sidney could not have pleaded 
 that his estate was defrauded by his 'Apology for 
 Poetry,' or his 'Astrophel,' or 'Arcadia' being 
 printed by a publisher who had got hold of one of 
 the manuscript copies. Under no circumstances 
 would Philip Sidney, who, poor as he was, was a 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 29 
 
 liberal patron of letters, have put himself on a level 
 with those he patronized by taking money from a 
 publisher. His relatives could only say that they 
 obje6led, and in an ordinary court of law it is hard 
 to see how they could have obtained any redress. 
 For here custom was all against therti. If a 
 medieval author circulated a book in manuscript 
 he could not prevent other copies being made from 
 it, though there may well have been cases in which 
 it would have been thought shabby in an owner to 
 permit this. Even the Elizabethan man of fashion 
 who wrote out his poems for his friends had no 
 remedy against copying in manuscript, and except 
 on the ground of pecuniary damage, which a man 
 of any distinction was debarred from pleading, it is 
 hard to see how an Elizabethan judge could have 
 ruled that to copy in manuscript was permissible, 
 but to copy in print, not. 
 
 Just because all matters connedled with printing 
 were under the almost absolute control of the Privy 
 Council and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the 
 Sidney family defeated the interfering publisher in 
 every case ; but the existence of a class of writers 
 who neither did, nor could, take money for their 
 books was none the less a great clog on the develop- 
 ment of prdfessional authorship, and introduced 
 possibilities of genuine mistakes. We all know to 
 what shifts Pope was reduced when he wanted the 
 world to see what beautiful letters he was in the 
 habit of writing to his friends, and recognized that 
 literary etiquette, or perhaps we should say ' decent 
 feeling,' forbade him to publish them himself. By 
 devices which soon became obvious, though their 
 
30 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 full exposure was reserved for literary antiquaries 
 ^ almost of our own day, he procured their publication 
 by the notorious pirate, Edmund Curll, and thus, 
 though with much loss of credit, secured his obje6l. 
 In the sixteenth century any aristocratic author, 
 or any author who wished to be thought equally 
 scrupulous on what was then considered a point of 
 honour, found himself debarred from publishing his 
 poems or other contributions to the fashionable 
 literature of the day by a convention of very much 
 the same kind as Pope, in the case of his private 
 letters, only surmounted by disgraceful intrigues. 
 
 The preliminary matter of Barnabe Googe's 
 ' Eglogs and Epytaphes,' printed by Thomas Col- 
 well for Raufe Newbery in 1563, shows us one 
 way in which an author's pretty hesitations about 
 committing his poems to print could be surmounted. 
 '' In 1562, when Googe went on a visit to Spain, he 
 left the manuscript of his verses in the keeping of 
 a friend named Blundeston, who took on himself to 
 send them to be printed, and explained at some 
 length, both in verse and prose, how desire for his 
 friend's fame prompted him to do so. The author's 
 own story is given in his dedication : ' To the ryght 
 worshipfull M. William Lovelace, Esquier, Reader 
 of Grayes Inne,' in which he asserts that his sense 
 of the grossness of his style and distrust of 'scorne- 
 fuU and carpynge Correftours ' caused him rather 
 to condemn his poems to 
 
 continuall darkenes, wherby no Inconvenience could 
 happen : than to endaunger my selfe in gyuynge them to 
 lyght, to the disdaynefuU doome of any offended mynde 
 . . . Notwithstandynge[,] all the dylygence that I coulde 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 31 
 
 vse in the Suppression therof coulde not suffise[,] for I 
 my selfe beyng at that tyme oute of the Realme, lytell 
 fearynge any suche thynge to happen //'/A verye Friende 
 of myne, bearyhge as it semed better wyll to my doynges 
 than respe(Styng the hazarde of my name, commytted them 
 all togyther vnpolyshed to the handes of the Prynter. In 
 whose handes durynge his absence from the Cytie, tyll 
 his returne of late they remayned. At whiche tyme, he 
 declared the matter wholly vnto me : shewynge me that 
 beynge so farre past, & Paper prouyded for the Impres- 
 sion therof: It coulde not withoute greate hynderaunce 
 of the poore Printer be nowe reuoked. His sodayne tale 
 made me at ye fyrst, vtterly amazed, and doubting a great 
 while, what was best to be done : at the lengthe agreying 
 both with Necessytie and his Counsell, I sayde with 
 Martiall / iam sed poteras tutior esse domi 
 
 and allowed the printer to proceed. 
 
 Googe's account of what happened is probably 
 very fairly true. Had he been lying, he would not 
 have confessed that at the time of his return print- 
 ing had not yet begun, with the implication that by 
 merely compensating Colwell for his loss on re- 
 selling the paper or holding it till it could be used 
 on some other book, he could have kept his poems 
 in safe obscurity. It is interesting to note, though 
 we need not lay stress on it, that he assumes that he 
 could have recalled his manuscript, and have left 
 the printer to bear such loss as might result. But 
 it sufficed for him to make consideration for ' the 
 poore Printer ' his excuse for publication, and it 
 may suffice for us to point out what a confusing 
 element the existence of busybodies or enthusiasts 
 like Googe's friend Blundeston must have intro- 
 duced into the book trade. 
 
32 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 Blundeston was a real person and a real friend 
 of Googe's, whether he played a friend's part in this 
 transaftion or not. A generation later, however, 
 it is hardly surprising that the genuine enthusiasts, 
 of whom we may take him as a type, should be 
 very difficult to distinguish on the one hand from 
 such a shadowy scapegoat as the ' some ' whom 
 Wm. Percy made responsible for the publication 
 of his ' Sonnets to the fairest Coelia' in 1594, and 
 on the other hand from such professional dealers in 
 manpscripts as Thomas Thorpe and William Hall, as 
 to whose doings Sir Sidney Lee has brought together 
 so much useful information in his account of the 
 publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets. It will be 
 useful to remember that one of these began his 
 career by procuring a manuscript of Marlowe's 
 (his translation of the first book of Lucan's ' Phar- 
 salia'), and the other by getting hold of Robert 
 Southwell's ' A Foure-fould Meditation ' ; and that 
 both Marlowe and Southwell were dead, and the 
 works of one as a reputed atheist and of the other 
 as a notorious Jesuit would be to an unusual extent 
 at the disposal of anyone who had the courage to 
 print them. On the other hand, Thorpe must 
 iiave obtained Chapman's consent to publishing 
 two bf his plays, as we find that to all copies of his 
 ' Byron,' and to some of ' All Fools ' Chapman pre- 
 fixed a dedication. It may be doubted indeed if 
 it can be proved, even in the case of Thorpe or 
 Hall, that they plied their trade without any respe<5t 
 to the pecuniary rights of living professional g,uthors. 
 It is possible, perhaps probable, that Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets were published by Thorpe in 1 609 without 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 33 
 
 his consent, and that he would have stopped their 
 publication if he could. Into that thorny question 
 we fortunately need not enter. But it is very 
 much to our purpose to note that the Sonnets in 
 1609 had been in existence for some fifteen years, 
 that Meres in his ' Palladis Tamia ' had commended 
 them in print in 1598, and that yet, with the excep- 
 tion of two printed in 'The Passionate Pilgrim' the 
 following year (1599), no printer bad been willing 
 or able to appropriate them. They may have been 
 pirated at last, but they escaped for fifteen years. 
 
 It may be worth while here to quote from Nashe's 
 dedication of 'The Terrors of the Night' to Mistres 
 Elizabeth Carey his assertions as to its popularity in 
 manuscript : 
 
 As touching this short glose or annotation on the foolish 
 Terrors of the Night. ... A long time since hath it line 
 suppressed by mee : vntill the vrgent importunitie of a 
 kinde frend of mine (to whom I was sundrie waies be- 
 holding) wrested a Coppie from me. That Coppie pro- 
 gressed from one scriueners shop to another, & at length 
 grew so Common, that it was readie to bee hung out for 
 one of their signes, like a paire of indentures. Wherevppon 
 I thought it as good for mee to reape the frute of my 
 bwne labours, as to let some vnskilfuU pen-man or 
 Nouerint-maker startch his ruffle & new spade his beard 
 with the benefite he made of them. 
 
 Although the booklet was being so repeatedly 
 copied by different scriveners, not only did none of 
 them make a second copy and sell it to a printer, 
 but Nashe does not seem even to have considered 
 the possibility of this being done. It is solely the 
 benefit or pay which the 'vnskilfuU penman' might 
 
34 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 make: by producing manuscript copies that he 
 grudges him. Yet in 1 594 a pamphlet by Nashe had 
 probably as high a selling value as any other book 
 of the same length that was being put on the market. 
 The point we are making is that the appropria- 
 tion of literary rights without permission or pay- 
 ment which we call piracy, in so far a)s it can be 
 >/> proved, was largely concerned with the works of 
 ' dead authors, or of men whose rank would have 
 forbidden them to receive payment for their books. 
 The talk about books being printed without leave 
 is at least sometimes only doubtfully sincere. Men 
 ' who were known to be making a living from their 
 pens seemed to have suffered very little indeed from 
 piracy, even when, as in the case of the book by 
 Nashe just mentioned, they laid themselves easily 
 open to attack. 
 
 In this connexion we shall do well to remember 
 that there was no change in the law, or in the 
 apparent, though not quite real, exclusion of 
 authors from the benefit of such copyright as the 
 Stationers' Company could secure, for exaftly a 
 hundred years after the publication of Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets. In 1624, ^^ ^^^ ' SchoUers Purgatory,' 
 ' George Wither wrote of the Stationers : 
 
 Yea, by the lawes and Orders of their Corporation, they 
 can and do setle vpon the particular members thereof a 
 p[e]rpetuall interest in such Bookes as are Registered by 
 them at their Hall, in their several Names : and are 
 secured in taking the full benefit of those books, better 
 then any Author can be by virtue of the Kings Grant, 
 notwithstanding their first Coppies were purloyned from 
 the true owner, or imprinted without his leave. - 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 35 
 
 In whatever sense this assertion was true at the 
 time when Wither made it, it was true also when 
 Milton was able to make a formal contract securing '' 
 him a share in the profits of more editions of 
 ' Paradise Lost ' than were printed during his life, 
 and when Dryden was able to support himself by 
 his pen. Until the first Copyright Aft was passed ' 
 in 1709 there was no change in the law. Whatever 
 else that statute efFefted (and it might well be con- 
 tended that it benefitted the reading public at the 
 expense of authors) it did not suppress piracy. It 
 was in the year which preceded that A61 that 
 Edmund Curll's name is first found on a title- 
 page, and his notorious career extended for some 
 thirty years after it became law. Yet, though 
 accusations have been levelled at random against 
 this or that Elizabethan printer or publisher, there 
 is not one of them who can be named in the same 
 breath with Curll. 
 
 Curll's piracies did not prevent the position 
 of authors from steadily improving during the 
 eighteenth century. It cannot therefore be argued 
 that the fadl that the position of authors un- 
 doubtedly improved steadily during the life of 
 Shakespeare proves that there were no piracies in • 
 his day. It only proves that they were not on a 
 scale to interfere with the steady development. 
 Piracies there were, and two reasons have here 
 been advanced to explain this much exaggerated 
 but indubitable faft : (i) the presence in London • 
 of more printers than there was work for ; (ii) the * 
 convention which forbade men of rank or fashion 
 from circulating their poems or essays except in 
 
36 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 manuscript. The first of these sources of trouble 
 was steadily kept in view by the Privy Council, 
 whose interference, usually represented as purely 
 repressive and tyrannical, was in part at least 
 economic and (on the whole) beneficent. The 
 second cause may be presumed to have been largely 
 removed by the succession to the throne, in the 
 person of James I, of ' a prentice in the noble art 
 of poetry ' who did not refrain from publication. 
 Even while these two purely transitory causes were 
 in full operation their e£Fe6l on the English book- 
 trade as a whole was insignificant. We have now 
 to ask whether there were any circumstances 
 peculiar to one branch of the book-trade, that con- 
 cerned with the publication of plays, which should 
 incline us to believe that it wa^ specially open to 
 attack, and what positive evidence can be found of 
 the attacks having been successful. 
 
 During the middle years of the sixteenth century, 
 when the ecclesiastical future of England was still 
 uncertain, the adling of interludes supporting more 
 or less blatantly cither the Roman or the Protestant 
 side seems to have greatly annoyed successive Tudor 
 governments. Elizabeth dealt with the nuisance 
 by an A£l declaring all players of interludes to be 
 rogues and vagabonds and liable to the unpleasant 
 penalties provided for these poor folk, unless formed 
 into companies under the prote(5lion of a Privy 
 Councillor, who would be answerable for their good 
 behaviour. As the business community became 
 more and more strongly addicted to Puritanism, 
 the rulers of the City of London would gladly have 
 prohibited stage plays altogether. Elizabeth, how- 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 37 
 
 ever, as well as her successors, happened to be very -^ 
 fond of these performances, and on the plea that 
 they must be given opportunities to develop their 
 skill for exhibition at Court, the players were gener- 
 ally protefted, although all performances were for- 
 bidden during visitations of the plague for fear of 
 infeftion, and at other times increase of Puritan 
 pressure might restrict the number of them. 
 
 The fa6t that one company of players was under ' 
 the protedlion of the Lord High Admiral, and 
 another of the Lord Chamberlain, and that these 
 were two of the most important members of the 
 Privy Council, which, as we have seen, exercised 
 supreme authority over printers and printing, 
 suggests at first that these companies must have 
 had complete protedlion against interference on the 
 part of pirates. It was the companies with which 
 the pirates would have had to deal, as during the 
 reign of Elizabeth it is certain that the dramatists 
 sold their complete rights to the company which 
 -was to aft the play, so that it would be the 
 company, not the author, that would be injured by 
 a piracy. That a company with the Lord Chamber- 
 lain or the Lord High Admiral as its protestor 
 should have submitted to any systematic robbery is 
 in the highest degree unlikely. On the other hand, 
 the hostility of the City and occasional trouble at 
 Court rendered the position of the players always 
 more or less precarious, and to trouble a great lord 
 over a small matter when they might need his help 
 in a much more important one would not have 
 been wise. Hence we need not be surprised if we 
 find a company submitting to occasional loss rather 
 
38 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 than trouble their protedlor, as long as the loss does 
 not become too frequent. The market price for a 
 pamphlet towards the end of the sixteenth century 
 seems to have been forty shillings, though the most 
 popular writers obtained more. The selling value 
 of a play must have been much the same as that 
 of a pamphlet. A few when printed went through 
 half a dozen or more editions ; many of those we 
 think the best were never reprinted at all, or not 
 in the popular quarto form. To go to the Lord 
 Chamberlain over the loss of a forty shilling fee for 
 
 , ^ [Z^ the printing rights in a play would hardly have 
 
 Jt..^^.'^4^ been good business. 
 
 On the other hand, if we are tempted to extend 
 this argument to the point of agreeing with the con- 
 tention that it could never have been worth while 
 for a company to permit its plays to be printed, we 
 must remember that the total sum paid to an author 
 " by the company was itself only small, ranging as a 
 ' rule from ^^6 to ^lo in the latter years of Elizabeth, 
 though as much as j^20 seems occasionally to have 
 been paid, and during the next decade may not have 
 been an unusual fee. To recover from a publisher 
 twenty or even ten per cent, of the original price 
 paid for a play cannot have been a matter of indif- 
 ference, and although at the outset of a play's run 
 it would probably have been bad policy to allow it 
 to be printed for any fee a publisher could have 
 afforded to pay, there must have come a time when 
 the injury, if any, done by publication would have 
 * been more than made good even by a return of only 
 a small fraction of the price paid. 
 
 On the view here maintained the players' willing- 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 39 
 
 ness to permit the publication of any individual 
 play would be decided by the conditions of the 
 moment, while their special power of appealing 
 to the Privy Council was a reserve force which 
 secured them against any general attack, but not 
 from isolated and occasional depredations. As 
 regards the Stationers' Company the players held 
 no specially favoured position. It is even possible 
 that some of the more important members of the 
 Company may have taken the official City view 
 that play-a<5ling was a nuisance which ought to be 
 abolished. But except that if a needy printer were 
 earning his bit of bread by pirating a play, he might 
 be a little less likely to be also pirating the ' Grammar 
 and Accidence' or the 'Catechism with the AB C,' 
 "^ the magnates of the Stationers' Company had no 
 reason to approve of the multiplying of plays by 
 piracy, while they had the very strongest reasons 
 for not embroiling themselves with the Privy 
 Councillors who were the players' protedlors. 
 The defensive position of the players being such 
 . as we have described, what were the possible 
 V attacking forces, and what power did they possess ? 
 We have seen that owing to the lack of work and 
 the uneven distribution of such work as there was, 
 some minor printer was always likely to be in 
 difficulties, and as we know that these men were 
 ready at such times to set the Stationers' Company 
 at defiance by pirating the ' Grammar and Acci- 
 dence' or the 'Catechism,' it is not likely that they 
 would be squeamish about pirating a play. Before 
 a play could be printed, however, the text of it had 
 to be obtained, and after it was printed the booklet 
 
40 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 had to be sold, and neither of these necessary steps 
 was easy. Thomas Heywood, in a preface written 
 in 16^0 and a prologue of 1637, speaks of early 
 plays of his having ' accidentally come into the 
 printers hands and therefore so corrupt and mangled 
 (coppied only by the eare) that I haue bin as vnable 
 to know them, as ashamed to chalenge them,' and 
 specifically of his play of ' Queen Elizabeth,' first 
 published in 1605, that 
 
 Some by Stenography drew 
 The plot : put it in print : (Scarce one word trew :) 
 
 Heywood was writing a quarter of a century after 
 the publication of the plays in question, and in 
 other respefts is not a very good witness ; but 
 taking his statements as they stand we must note, 
 hardly without surprise, his declaration that the 
 stenographic copy came ' accidentally ' into the 
 printer's hands, which excludes deliberate piracy 
 on the part either of printer or shorthand writer. 
 If we must venture a guess as to what happened 
 we may remember that at a slightly later date 
 manuscript copies of some of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's plays circulated among lovers of the 
 drama, and it is possible that the shorthand copies 
 of some of Heywood's plays were made by a 
 scrivener for this comparatively innocent purpose, 
 and that one of these came ' accidentally ' into the 
 printer's hands. Heywood's further statement that 
 this was ' vnknown to me and without any of my 
 direftion,' it will also be observed, does not oblige 
 us to believe that the company of players to whom 
 he had sold his play outright were also ignorant 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 41 
 
 of the transa(3:ion and unconcerned in it. In any 
 case piracy by stenography can hardly, without 
 \ incredible carelessness on the part of the owners of 
 theatres, have been allowed to grow into a practice. 
 When once dete<5led it could easily be stopped, 
 
 Mr. Fleay, when he set himself to explain how 
 'Romeo and Juliet' was pirated, supposed that the 
 text in question was the prompter's copy of an 
 unrevised early version, and proceeds : ' When the 
 revision took place this copy would be thrown aside 
 as worthless ; and any dishonest employe of the 
 theatre could sell it to an equally dishonest publisher, 
 who would publish it as the play now afted.' If 
 piracy of plays was pradtically unknown in 1596 
 the explanation is bibliographically possible, what- 
 ever else may be said against it. But if piracy were 
 at all a common danger can we imagine a prompter 
 throwing aside a complete copy of a play for any 
 dishonest servant to pick up and sell ; or, if this 
 might happen once, can we believe it to have 
 happened twice ? 
 
 Mr. Greg has suggested the possibility that the 
 traitor in the case of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor' 
 may have been the aftor who played the part of the 
 Host, the scenes in which the Host appears being 
 more coherently reproduced than the rest. This is 
 technically a sound hypothesis, and the danger to 
 which it points was more likely to be permanent, 
 or recurrent, than those just considered. The 
 ' hixed - men ' in the Elizabethan theatres were 
 poorly ^aid, and still more poorly esteemed, and 
 if one of them made up his mind to add to his 
 earnings in this fashion, it might have been some 
 
 D 
 
 •y 
 
42 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 time before 4ete6tion overtook him. If such a 
 treacherous ' hired man ' lighted on a printer such 
 as John Danter when the latter was in his worst 
 straits, there was nothing to prevent the piracy 
 from being completed. Danter could hawk the 
 edition among the booksellers without employing 
 a publisher, and as soon as the copies were off his 
 hands his known poverty would make it useless to 
 take a<3:ion against him. Unless he entered the 
 book on the Register of the Stationers' Company 
 he could claim no copyright in it, but {as we have 
 said) many plays never reached a second edition, so 
 Danter saved the sixpence registration fee, sacri- 
 ficed the hope of future profit, and was content 
 with his gains on a single edition. Had he flown 
 at the higher game, he might have found himself 
 cross-examined as to the provenance of his copy, 
 and finally have been fobbed off with a conditional 
 entry, ' provided that he get lawful license for it.' 
 If the impecunious copy-snatcher were a book- 
 seller instead of a printer, he might find himself 
 obliged to take this risk as the only means of 
 making a profit at all. This seems to have been 
 the case with John Busby when he brought up 
 'The Merry Wives of Windsor,' on i8th January, 
 1602, and assigned it, at the cost of another six- 
 pence, there and then, to Arthur Johnson. If 
 Arthur Johnson had declared himself unwilling to 
 enter the play himself, or to buy the copy before 
 it had been entered, we should have a pretty 
 explanation why two sixpences were spent instead 
 of one. 
 
 John Busby brought off his coup, owing probably 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 43 
 
 to his vidlims being in an unusually defenceless 
 position, of which he was doubtless aware. But 
 in the twenty years July, 1590, to June, 1610, over •^ 
 150 plays were duly brought before the Stationers' 
 Company and entered, and, although here and there 
 a pirate may have achieved the maximum success 
 of getting a ' stolne and surreptitious ' copy regis- 
 tered as his property, bibliographers may well 
 hesitate to believe that such triumphs were frequent 
 until someone propounds an easier way in which they 
 could be achieved. Incredulity will be heightened v 
 when we find that a considerable proportion of these 
 entries come close together, as if the books which 
 they represent had been disposed of in batches. 
 Thus in the two years July, 1591, to July, 1593, 
 only six plays were registered ; but in the ten 
 months 06lober, 1593, to July, 1594, no fewer 
 than twenty-eight. In 1595 there were eight 
 entries; in 1596 one; in 1597 two; in 1598 four; 
 in 1599 two. Then in 1600 the number rises to 
 twenty-two, and 1601 produced another eight. 
 1602 has three; 1603 (a plague year) only one; -^ 
 1 604 six ; 1 605 eleven ; i 606'seven ; 1 007 as many 
 as seventeen; 1608 a dozen, or if we take the 
 twelvemonth, 22nd March 1608, to loth March, 
 1609, seventeen again, after which no play was 
 entered for another fifteen months. Surely these 
 variations, from one, two or three entries of plays 
 in a twelvemonth to seventeen, twenty-two or 
 twenty-eight, point to a controlled output, to there 
 \ being years when the supply was rigorously held 
 up and other years when they were offered to the 
 booksellers in such quantities as could only have 
 
44 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 been produced by the legitimate owners of them. 
 We cannot imagine twenty-eight piracies having 
 immediately preceded the ten months Odtober, 
 1593, to July, 1594, but we can easily imagine that 
 the players would have been glad to sell this number 
 "of plays about that time, because shortly before this 
 there had been a similar period, from April to 22nd 
 December, 1593, ^i^ring which the theatres were 
 closed because of the plague, and the companies 
 must have been very hard hit. In like manner, 
 though the coincidence is not quite so strong, the 
 outpouring of plays in 1600 and 1601 may be 
 connected with the Puritan attacks on the players 
 which resulted in an Order in Council on 22nd 
 June of the former year, restricting the number of 
 theatres to two, forbidding any performances in 
 Lent, and allowing onlyjwo_j, week at other times. 
 If the large numbers in which plays were put on 
 the market in certain years oblige us to presume 
 that they were obtained direftly from the Com- 
 panies of Players, as the only holders of plays who 
 could supply them in this wholesale fashion, it is 
 still part of my case that pirates existed and were 
 occasionally successful. In the light of recently 
 acquired knowledge it is interesting to note how 
 these casual depredations were resisted. Until 
 lately it was generally assumed that James Roberts 
 was the most audacious of the pirates. The as- 
 sumption was curiously hasty, because Roberts was 
 in possession of two special privileges, and it was 
 the unprivileged men whose financial straits led 
 them to take dangerous risks in order to obtain 
 work. One of Roberts's privileges, shared with 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 45 
 
 Richard Watkins, was for printing all almanacks 
 and prognostications ; the other, obtained by marry- 
 ing the widow of John Charlewood, the original 
 grantee, was for printing all play bills. This would 
 necessarily bring him into close touch with the 
 players, and to suppose that he was at the same 
 time openly robbing, or trying to rob, them, is 
 unreasonable. Some ground for suspedling Roberts 
 seemed to be offered by the occurrence of the 
 words ' Printed by J. Roberts ' on the title-pages 
 of editions of ' The Merchant of Venice ' and 
 ' Midsummer Nights Dream ' bearing the same 
 date (1600) as those which he printed respedlively 
 for Thomas Haies and Thomas Fisher ; but now 
 that (I hope I may say) it has been proved that 
 these editions were not printed by him and only 
 came into existence nineteen years later, there is 
 nothing to hinder us from regarding him as an 
 agent for the players, a part very well suited to the 
 printer of their bills. When therefore we find that 
 on four occasions Roberts entered plays on the 
 Stationers' Register with a proviso that they should 
 not be printed until he had produced better authority, 
 instead of regarding him as a would-be pirate baffled 
 by the exceptional caution of the authorities at 
 Stationers' Hall, we may admit the probability that 
 he was entering them in the interest of the players 
 in order to postpone their publication till it could 
 not injure the run of the play and to make the task 
 of the pirates more difficult.' 
 
 * 
 ' On 27th July, 1598, he entered in this way 'The Merchant 
 of Venice,' ' provided it be not printed without licence first had 
 from the Lord Chamberlain'; on 27th May, 1600, 'A moral of 
 
46 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 With the entries by Roberts we must mention 
 two still more significant ones under the heading 
 ' My lord Chamberlens mens plaies Entred.' The 
 first of these is undated, and registers 'A moral of 
 clothe breches and velvet hose,' and an ' AUarum to 
 London,' with side-notes referring to the entries 
 by Roberts on 27th and 29th May [1600] quoted 
 above ; the second, dated ' 4 August!,' reads : 
 
 L 
 
 As you like yt, a booke 
 Henry the ffift, a booke 
 
 Every man in his humour, a booke V to be staied. 
 The Commedie of muche Adoo about ' 
 nothing, a booke 
 
 Here we have the ' Lord Chamberlen's men ' 
 ^ themselves taking aftion with the Stationers' Com- 
 pany direft, despite the fadl that they had no status 
 in it, to proteft their own property. The fadt that 
 the Stationers permitted them to do this is signifi- 
 cant of the influence which as the Lord Chamber- 
 lain's servants they possessed ; the hCt that they 
 were driven to do it is significant also, for it shows 
 4 indisputably that the danger of piracy was real, and 
 enables us to be pretty sure that one or more adts 
 of piracy had already been committed. 
 
 That some of Shakespeare's plays were pirated 
 we have evidence in a passage from the address 
 
 Cloth Breeches and Velvet Hose as it is afted by my Lord 
 Chamberlain's servants . . , provided that he is not to put it in 
 print wfithout further and better authority,' and two days later 
 'The Allarum to London,' 'provided that it be not printed 
 without further authority' ; lastly, on 7th February, 1603, 'Troilus 
 and Cressida' 'as it is afted by my Lord Chamberlain's men . , . 
 when he hath gotten sufficient authority for it.' 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 47 
 
 in the Folio of 1623, ''^^ ^^^ great Variety of 
 Readers,' which has been quoted, or quoted from, 
 ' ad nauseam,' but which we must quote once more. 
 ' It had bene,' write Heminge and Condell, or 
 -whoever held the pen for them : 
 
 It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to haue bene 
 wished, that the Author himselfe had liu'd to haue set 
 forth, and ouerseen 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 haue coUefted & publish 'd them ; 
 and so to haue publish'd them, as where (before) you 
 were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, 
 maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of 
 iniurious impostors, that expos'd them : euen those are 
 now offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfed: of their 
 limbes ; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he 
 conceiued 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 vttered 
 with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse receiued from him 
 a blot in his papers. 
 
 Here we have two positive statements (i) that 
 purchasers had been ' abus'd with diuerse stolne 
 and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by 
 the frauds and stealthes of iniurious imposters that 
 expos'd them,' and (2) that ' even those ' plays were 
 now presented 'cur'd, and perfedl of their limbes.' 
 The whole point of the paragraph is that the 
 pirated plays had been maimed and deformed in 
 the process, and were now cured and perfed:ed. 
 While, therefore, it is good evidence of piracy, it 
 only applies to plays of which the Quartos have 
 
48 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 bad texts and the Folio good ones. Now the 
 plays of which the Quarto texts are, by common 
 consent, strikingly inferior to those of the First 
 Folio, are : 
 
 Romeo and Juliet. Printed by John Danter, 1597. 
 Henry the Fifth, Printed by Thomas Creede for Tho. 
 
 Millington and John Busby, 1600. 
 The Merry Wives of Windsor. Printed by T. C. [i.e. 
 
 Thomas Creede] for Arthur Johnson, 1602, 
 Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Printed for N. L. [i.e. 
 
 Nicholas Ling] and John Trundell, 1603. The 
 
 printer being identifiable as Valentine Sims. 
 
 To which may be added as a bad text, though 
 excluded from the First Folio, ' Pericles, Prince 
 of Tyre,' Printed for Henry Gosson, 1609. 
 
 Now if we put these five plays as a provisional 
 class, marked out as such by the verdifts of Shake- 
 speare editors holding every variety of view on the 
 subjeft of piracy, and if we put on the other side 
 all the other First Editions in Quarto, including 
 two first editions of a different text of ' Romeo and 
 Juliet,' and a different text of ' Hamlet,' are there 
 any other marked characteristics by which the 
 two groups are differentiated ? 
 
 In the first place we find, to our comfort, that 
 , not one of the bad texts was used as a basis for 
 printing the play in the First Folio. So that if 
 there were no other ' Stolne and surreptitious ' 
 editions than these, the editors of the Folio were 
 as good as their word, and had presented ' Euen 
 those' plays which had originally been pirated 
 ' cur'd and perfe(5t of their limbes.' 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 49 
 
 On the other hand, of the fourteen texts in our -^ 
 other class no fewer than twelve were used as the 
 basis of the First Folio text, the two exceptions 
 being the ' Second Part of Henry IV,' of which 
 the Quarto prints an earlier ailing version and the 
 Folio a later one, and 'Othello,' of which the 
 Quarto was only published in 1622, when the 
 arrangements for the First Folio must have been 
 already made. 
 
 In the second place, we note that not one of the 
 five plays in what (for convenience and without 
 prejudice) we may call the pirated group was » 
 entered on the Stationers' Register by its publishers, 
 although Arthur Johnson was clever enough to get 
 a man of straw to enter the ' Merry Wives ' and 
 assign it to him on the same day, thus securing the 
 copyright. 
 
 On the other hand, of the fourteen plays in our 
 other group no fewer than twelve were duly entered v < 
 before publication on the Stationers' Register, the 
 two exceptions being ' Romeo and Juliet,' of which 
 an edition ' Newly corrected, augmented, and 
 amended ' was published by Cuthbert Burby in 
 1599, and 'Loves Labors Lost,' of which an edition 
 ' Newly corrected and augmented ' had been pub- 
 lished, also by Burby, the previous year. As a 
 license was only required for new books the exis- , 
 tence of a previous (pirated) edition enabled Burby 
 to save his sixpence in the case of ' Romeo and 
 Juliet,' and it seems more than probable that his 
 similar saving in the case of ' Loves Labors Lost ' 
 and also the words on the title-page ' Newly cor- 
 redied and augmented ' are to be explained by 
 
50 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 Danter having published a pirated edition of this 
 also, though no trace of it now remains. 
 
 On 22nd January, 1607, both 'Roineo and Juliet' 
 and 'Loves Labors Lost' were entered as the copies 
 pf Nicholas Ling ' by direccon of a Court and with 
 consent of Master Burby in wrytinge.' Thus all 
 the fourteen good texts were eventually entered on 
 the Register. On these grounds it is submitted 
 that an entry in the Stationers' Register may be 
 taken as prima facie evidence that a play was 
 , honestly purchased from the players to whom it 
 belonged, while the absence of an entry or entry and 
 immediate transfer, as in the case of the ' Merry 
 Wives,' points to a play being printed without the 
 players' leave, or in other words ' pirated.' 
 
 In the light of this evidence let us now try to 
 reconstruft the story of the publication of Shakes- 
 peare's plays in Quarto. On 6th February, 1594, 
 soon after the time that many plays were being sold, 
 as we must believe, by the players owing to the 
 theatres being closed because of the plague, John 
 Danter entered 'Titus Andronicus' for his copy, 
 and before the end of the year printed an edition 
 which was sold by Edward White and Thomas 
 Millington. Whether this should be reckoned a 
 Shakespeare Quarto or not, literary critics must 
 decide ; but as it was printed as his in the Folio of 
 1623 it comes within our survey. In 1597 Danter, 
 who had in the intervening three years gone down 
 in the world (his press had been seized in 1596), 
 printed a pirated edition of ' Romeo and Juliet,' 
 and very probably a similarly pirated edition of 
 ' Loves Labors Lost.' Finding themselves thus 
 
/ 
 
 IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 51 
 
 attacked, the players, lest more plays should go the 
 same way, sold to Andrew Wise the right to print 
 three of Shakespeare's Chronicles, ' Richard II,' 
 'Richard III,' and 'Henry IV, Part i.' On 
 Danter's death, or possibly a little earlier on his 
 damning himself past redemption by pirating the 
 ' Grammar and Accidence,' they gave Cuthbert i^ 
 Burby, whom we must regard as the first of their 
 confidential publishers, good texts of 'Loves Labors 
 Lost ' and ' Romeo and Juliet,' which he brought 
 out in 1598'and 1 599, thereby regaining the copy- 
 right. About the same time, on 22nd July, 1598, 
 they insfrudted James Roberts, the printer of their 
 play-bills, to prevent the piracy of 'The Merchant 
 of Venice' by entering it on the Stationers' Register 
 with the proviso ' that yt bee not printed by the 
 said James Robertes or anye other whatsoever 
 without lycence first had from the Right honorable 
 the lord Chamberlen.' 
 
 In 1600 the Chamberlain's men apparently had 
 reason to fear piracy, and at the satne time, owing 
 to the Order in Council of 22nd June restridting 
 their performances to two a week, were more in- 
 clined to sell. They therefore themselves, on 4th 
 August, 'stayed' 'As you like it,' ' Henry V,' and 
 ' Much ado about Nothing,' only to find that 
 'Henry V had already been pirated by Thomas 
 Millington and John Busby. 'As you like it' they 
 prevented from being printed at all, but they sold 
 'Much Ado' to Andrew Wise and William Aspley, 
 and with it ' The second part of Henry IV.' They 
 also sold the ' Midsummer Night's Dream ' to 
 Thomas Fisher and san(3:ioned the ' Merchant of 
 
52 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES 
 
 Venice ' being published by Thomas Heyes, the 
 printing of this (and of the 'Midsummer Night's 
 Dream' also) being given to their play-bill printer, 
 James Roberts, who had previously stayed for them 
 the 'Merchant of Venice.' 
 
 In January, 1 602, when the Chamberlain's men 
 were still in disgrace for having adled ' Richard II ' 
 before the partisans of the Earl of Essex^ John 
 Busby the elder, who had previously pirated 
 ' Henry V,' successfully repeated the trick in the 
 case of the ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' entering 
 
 ,it on the Register on i8th January, and transferring 
 it on the same day to Arthur Johnson. In the 
 following July James Roberts entered on the 
 Register ' The Revenge of Hamlet,' and on yth 
 February, 1603, 'Troilus and Cressida,' in the 
 latter case with the old proviso ' to print when he 
 hath gotten sufficient authority for it.' Roberts 
 never printed 'Troilus and Cressida' at all, and 
 probably had no intention of printing ' Hamlet.' 
 Printed it was, however, though not (as has been 
 believed) by him, but by Valentine Sims, and 
 published by N. L. (i.e. Nicholas Ling) and John 
 Trundell some time in 1603. In this case the 
 players seem to have condoned the attack, and Ling 
 was allowed to publish a revised edition, which 
 
 . was printed for him by Roberts, and shortly after- 
 wards took over the Shakespeare copyrights which 
 had belonged to Cuthbert Burby. 
 
 After this Shakespeare's company, now the King's 
 Majesty's Servants, had some years' freedom from 
 piracy, partly owing to the faft that the censorship 
 of plays was now more severe, and before entry in 
 
IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. 53 
 
 the Stationers' Register they had to be licensed by 
 the censor. Sir George Buck. Being in the sun- 
 shine of the King's favour, and protefted from 
 piratical attack, they had no need to sell plays, and 
 withheld them fram the press much more rigor- 
 ously. Nevertheless, on 26th November, itoy,' 
 ' King Lear ' was registered for their copy by 
 Nathaniel Butter and John Busby in a singularly 
 long and pompous entry, and duly printed from 
 a playhouse copy the next year. It seems clear 
 that the King's players consented to this, and yet 
 as John Busby (if it was Busby senior who entered 
 the play, as seems agreed) had robbed them twice 
 before, and their policy was clearly against print- 
 ing, it seems improbable that they did so willingly. 
 I venture to hazard the suggestion that Busby may 
 have been in a position to annoy them by reprint- 
 ing the old play of 'King Leir' (with an 'i'), which 
 Simon Stafford, a printer frequently in trouble, had 
 entered and printed when 'Lear' (with an 'a') was 
 first being afted in 1605. It is interesting to note 
 that in the following May (20th May, 1608), 
 Roberts being no longer in business, Edward 
 Blount, subsequently the publisher of the First 
 Folio, registered 'Pericles' and 'Anthony and 
 Cleopatra,' and thereafter showed no more eager- 
 ness to publish them than Roberts had done in the 
 case of ' Troilus.' 
 
 As it happened, ' Troilus ' was the next play to 
 appear, being re-entered on 28th January, 1609, to 
 Richard Bonion and Henry Walleys and printed the 
 same year. It seems not impossible that this edition 
 was permitted by the players at Shakespeare's 
 
54 AUTHORS, PLAYERS, AND PIRATES. 
 
 request in continuance of an old feud with George 
 Cliapman, wlio was then about to publish the 
 first twelve books of his translation of the ' Iliad.' 
 On the other hand, despite Blount's precautionary 
 entry, ' The late and much admired Play called 
 '^ Pericles, Prince of Tyre ' was pirated in 1 609 by 
 ' * Henry Gosson, a small publisher, who dealt chiefly 
 in ballads, broadsides, and other popular literature. 
 According to Thomas Heywood, it was a little 
 before this that two of his plays had been ' coppied 
 by the eare,' and had their plot drawn by steno- 
 graphy, ' scarce one word trew,' and ' Pericles ' 
 seems to have come into the hands of Gosson in 
 some such manner, let us hope ' accidentally.' 
 
 Finally, in 1622 Thomas Walkley thought it 
 worth while, and was allowed to print ' Othello ' 
 separately in Quarto, when the great Folio was 
 already in progress, and this brings to a close our 
 story. In this we show the players selling plays 
 • wh-cn they cannot a6t them, attacked by a pirate, 
 /selling more old plays and trying to safeguard others 
 / by precautionary entries. Attacked again, when 
 V in disgrace at Court, they again resort to selling and 
 staying. After five years' immunity we find them, 
 in 1 608 and 1 609, selling ' King Lear ' (perhaps to 
 a blackmailer), once more resorting to precautionary 
 entries, losing ' Pericles,' and then regaining con- 
 trol of their property, and suffering no more losses. 
 Is not this a more probable picture than that which 
 represents men like Burby, Roberts, and Blount as 
 playing the pirates' game, and the servants of the 
 ' Lord Chamberlain and of the King's Majesty him- 
 self as sitting down tamely under their attacks ? 
 
55 
 
 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF SHAKE- 
 SPEARE'S PLAYS. 
 
 I N our last paper we tried to reconstru(5l, 
 in a reasonable and human manner, the 
 story of how the Company of Players 
 
 I to which Shakespeare belonged met, as 
 j^Li^^ best they could, the successive attempts 
 to pirate his plays. We found them after each 
 piracy trying to protedl certain plays, presumably 
 those which they were then adling, by causing 
 them to be entered on the Stationers' Register, so 
 that no pirate should be able to obtain the copyright 
 of them. That these entries in several instances 
 were not followed by the appearance of an edition 
 seemed to justify us in believing that their sole 
 objedl was to defeat the pirates. On the other 
 hand when the company had in their possession 
 plays still saleable, but not being performed, still 
 more when the theatre was closed owing to plague, 
 or the number of performances was restricted in 
 deference to Puritan complaints, we held that it 
 might have been good business to sell plays to the 
 best advantage, more especially if the pirates had 
 been busy and there was any uncertainty as to what 
 plays they had got hold of. We submitted on these 
 lines that the company sold during Elizabeth's 
 reign and the first year of James I eight plays by 
 
56 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 Shakespeare to friendly publishers, and in three other 
 cases asserted their rights after a piracy by putting 
 out better texts. After their position as the King's 
 servants was secured they were only induced by 
 special reasons in each case to permit the publica- 
 tion of ' Lear ' and ' Troilus,' and just before the 
 appearance of the Folio of 1623 sanftioned a quarto 
 edition of ' Othello.' Altogether they handed over 
 to the printers the texts of fourteen plays. We 
 have now to consider, from our bibliographical 
 standpoint, what sort of texts these were, and what 
 usually happened to a playwright's manuscript from 
 the moment that it first left his hand to the time 
 when it was used to light a fire or play some 
 mysterious part in baking mackerel or lining a pie. 
 From the bibliographical standpoint a play of 
 Shakespeare's is not a masterpiece of dramatic 
 poetry^but so many sheets of paper with so much 
 writing on them, by the aid of which a£lors had to 
 say their words, and subsequently printers had to 
 reproduce what the author wrote. After which, 
 if the acSors continued to say their words and the 
 play was reprinted, more or less frequently, the 
 bibliographer wants to know with what aids this 
 process went on. When we have done our best by 
 piecing together evidence from different quarters, 
 and in default of evidence by supposing everyone 
 to have taken as little trouble and gone to as little 
 expense as possible, whatever story we are able to 
 construft will at best be the story of an average 
 or normal play, and how far it applies accurately 
 to the case of any individual play or plays in 
 which we are interested is a matter on which 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. <,j 
 
 there may or may not be specific evidence. We 
 must walk humbly in this matter; but it is not 
 humility but laziness to give up any attempt to 
 reconstru(5l what happened^ because the task is 
 difficult and we know that we can only attain 
 partial success. Every editor of an old text is 
 constantly, whether he realizes it or not, making 
 various assumptions as to what happened in its 
 progress from manuscript to print and from one 
 edition to another, and to force ourselves to think 
 out the whole process should at least give us a 
 keener perception as to whether our assumptions 
 are bibliographically possible or impossible. 
 
 A playwright has written a play for the Chamber- 
 lain's men. It will be better not to call the play- 
 wright Shakespeare before we are obliged, because 
 we so often unconsciously assume that Shakespeare 
 must always have been regarded as a person of 
 special importance and his writings have been in 
 some way specially treated, whereas when his plays 
 first began to be printed it was apparently not 
 thought worth while to put his name on their title- 
 pages. Our anonymous playwright then has sold 
 1 play to the Chamberlain's men. Was that manu- 
 script likely to have been in his own handwriting 
 or a scrivener's ? If it had been written for the 
 company which Henslowe exploited the scrivener 
 would be ruled out by the faft that the playwright, 
 or playwrights, wQuld have been paid so little and 
 that, not improbably, by small advances, that they 
 would certainly have grudged the scrivener his fee. 
 In the case of the Chamberlain's men, who paid 
 better and attracted the best writers, the weightiest 
 
58 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 objedlion to the scrivener would be the increased 
 ' chance of piracy. If a scrivener were employed to 
 make one copy, he might take the opportunity of 
 making two. As it was, the players were exposed 
 to some risks ; for Greene was accused of having ^ 
 sold the same play to two different companies, and 
 Heywood asserts that some playwrights reserved a 
 copy to sell to the booksellers behind the players' 
 backs. However^this may be, the scrivener would 
 * certainly have introduced a fresh possibility of loss. 
 As a basis for our doubts as to whether drama- 
 tists as a rule handed their plays to the companies 
 in fair copies written for them by scriveners, we 
 are not restridled to these ' a priori ' arguments. 
 On 13th November, 161 3, we find the industrious, 
 but ever impecunious Daborne writing to Henslowe 
 as to his tragedy on Machiavelli : 
 
 You accuse me with the breach of promise : trew it is 
 I promysed to bring the last scean, which that you may 
 see finished I send you the foul sheet & the fayr I was 
 wrighting, as your man can testify, which if great busines 
 had not prevented I had this night fynished. . . . How- 
 soever I will not fayle to write this fayr and perfit the 
 book, which shall not ly on your hands. (' Henslowe 
 Papers,' ed. W. W. Greg, article 89, page 78.) 
 
 Here we see Daborne adling as his own copyist, 
 making up the book of the play by instalments, as 
 he found time, and sending his rough copy in 
 advance when Henslowe grew impatient. It 
 would be interesting to have this autograph manu- 
 script and see what it looks like. Unfortunately 
 it has not been preserved, but several plays by 
 other contemporaries of Shakespeare have come 
 
SHAKESPEARE*S PLAYS. 59 
 
 down to us in their authors' own handwriting, and 
 when we examine some of these two very important 
 points come to light : (i) that, contrary to what 
 might have been expedled, the players were able 
 to obtain the verdi(5t of the Master of the Revels, 
 as to whether a play might be publicly afted, or 
 not, by submitting to him the play as written by 
 the author, or authors, sometimes in pretty rough 
 manuscript, and with passages written on slips and 
 pasted in ; and (ii) that, again contrary to what 
 might have been expedled, plays endorsed with the 
 licence for their public performance were handed 
 over to the prompter, and by him converted into 
 prompt copies, without the ' play-house scrivener,' 
 if such a person existed, being given a chance. 
 
 Among plays extant in the autograph of their 
 author or authors may be instanced that of 'John 
 a Kent and John a Comber,' by Anthony Munday 
 (December, 1596) and 'Sir Thomas Moore,' by 
 Munday, Dekker and others, c. 1600 (as to these 
 two see Mr. Greg's note in the ' Modern Language 
 Review,' viii 89), and Massinger's 'Believe as you 
 List,' 1 63 1 . This last has the Licenser's permission 
 for it to be afted endorsed on it, while ' Sir Thomas 
 Moore' is also endorsed by the licenser, though 
 the changes he required were so drastic that Mr. 
 Greg is almost certainly right in believing that tlie 
 idea of adting it had to be abandoned. 
 
 In the case of anonymous plays, or of plays by 
 known authors where confrontation of an un- 
 doubted autograph and the handwriting of the play 
 cannot be effedted, our problem becomes very diffi- 
 cult and demands independent examination. We 
 
6o THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 have to recognize that an author, when he gives 
 his mind to it, may be able to beat the scriveners 
 at their own craft. Thus Ben Jonson's autograph 
 'Masque of Queens' (Royal MS. i8. A. xlv) is a 
 far neater manuscript than the scrivener's version 
 of his 'Tears of the Hours' (Royal 17 B. xxxi). 
 On the other hand I have been taught lately during 
 an examination of the fifteen plays in Egerton MS. 
 1994, to regard a complete lack of charadier in a 
 handwriting and apparent absence of interest as a 
 very promising beginning for an argument that a 
 text had been handed over to a scrivener. The 
 main evidence for an anonymous play being auto- 
 graph must be looked for in corrections in the 
 same hand as the text which must be attributed to 
 the author changing his mind, and evidence of this 
 kind needs very careful weighing. For the present 
 our examination of the plays in Egerton 1994 can 
 only be cursory. Most, if not all of these were 
 written, not only after Shakespeare's death, but 
 after the publication of the First Folio. The 
 majority of them show clear signs of having been 
 used as prompt copies. Two, at least, had passed 
 through the licenser's hands, viz., Heywood's 'The 
 Captives' and a curious anonymous play in praise of 
 the East India Company entitled 'The Lancheinge 
 of the May or the Seaman's Honest Wife' (1633), 
 and the former of these probably, and the latter 
 certainly, from the character of the correftions, 
 may be claimed as autograph. 'Dick of Devon- 
 shire' is doubtful, 'The Lady Mother,' attributed 
 to Glapthorne, appears to be written by a scrivener 
 and corredted by the author. The 'Two Noble 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 6i 
 
 Ladyes or the Converted Conjuror ' appears to be 
 autograph. ' Poore Man's Comfort,' attributed to 
 Daborne in the printed edition of 1655, is not in 
 Daborne's hand, despite his earlier habits. The 
 'Tragedy of Nero,' printed in 1624, is in several 
 hands. As to other plays even a tentative opinion 
 cannot be offered. Two in pther manuscripts in the 
 British Museum show 'dear signs of having passed 
 through the licenser's hands. One of these, 'Sir 
 John Barnevelt' (Add. 1865 3), attributed to Fletcher 
 and Massinger, has a sidenote beginning ' I like 
 not this,' signed G. B., i.e., Sir George Buc, while 
 the ' Second Maidens Tragedy' in Lansdowne 807 
 owes its title to Buc, and beairs his license for its 
 representation dated 161 1. Both manuscripts were 
 undoubtedly afterwards, used as prompt copies. 
 
 This being the best light we can obtain as to 
 the theatrical custom, have we any special informa- 
 tion in the case of Shakespeare's plays? As we 
 have seen, a curious vein of pessimism has caused 
 many scholars, especially during the last thirty 
 years, to enlarge the reference, in the preface to 
 the First Folio, to 'diuerse stolne and surreptitious 
 copies ' from a verifiable statement, that even such 
 plays as had been maimed in the quartos were 
 presented in sound texts, into a general accusation 
 casting the slur of surreptitiousness on all the 
 quartos indiscriminately. On the other hand, save 
 as a peg on which Ben Jonson hung a character- 
 istic criticism, very little importance seems to be 
 attached to the remarkable statement at the end of 
 the same paragraph which, after praise of Shake- 
 peare as ' a happie imitator of Nature' and 'a most 
 
62 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 gentle expresser of it,' proceeds ' His mind and 
 hand went together : And what he thought he 
 vttered with that ealinefTe, that wee haue fcarfe 
 
 - receiued from a him a blot on his papers,' 
 
 The importance of this statement, the justifica- 
 tion for calling it remarkable, is that, if it has 
 any meaning at all, it implies two things : first, 
 that the Folio editors, as members of Shakespeare's 
 Company, had received from him 'his papers,' i.e. 
 autograph manuscripts of at least som.e of his plays ; 
 and secondly, that these autograph manuscripts 
 were not ' fair copies,' such as Daborne and other 
 authors were in the habit of delivering, but the 
 text of the plays as he first wrote them down. 
 Unless the papers were first drafts the claim made 
 
 ^on Shakespeare's behalf on the ground of the 
 absence of blots becomes ridiculous. The absence 
 of blots from a scrivener's copy would prove nothing 
 at all ; therefore the papers must have been auto- 
 graph. The absence of blots from an autograph 
 ' fair ' copy might be instanced as a proof of the 
 writer's neatness, or accuracy, or willingness to take 
 trouble, or even his affeftion for his fellows, and so 
 forth ; but by no logical gymnastics could it be 
 quoted as a basis for the assertion that his mind 
 and hand went together and what he thought he 
 uttered with this ' easinesse ' that is held up to 
 admiration. Therefore, if the statement is to be 
 allowed any meaning, the papers were not fair 
 copies, but the original drafts. 
 
 The address in the First Folio ' to the great 
 Variety of Readers,' from which we have been 
 quoting, is a very tradesmanlike advertisement. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 63 
 
 The book 'is now publique,' Heminge and Condell 
 write, ' & you wil ftand for your priuiledges wee 
 know : to read and cenfure. Do fo, but buy it 
 firft. Tliat doth beft commend a Booke, the 
 Stationer faies. Then, how odde foeuer your 
 braines be, or your wifedomes, make your licence 
 the fame, and fpare not. Judge your fixe-pen'orth, 
 your (hillings worth, your fiue fhillings worth at a 
 time, or higher, fo you rife to the iuft rates, and 
 welcome. But, what euer you do. Buy. Cenfure 
 will not driue a Trade, or make the Jacke go.' 
 
 This is poor enough stuff to offer some justi- 
 fication for regarding whatever follows as mere 
 advertisement, and when we turn to the Dedication 
 ' to the moft noble and incomparable paire or 
 Brethren,' the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, 
 its heavy servility may confirm our ill impression. 
 No doubt a handsome present was expedled from 
 the ' incomparable paire,' and the writers were 
 ready to call Shakespeare's plays ' trifles ' and make 
 'humble offer ' of them to the dedicatees in order to 
 get it. ' We haue obferved,' they tell them naively, 
 ' no man to come neere your Lordfhips but with 
 a kind of religious addreff,' and customs having 
 changed, their attempt to assume this ' religious ' 
 attitude repels us. But with a little sympathy we 
 can understand both the advertisement and the 
 obsequiousness, and arrive at a juster estimate of 
 Heminge and Condell. The First Folio, with 
 nearly a thousand pages of double-columned small 
 type was a heavy venture for all concerned in it, 
 and to obtain influential patronage and suggest to 
 w^U-wishers quips by which they might shame 
 
64 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 the recalcitrant into buying may have seemed 
 necessary business precautions. They should not 
 make us doubt the sincerity of the assurance thfit 
 the editors had taken up their task ' without am- 
 bition either of felfe-profit or fame : onely to keepe 
 the memory of fo worthy a Friend & Fellow aliue, 
 as was our Shakefpeare.' There is a ring of real 
 affection about this phrase, which makes it incre- 
 dible that the men who used it should on the next 
 page have picked out a literary charafteristic of 
 Shakespeare's only to lie about it. So when 
 Heminge and Condell' write : ' His mind and hand 
 went together : And what he thought he vttered 
 with that ealinefle, that we haue fcarfe receiued 
 from him a blot on his papers,' we shall do well to 
 believe that the autograph manuscripts of some at 
 least of Shakespeare's plays had passed through the 
 hands of Heminge and Condell, and that these 
 contained the texts as they were first written down 
 in the moment of composition. 
 
 On the authority of the editors of the First 
 Folio we are thus justified in believing that Shake- 
 speare, like Munday and Daborne and Massinger 
 and other dramatists, brought his plays to the 
 theatre in his own autograph. Heminge and 
 Condell may only have seen the manuscripts of 
 the later plays, but if Shakespeare avoided the 
 scriveners when he was already rich and piracy had 
 greatly abated, it is highly improbable that he 
 
 ' Even if it should be proved beyond contradidlion that the 
 prefatory matter in the First Folio was written not by Heminge 
 and Condell, but for them, the argument in this paragraph would 
 hardly be affedled, as a statement of this kind must surely have 
 been inserted from their information. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 65 
 
 employed them in his early days when the danger 
 from piracy was much greater. In the absence 
 of evidence to the contrary in the case of any 
 individual play there is thus a bibliographical pre- 
 sumption that it reached the players in the author's 
 original autograph manuscript. 
 
 But in the case of other plays we have examined 
 we find that the original manuscript was taken to 
 the Master of the Revels for his consent to its being 
 publicly afted, and that when this consent was 
 endorsed on it the same manuscript was used as a, 
 prompt-copy. If this course was followed in the 
 case of Shakespeare's manuscripts our case is com- 
 plete, for there is a considerable body of evidence, 
 which is as strong as regards some of Shakespeare's 
 plays as any others, that when a play was printed 
 by anyone except a pirate, it was the text of the 
 prompt-copy that was sqt up. The evidence con- 
 sists in the survivail of stage-direftions of a certain 
 kind, and to explain it we must set forth the 
 different sources from which the annotations which 
 we lump together under this general name, stage- 
 direftions, could take their rise. 
 
 In writing out a play, for his own convenience 
 as well as that of the players, a dramatist would 
 naturally insert exits and entrances, in order to 
 show who at any nloment was on the stage. He 
 might also, though as to this there was no uni- 
 formity, describe any aftion with which the 
 player was to accompany bis words. Possibly in 
 some cases, if he were familiar with the theatre, 
 he might use the same technical language as a 
 prompter^ so that Shakespeare himself, in the scene 
 
66 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 in the wood in the ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' 
 may have written the directions, ' Enter a Faerie 
 at one doore and Robin goodfellow at another,' 
 ' Enter the King of Fairies at one doore, with his 
 traine ; and the Queen at another with hers,' the 
 ' doors,' of course, being those of the stage, not of 
 the wood. Moreover, as Mr. Greg has pointed 
 out with reference to ' Sir Thomas Moore,' the 
 playwright would be almost as likely as the 
 prompter to substitute the name of the adlor for 
 whom a part had been written for that of the 
 part itself. In any case, however, when the manu- 
 script reached the playhouse the prompter would 
 go over it and insert in the margin any further 
 diredlions needed for the performance, more espe- 
 cially as to the provision of stage properties or as 
 to music, shouts, knocks, or other noises to be 
 made in the room behind the stage, which was 
 compendiously indicated by the word ' within.' 
 For our present purpose, if the author's manuscript 
 became the prompt-copy, whether any given direc- 
 tion was made by author or prompter is all one. 
 
 When a play was put into print the prompter's 
 notes, whether written by himself or the author, 
 as distin(5t from the descriptive notes, should in all 
 cases have been either omitted or translated into 
 descriptive phrases. Fairly often, however, one or 
 more in a play is printed in its original form, and 
 thus betrays the nature of the copy from which the 
 printed text was set up. Thus, in the 1599 Quarto 
 of ' Romeo and Juliet,' although in Aft I, Scene iv, 
 we get the descriptive note ' Mufick playes and 
 they dance,' later on in the play we get such 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 67 
 
 charafteristic prompter's notes as 'Enter Romeo 
 and Juliet aloft. Play Muiicke'; or again, 'Enter 
 Will Kemp ' (the name of an adlor, here substituted 
 for his part), and 'Whistle boy.' So in the ' Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream,' besides the directions as 
 to the ' doors ' at which the fairies are to enter in 
 the wood, in III, ii, 85 we find the prompter's 
 reminder to Demetrius, ' Ly down.' So also in 
 ' Much Ado about Nothing,' we find the names 
 of the adtors Kemp and Cowley, and in the 'Second 
 Part of Henry IV ' that of Sincklo, substituted for 
 the characters they had to play. 
 
 In the plays first printed in the Folio, in those 
 at the beginning of each of the three sections 
 Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, the prompter's 
 notes have usually been edited away ; but in other 
 plays we find several instances of the substitution 
 of a6tors' names for their parts, and ' within ' is 
 almost uniformly used for anything done behind 
 the scenes, so that in the Porter's speech in ' Mac- 
 beth,' the note ' knocking within ' is applied to 
 Macduff's knocks on the outer gate. Also in the 
 'Second Part of Henry VI,' III, ii, 146, the 
 prompter's note, ' Bed put forth,' reveals to us the 
 primitive stage management, which thrust forth a 
 bed, with Gloucester's body on it, into the middle 
 of the stage, instead of having it ceremoniously 
 brought in, according to the directions in modern 
 editions, ' Exit Warwick' and 'Re-enter Warwick 
 and Others bearing Gloucester's body on a bed.' 
 
 If, as has been shown, there is a high probability 
 that the prompt-copy of any of Shakespeare's plays 
 would be written in the author's autograph ; and 
 
68 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 if, as has also been shown, we know that the text 
 of many of bis plays, both of those printed in Quarto 
 and of others which first appeared in the Folio of 
 1623, was derived from prompt copies, we can only 
 escape from admitting the probability that some, 
 at least of Shakespeare's plays were set up diredlly 
 from his own manuscript by supposing that now 
 at last the scrivener was given a job, and that a 
 scrivener's copy intervened between the printer 
 and Shakespeare's autograph. 
 
 It may be said in support of this supposition that 
 if the players had handed over the actual prompt- 
 copy to be printed they would have been left with 
 no text of their own save such as could be recon- 
 stru(5led from the acSlors' parts. But the force 0/ 
 this objeftion is broken by the clear evidence which 
 can be produced that copies of authorized Quartos 
 were used in the theatre as prompt-copies. Thus, 
 in the Folio text of 'Much Ado about Nothing,' 
 set up from the Quarto of 1600, while the substi- 
 tution of the names of the adtors Kemp and Wilson 
 for Dogberry and Verges is retained, in an earlier 
 scene we find the name of Jack Wilson, the singing 
 man of the company, freshly substituted for that 
 of Balthasar, who has to sing ' Sigh no more, 
 ladies.' In the same way, in the ' Midsummer 
 Night's Dream,' for which the reprint of 1.6 19 
 (dated i6oq) was used for the Folio, this had clearly 
 been used in the theatre, as two new and very 
 obvious prompter's diredtions have crept in, namely 
 in III. i. 116, 'Enter Piramus [i.e. Bottom] with 
 the Asse head ' (where only the prompter, who 
 knew that there was only one Ass-head in the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 69 
 
 playhouse stock of properties, would have written 
 Hhe Asse-head ' instead oi'-an Ass-head' as in modern 
 editions), and again in V. i, 134, where the direc- 
 tion for the entry of the clowns is preceded by the 
 note ' Tawyer with a trumpet before them,' 
 
 A Shakespeare Quarto could easily have been 
 printed in a month if the printer employed a 
 journeyman and a fairly advanced apprentice, so 
 that if the players saw the superior convenience of 
 a printed prompt-copy, and were not (as we may 
 be sure) adting the plays at the time they sold 
 them, no inconvenience would have arisen from 
 their parting with their manuscript prompt-copy 
 to the printer. 
 
 Another objed'tion which suggests itself is that 
 the players would be bound to keep in their 
 archives the manuscript signed by the Master of 
 the Revels,' in case they should be challenged for 
 departing from the text approved. This seems to 
 ignore the easy temper of English oiEcialdom at all 
 periods. A Spanish censor must needs have a notary 
 initial every page of the manuscript submitted to 
 him. Tilney, or Buc, or Herbert were content 
 to write their licence at the end of the manuscripts 
 already altered and added to, in some cases with 
 slips containing additions pasted on to a leaf. By 
 the time a play had been on the stage a year or 
 two challenge would become less probable, and the 
 fail that it had been licensed for printing should 
 have been an ample answer. Even that grasping 
 person. Sir Henry Herbert, asked no fee for re- 
 licensing ' The Winter's Tale ' when it was revived, 
 shortly after 1623, and the players reported the 
 
70 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 original manuscript as missing. On the other 
 hand, it is intrinsically probable that, for obtaining 
 the original licence to print, produ6lion of the 
 signed manuscript would have been helpful even 
 in Elizabeth's day, while in the next century this 
 was probably indispensable. 
 
 On the whole, then, it seems reasonable to believe 
 that in the case of a play printed after having been 
 regularly entered in the Stationers' Register there is 
 a high probability that a prompt-copy would be 
 supplied to the printer ; and there is a further high 
 probability that such a prompt-copy would be the 
 manuscript handed over to the players by the 
 author ; and yet a further high probability that 
 this manuscript would be in the author's autograph. 
 The highest probability is only a large fraction of a 
 complete proof, and when three fradlions are multi- 
 plied together they diminish very rapidly. It would 
 need the odds in each case to be as four to one to 
 leave us at the end of our three probabilities with 
 anything more than an even chance. Perhaps it will 
 be wise not to claim more than this even chance 
 that the text of any given play reached the printer 
 of the Quarto in Shakespeare's autograph ; but in 
 view of Heminge and Condell's statement as to the 
 receipt of Shakespeare's ' papers,' the use of other 
 autograph manuscripts for prompt-copies, the evi- 
 dence that quartos of Shakespeare's plays were based 
 on prompt-copies, and the occurrence of new traces 
 of the prompter's hand in the First Folio text of 
 plays printed from Quartos, there does not seem 
 any reason why we should claim less than this. 
 
 It will probably be said that a claim which 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 71 
 
 invites the belief that even half of the fourteen 
 regularly entered Shakespeare Quartos were set up 
 direft from Shakespeare's autograph manuscripts 
 proves too much, because the texts of these first 
 editions contain too many mistakes to stand in such 
 immediate contaft with their source. Not a few 
 of these mistakes would be explained if we may 
 believe, as it has been contended we should, that 
 Shakespeare supplied the players not with revised 
 copies, but with treacherously clean-looking rough 
 ones. We have yet, moreover, to reckon with the 
 Elizabethan printer, and the more- closely we study 
 the ways of Elizabethan printers, when employed 
 on dramatic work, the more highly we shall rate 
 his capacity for introducing any number of errors 
 into the text supplied to him. 
 
 It has long been a commonplace among the 
 textual critics of Shakespeare that in every Quarto 
 edition subsequent to the First new mistakes are 
 introduced, so that the text becomes progressively 
 worse. In an extreme case, that of a probably 
 hasty reprint of ' Richard II,' taking the accept- 
 ance or rejeftion of a reading by the Cambridge 
 editors as definitely marking it as right or wrong, 
 a second quarto has been found to add about 180 
 per cent, of new errors to those originally made, 
 so that it is nearly three times as incorreft. The 
 case is exceptional, and it must also be remembered 
 that although reprinting a printed edition is easier, 
 and should therefore give a more correct result 
 than printing from manuscript copy, as a matter 
 of faft the very easiness of their task often made 
 compositors and corredtors careless. It is also 
 
72 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 possible, or rather certain, that there are mistakfes 
 in the First Quartos which, because they leave the 
 line in which they occur still intelligible, no one 
 has suspected. In view, however, of the ceaseless 
 stream of new errors poured into the text as first 
 printed in every new edition, it is not possible to 
 say in the case of an average First Quarto, duly 
 entered on the Stationers' Register, that the blunders 
 in it cannot jlL_been due to the printers, but that 
 we must postulate the intervention of one or more 
 copyists to share the blame. The proved inaccuracy 
 of the printers suffices to account for all the faults. 
 We are not entirely dependent on the judgment 
 of the Cambridge editors in estimating the blunder- 
 making capacity of these printers. As is well 
 known, in several plays of Shakespeare, and of Ben 
 Jonson and other authors also, individual pages are 
 found in two different states, one with certain 
 errors in them, the other with these errors cor- 
 refted. Where there is only one, or perhaps two, 
 readings in question, it is possible in some cases 
 that instead of speaking of an error and a correftion 
 we ought to speak of a right reading and a corrup- 
 tion, because it is certain that the inking-balls 
 sometimes pulled one or more letters out of the 
 forme, and that mistakes were made by these being 
 incorrectly replaced. More commonly, however, 
 and in some cases quite certainly, we can see that 
 the pressmen had begun printing off a page before 
 it had been fully correfted, and that on the master 
 printer (who in a small printing-house, would 
 usually adl as his own correftor) coming in, the 
 press was stopped and his corredlions introduced 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 73 
 
 in all the impressions of the page which remained 
 to be pulled. Now on different impressions of one 
 page of the first quarto of ' Richard II ' there are 
 four, and on another as many as five, of these un- 
 corredted and corrected readings. On B verso a 
 word is omitted, a letter is added, and in two cases 
 one word is substituted for another. On Bj-verso a 
 word and a hyphen are omitted, a letter is omitted, 
 one word is substituted for another, and two words 
 caught from a previous line displace two others. 
 That shows us what an Elizabethan compositor 
 could do when his master was out. By the Cam- 
 bridge standard the number of detedled errors in 
 the First Quarto of ' Richard II ' is less than one 
 a page. Left to themselves, the compositors were 
 capable of multiplying this four-fold, and we cannot 
 tell how often this happened. That is a gloomy 
 thought, and we are bound to remember that in 
 the case of these two pages in ' Richard II ' the 
 corre6lor did come back before the impression was 
 completed, and was conscientious enough to stop 
 the press to put things right as far as he could. 
 But if any one contends that Elizabethan com- 
 positors could not have made the errors found in 
 First Quartos without the help of copyists, it is 
 well to bear in mind these instances of his error- 
 making capacity. 
 
 We are thus emboldened to persist in our con- 
 tention that in some cases Shakespeare's own auto- 
 graph of a play may have been the copy supplied 
 to its first printer, resting our case now on the 
 four points : (i) that the manuscripts handed to 
 the players were in Shakespeare's autograph; (ii) 
 
74 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 that in other cases we find an autograph manuscript 
 used as a prompt-copy ; (iii) that at least some of 
 the First Quartos were set up from prompt-copies; 
 (iv) that the proved inaccuracy of the printers 
 allows us to assume an original quite as free from 
 faults as an autograph copy supplied by Shakepeare 
 was likely to be. 
 
 From the Quartos to the First Folio. 
 
 As regards the period from the first publication 
 of a duly registered Quarto to the appearance of a 
 play in the Folio of 1623, no editor, as far as I am 
 aware, has ever propounded a formal theory that 
 readings which appear for the first time in the 
 later Quartos are based upon either a fresh consulta- 
 tion of the MS. already used, or access to a new 
 one. As will be emphasized in our last paper on 
 ' the Improvers of Shakespeare,' editors have con- 
 cerned themselves unnecessarily with the readings 
 of the later Quartos and have admitted too many 
 readings from them into their text : but they have 
 done this rather on some muddle-headed plea 
 that it all happened a long time a.go, that the 
 particular circumstances are very obscure, and 
 that we must take good where we find it and be 
 thankful, than with any the smallest attempt to 
 show how any new authority was obtained. If 
 an eighteenth century editor had had the courage 
 to say that ' the Printer of the First Edition, fear- 
 ing that he had not done Justice to the Untutored 
 Charm of his Author, had kept the original MS. by 
 him in the hope of Improving his Performance in 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. -js 
 
 another edition,' some one would doubtless have dealt 
 satisfadtorily with that editor before now. Surely 
 he would have been confronted with a conspedlus 
 of all the changes introduced into any given second 
 edition, and in the utter impossibility of contending 
 that the performance as a whole had been improved, 
 that it had not on the contrary been in every way 
 worsened and depraved, a confession might have 
 been extradled that the later Quartos could have 
 had no other source for their most plausible readings 
 than the wits of their own printers ; for the press- 
 corredtors of these Quartos did undoubtedly use their 
 wits in corre6ling blunders they found in the first 
 editions, and sometimes with good success. The 
 causes, however, of the great bulk of the variants 
 introduced into the later Quartos seem to be those 
 common to all copying and more especially the 
 trick of carrying too many words at a time in the 
 head. It has lately been pointed out to me by a 
 master-printer that this tendency is especially aftive, 
 and therefore especially dangerous, in reprinting 
 from a printed text, in which the eye easily takes 
 in a whole line at a glance, whereas the setting of 
 the line would be a work of minutes, during which 
 it would be easy for the memory to play tricks 
 with one or more words. Besides these, of course, 
 there are the usual transposition of letters, substitu- 
 tion of one letter for another, and other errors to 
 which careless printers are liable. Not all of the 
 printers of Quartos deserve to be stigmatized as 
 careless ; but many of them were very careless 
 indeed. 
 
 When we come to the First Folio and begin to 
 
76 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 enquire into its relation with the Quartos, we find 
 ourselves confronted with a series of readings which 
 at first sight seem decisive against any new manu- 
 scripts having been available for improving the text 
 of these plays. Anyone can make mistakes when 
 he is careless. But when we find old blunders 
 being hidden up by commonplace tinkering instead 
 of the true reading being restored, it seems a fair 
 inference, since the tinkerers were obviously wide 
 awake and taking trouble, that the producers of 
 the First Folio were driven to tinker because no 
 other course was possible, i.e. because they had no 
 independent authority at hand by which a real 
 correction could be made. 
 
 These cases arise where the text of a First 
 Quarto is sound, but an error has been introduced 
 * in the second or some later one:, and the reading of 
 the First Folio is obviously a tinkering of this 
 error. A couple of instances of this kind may be 
 quoted from among the examples of progressive 
 corruption cited by Malone in his admirable pre- 
 face in 1790. 
 
 In I 'Henry IV,' v. iii. .11, Blunt answers the 
 threats of Douglas with the words : 
 
 1 was not born a yielder, thou proud Scot. 
 
 In the Quarto of 161 3 the printer substituted for 
 the three syllables ' a yielder' the two syllables 'to 
 yield,' thus producing the unmetrical line : 
 
 I was not born to yield, thou proud Scot. 
 
 In the First Folio this is mended with absolute 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. -jj 
 
 neatness by the substitution of ' haughty ' for 
 'proud,' the line thus becoming 
 
 I was not born to yield, thou haughty Scot. 
 
 If the Quarto of 1613 had disappeared this reading 
 might have held its own, against that of the First 
 Qua^rto, as a genuine alternative obtained from a 
 new manuscript. But with the nine-syllabled line 
 already in evidence in the Quarto of 161 3 we can 
 see that the line has been cleverly botched, and 
 that instead of suggesting the existence of an alter- 
 native manuscript, it is strong evidence that no 
 authorative text was available, and therefore botch- 
 ing had to be resorted to. 
 
 Again in the first Quarto of 'Richard III,' i. 
 i. 63-65, Richard assures Clarence : 
 
 'Tis not the king that sends you to the Tower: 
 My lady Grey his wife, Clarence, 'tis she 
 That tempers him to this extremity. 
 
 In the last of these lines the later quartos substi- 
 tuted the monosyllable ' tempts ' for the dissyllable 
 ' tempers,' thus reducing it to 
 
 That tempts him to this extremity. 
 
 In the Folio the line is eked out to its proper 
 length by the interpolation of an adjeftive, giving 
 us: 
 
 That tempts him to this harsh extremity. 
 
 With the history of the line before him no one 
 can doubt that this is botching or tinkering, and 
 it is a perfectly sound inference that the botcher 
 
78 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 or tinker in question cannot have had easy access 
 to a manuscript-ixcording the true reading, or he 
 "Wouldrnotnave cudgelled his brains with this sorry 
 result. 
 
 We must not, however, underrate the complexity 
 of the problem with which we are dealing. 
 
 Where a duly registered quarto had been pub- 
 lished, the text of the First Folio was usually, 
 though not always, set up from the latest edition 
 of this on the market, this being of course the 
 easiest and cheapest way of supplying the printer 
 with copy. 
 
 But in almost every case the Folio text supplies 
 a number of new readings, which, like most other 
 things in the world, may be quite accurately 
 classified under the three headings good, bad, and 
 indifferent. 
 
 By a 'Good' reading in this classification is meant 
 a reading undoubtedly Shakespeare's. By a ' Bad ' 
 reading, one that is undoubtedly not Shakespeare's, 
 but either belongs to the class of the Folio read- 
 ings botched up out of the errors of the later 
 Quartos at which we have just been looking, or is 
 an obvious misprint. Lastly, ' Indifferent ' readings 
 are those which may be a little better assthetically 
 than their alternatives, or a little worse ; but which, 
 because they make sense and grammar and scan, 
 and crop up mostly in what may be called the 
 lower levels of Shakespeare's verse, we cannot treat 
 as impossible, while it is equally clear that we 
 cannot treat them as possessing any certainty in 
 their own right. If we can find ground for believ- 
 ing that the text of any play first printed in quarto 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 79 
 
 was revised as a whole by the aid of a good manu- 
 script, then for these indifferent readings we must 
 follow the text of the Folio. If on the other hand 
 no such revision took place, then we must print 
 them as they stand in the First Quarto. 
 
 If in the case of a given play we are to suppose 
 that a good manuscript existed and was used in 
 improving the text of the late Quarto, who are we 
 to suppose had the manuscript entrusted to him 
 and used it for this purpose ? 
 
 We may rule out of consideration the person, or 
 persons, whom we may think of as exercising its 
 general editorship. Their task must have been to 
 get together the material, decide what was to be 
 printed and what not, settle the order of the plays, 
 and carry through two specific bits of work, which 
 required special knowledge — the division of the 
 plays into a6ts and scenes and the substitution, 
 where necessary, of descriptive notes for the im- 
 peratives of the old stage-dire6tions. They did 
 not complete either of these jobs — Parts 2 and 3 
 of 'King Henry VI' seem to have been sent to the 
 printer without any general editing of this kind 
 whatever, several plays are only divided into a61s, 
 not into scenes, and imperative stage-direftions are 
 found sporadically — and as the general editors 
 obviously could not find time to attend to this 
 business, it is impossible to imagine that they had 
 the time or the patience to attend to the collation 
 of the text. 
 
 It is quite clear that hired aid must have been 
 called in and that the work done by these hired 
 helpers must have been accepted as final. That is 
 
8o THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 to say, if any better text, manuscript or printed, 
 was used in preparing that of the late Quarto for 
 the press, the hired man corredied a copy of the 
 late Quarto by this with as much care and skill as 
 he had to bestow, and the copy so corredled 
 became the sole authority for the new text. Very 
 probably the hired man was not engaged for proof- 
 reading ; but even if he had been, it would have 
 Deen out of keeping with the whole atmosphere 
 which surrounds the publication of Shakespeare's 
 plays, if he had discarded the copy for which he 
 himself was responsible, and read the proofs with' 
 the better authority which he had collated. Hence, 
 whether the hired man of our (not unreasoned) 
 imagination, or the press-corre6lor in Jaggard's 
 printing-house had the last word in the matter, if 
 a line were faulty in the copy prepared for press, 
 the choice would be between leaving it as it was 
 and the gross botching of which instances have 
 been given. 
 
 In the case of some plays the question to be 
 solved may finally take the form. How far may 
 we reasonably push our belief in the incompetence 
 of the collator in order to explain a few good 
 readings being introduced into the Folio text 
 along with a crowd of bad ones? Sooner than 
 postulate an inhumanly incompetent collator, it 
 might be well to consider whether no source 
 existed from which isolated good readings might 
 be derived without any new manuscript having 
 been available. If we can conceive of the prompter 
 of the Globe Playhouse making haphazard manu- 
 script correftions on his prompt-copy, we may find 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 8i 
 
 in this a source of exaftly the kind we want. 
 There is ample evidence (some of it has been 
 quoted) that copies of the printed Quartos were 
 used in the Playhotise as prompt-copies, and that 
 these prompt-copies were used in preparing the 
 Folio text, with the result that some of their 
 manuscript stage-diredtions got into print. If a 
 prompter could annotate a printed quarto with 
 additional stage-direftions for his own use, there 
 seems no reason why he should not have brought 
 the text of his copy into some kind of occasional 
 conformity with any variations made by the aftors 
 whom he had to prompt. The adlors would pre- 
 sumably still have at their disposal the original 
 adling-parts. In so far as they had learnt these 
 correftly they would restore true readings which 
 the First Quarto had corrupted. In so far as they 
 had not learnt their parts corredtly they would 
 from imperfetS memory make mistakes very similar 
 to those made by printers from trying to carry too 
 many words at a time in their heads. In the first 
 instance (if the prompter was interested) we have 
 an explanation of the appearance of two or three 
 good readings in the Folio text where nothing else 
 suggests that recourse had been had to any new 
 authority. In the second instance (again if the 
 prompter was interested) we may perhaps find a 
 means for transferring to other shoulders some of 
 the blame for the frequent substitution of one 
 word for another which now, if we refuse to 
 postulate a new manuscript, rests with the printer 
 of the Folio. 
 
 If such an hypothesis as has here been sketched 
 
82 THE MANUSCRIPTS OF 
 
 were accepted, the number of plays. first printed in 
 Quarto, for which we should have to call in new 
 manuscript authority to account for the Folio text, 
 would be small indeed. It is, however, no part of 
 the bibliographer's work to poach on literary pre- 
 serves as regards individual plays. Our business is 
 to try to think out in terms of pieces of paper 
 what must have happened for a reading which can 
 be accepted as Shakespeare's to have got into the 
 printed text, subsequently to the First Edition. 
 In view of the licence which Elizabethan printers 
 allowed themselves, we must refuse to invoke 
 manuscript authority for any changes, right or 
 wrong, which might easily originate with the 
 printer — with his common sense or ingenuity, if 
 the changes may be adjudged right, with his very 
 conspicuous carelessness if they are wrong. In the 
 same spirit of economy we must refuse to assume 
 the availability of a manuscript for the revision of 
 the whole text of a play, unless adequate evidence 
 is forthcoming that the whole text was in fa6t 
 revised. As a way of escape from such extrava- 
 gance the alternative has here been proposed of 
 haphazard corredlions on a printed prompt-copy. 
 But it must be constantly borne in mind that dif- 
 ferent plays may have had different fortunes. We 
 are bound to suppose that the players as a rule 
 took the cheapest and safest course ; but it would 
 be rash indeed to assume that they did so invari- 
 ably, and that an additional transcript was never 
 made and preserved and came in useful in 1623. 
 All we have tried to do in this paper is to think 
 out the problem in general terms, and trust the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 83 
 
 application to Shakespeare's editors, who hitherto 
 have left the bibliographical side of the problem — 
 the passing from hand to hand of pieces of paper 
 — very imperfedtly developed. On these lines we 
 submit that it is bibliographically probable that 
 some of the First Quarto Editions of Shakespeare's 
 plays were printed from the author's own autograph * 
 manuscript, which had previously been used as a 
 prompt-copy ; that the adlors replaced their manu- 
 script prompt-copy by a copy of the printed 
 Quarto, which in its turn received additional stage- 
 diredlions and also readings representing some of 
 the variants which were adopted by individual 
 adlors; that in 1622 a copy of the last Quarto on 
 the market was sent to the playhouse to be roughly ' 
 collated with the printed prompt-copy ; and that 
 the copy so corredted was the source of the Folio , 
 text of a normal play originally printed in a duly 
 registered Quarto. 
 
 It may be added that in November, 19 15, when 
 this paper was read as a Sandars Ledture at Cam- 
 bridge, I was applying this theory to the case of 
 Shakespeare's ' King Richard 11 ' ; readers of the 
 introduction to the facsimile of the unique copy 
 of the third Quarto owned by Mr. W. A. White, 
 of New York ('A New Shakespeare Quarto,' 
 London, Quaritch, 19 16), must judge with what 
 success. 
 
84 
 
 THE IMPROVERS OF SHAKE- 
 SPEARE. 
 
 I N our third paper we tried to establish 
 bibliographically what was the normal 
 history of the text of Elizabethan plays 
 I from the time the playwright handed 
 __ his manuscript to the players ; we then 
 
 enquired what special evidence we had in the case 
 of Shakespeare's plays, and finally applied the 
 theories we construfted to the history of his text 
 down to the publication of the Folio of 1623. We 
 shall devote the first part of this our last paper to 
 three dedudlions of some importance arising out of 
 this survey. 
 
 I. The first of these is that, from our biblio- 
 graphical standpoint^ the readings of any edition of 
 a play of Shakespeare's subsequent to the First duly 
 registered Quarto cannot have any shred of authority, 
 unless a reasonably probable case can be made out for 
 access having been obtained to a new manuscript, 
 or its equivalent. And to construdl such a case 
 all the variants in the edition must be brought 
 together and considered as a whole. 
 
 Editors of Shakespeare, even the best editors of 
 Shakespeare, have been too ready to accept or reject 
 variants on what they would call ' their individual 
 merits'; and they have yielded, consciously or 
 
IMPROVERS OF SHAKESPEARE. 85 
 
 unconsciously, to the illusion that if a first edition 
 printed (say) in 1597 is a good authority, a second 
 edition printed within a year or two is also an 
 authority, though perhaps not quite of equal weight. 
 A printed text £annot be invested with authority 
 merely by an early date on its title-page. The 
 authority can only come to it by derivation from 
 the original manuscript, and if this derivation is 
 simply and solely through a previous printed edition, 
 then a reading in the second edition can have no 
 authority whatever as against a reading in the first. 
 It may be right, as any conjedtural emendation may 
 be right ; but it must be judged as a conjedlural 
 emendation, and on precisely the same footing as 
 if it had been made a week ago. 
 
 The point is so obvious that it seems superfluous 
 to labour it, but with the honourable exception of 
 Malone, it has been almost uniformly neglefted by 
 Shakespeare's editors. 
 
 Theobald arranged his list of the editions known 
 to him under the three headings : 
 
 Editions of Authority, 
 Editions of Middle Authority, 
 Editions of no Authority. 
 
 He did this, doubtless, for the pleasure of making 
 his third class, the editions of no authority, consist 
 of those of Rowe and Pope. His second class con- 
 tained the Third Folio and the Quartos printed 
 between 1623 and the Restoration. But how did 
 these later quartos acquire the Middle Authority 
 which he ascribes to them } In so far as they were 
 accurate reprints of the First registered Quarto, if 
 
86 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 every copy of that had been destroyed they might 
 have taken its place. But as long as that remains 
 they are purely negligible. And this applies with 
 almost equal completeness to most of the editions 
 included in Theobald's highest class, as Editions 
 of Authority. These comprise all the Quartos, of 
 which he knew, printed before 1623, and the First 
 and Second Folios. It would be perhaps too much 
 to say that a Quarto of 161 5 is no better than a 
 Quarto of 1655, because the latter will certainly 
 have accumulated some more errors, and the Quarto 
 of 1 61 5, moreover, may be of considerable interest 
 in determining for a given play the value of the 
 First Folio. But as against a reading in a First 
 Quarto, the authority which a variant derives from 
 having been printed within one year, ten years, or 
 forty years of it, is in every case the same, because 
 in every case it is nil. 
 
 Just as, so long as a copy of the first edition of a 
 good Quarto exists, all the later quarto editions 
 have no value for the construflion of a text ; so, as 
 long as a copy of the First Folio remains, the three 
 later Folios have no textual importance. In criti- 
 cizing Theobald's table of editions. Dr. Johnson 
 expressed this with his usual sturdy common sense: 
 
 In his enumeration of editions (he writes of Theobald) 
 he mentions the two first folios as of high, and the third 
 folio as of middle authority ; but the truth is that the first 
 is equivalent to all [the] others, and that the rest only 
 deviate from it by the printer's negligence. "Whoever 
 has any of the folios has all, excepting those diversities 
 which mere reiteration of editions will produce. I collated 
 them all at the beginning, but afterwards used only the first. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 87 
 
 The importance of the later Quartos printed 
 before 1623, ^"'^ °^ *^^ three later Folios, is purely 
 genealogical. Had none of the later Quartos been 
 preserved, we should have been obliged to debit to 
 the First Folio as original errors, all the bad read- 
 ings which it took over from the later Quartos. 
 On the one hand, the credit of the Folio would 
 have been unjustly depreciated ; on the other hand, 
 various easy readings introduced by the later 
 Quartos would have been invested with whatever 
 authority the Folio text for the play in which they 
 occur may possess. But when once the errors bor- 
 rowed from the later Quartos have been eliminated, 
 only the First Quartos and the First Folios have 
 any textual value. 
 
 The genealogical importance of the later Folios is 
 of much the same kind. It arises from the fa6l that 
 the Fourth Folio being the easiest and cheapest to 
 buy and also the most modern in its spelling was the 
 copy which Rowe sent to the printer, after he had 
 tinkered it at his pleasure. Pope used Rowe's 
 text las his ' copy ' to print from ; Theobald used 
 Pope's, and so on. It may be doubted whether 
 any edition of Shakespeare's works (with the pos- 
 sible exception of Capell's) has ever been wholly 
 printed from manuscript. That of 1623 was 
 printed partly from manuscript, partly from the 
 printed quartos. Probably every subsequent edi- 
 tion has been set up from some earlier printed 
 text, some of the misprints in which will almost 
 certainly be carried over into the new edition 
 despite editorial care. Many of the readings of 
 the Fourth Folio were thus inadvertently adopted 
 
88 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 by Rowe, and the Fourth Folio and its two im- 
 mediate predecessors are thus necessary to a right 
 understanding of the eighteenth centiiry texts. 
 But it must be said again and again that as authori- 
 ties for ascertaining what Shakespeare himself 
 actually wrote, no editions can have any shred, jot 
 or tittle of value except the First Quartos,' and the 
 First Foho. 
 
 While it is true that the eighteenth century 
 editors who started the editorial tradition as to 
 Shakespeare's text had not all the bibliographical 
 data before them, nor even a complete set of the 
 First Quartos, their tendency to treat all the later 
 Quartos and later Folios as in some degree authori- 
 tative was due much less to ignorance than to their 
 desire to improve their text. It is a little lament- 
 able that no where can we find this standpoint 
 more clearly stated than in the words of Edward 
 Capell, to whomiShakesperian criticism is so heavily 
 indebted. 
 
 Listen to what he writes in the Introduftion to 
 his audaciously entitled edition of ' Mr. William 
 Shakespeare his Comedies Histories and Tragedies, 
 set out by himself [!] in quarto, or by the Players 
 his Fellows in folio, and now faithfully republish'd 
 from those Editions, in ten Volumes o6tavo ' : 
 
 It is said a little before, — that we have nothing of his 
 in writing ; that the printed copies are all that is left to 
 guide us ; and that those copies are subjedl to numberless 
 
 ' Of course where there are two t^xts as in ' Romeo and Juliet,' 
 the First Quarto of each counts for whatever it may be worth. 
 So also as regards the deposition scene the i6o8 edition of 
 ' Richard II ' counts as a First Quarto. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 89 
 
 imperfedlions, but not all in like degree : our first business 
 then, was — to examine their merit, and see on which side 
 the scale of goodness preponderated, which we have gener- 
 ally found, to be on that of the most ancient : It may be 
 seen in the Table, what Editions are judg'd to have the 
 preference among those plays that were printed singly in 
 quarto ; and for those plays, the text of those Editions 
 is chiefly adher'd to : in all the rest, the first folio is 
 foUow'd ; the text of which is by far the most fault- 
 less of the Editions in that form; and has also the 
 advantage in three quarto plays, in 2 Henry IV., Othello 
 and Richard III. 
 
 Up to this point nothing could be more sound, 
 and the service which Capell was rendering, in so 
 far as he based his text on the earliest editions 
 instead of trusting to collation to eliminate the 
 faults of the later ones, was very great. Unhappily 
 he proceeds : 
 
 Had the editions thus follow'd been printed with care- 
 fulness, from corred copies, and copies not added to or 
 otherwise alter'd after those impressions, there had been 
 no occasion for going any further : but this was not at all 
 the case, even in the best of them ; and it therefore became 
 proper and necessary to look into the other old editions, 
 and to sele<3: from thence whatever improves the Author, 
 or contributes to his advancement in perfedness, the point 
 in view throughout all this performance : that they do 
 improve him was with the editor an argument in their 
 favour; and a presumption of genuineness for what is thus 
 seledted, whether additions or differences of any other 
 nature ; and the causes of their appearing in some copies 
 and being wanting in others, cannot now be discover'd, by 
 reason of the time's distance, and defedt of fit materials 
 for making the discovery. 
 
 G 
 
90 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 As if to put his method of procedure beyond any 
 possibility of doubt, he concludes : 
 
 . . . Without entering further in this place into the 
 reasonableness or even necessity of so doing, he does for 
 the present acknowledge, — that he has everywhere made 
 use of such materials as he met with in other old copies, 
 which he thought improv'd the editions that are made the 
 ground-work of the present text (pp. 21-22). 
 
 Capell's present critic has a personal reason for 
 being moderate in his stri6lures, because (nearly 
 thirty years ago) moved by a laudable desire to win 
 more readers for Chaucer's ' Canterbury Tales,' 
 without entering on the slippery paths of moderniz- 
 ing, he laboriously picked out from the seven texts 
 published by the Chaucer Society the spellings 
 easiest to a modern reader in every line, and thus 
 produced an edition for the spelling of every word 
 of which there was early manuscript authority, but 
 which certainly did not present the words as 
 Chaucer wrote them. Had Capell, in order to 
 popularize Shakespeare, without committing him- 
 self to wholesale tinkering, announced that he had 
 accepted the emendations or improvements pro- 
 posed by Shakespeare's contemporaries, and those 
 only, it might still have been questioned whether 
 what he did was worth doing, but he would not 
 have introduced any fundamental confusion into 
 editorial ideals. As it was, he did introduce, or at 
 least help to perpetuate, confusion, by asserting his 
 right to corredl original editions by others that 
 were merely old, and by the specious suggestion 
 that the fadl of a new reading being (in editorial 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 91 
 
 eyes) an ' improvement ' carried with it a ' pre- 
 sumption of genuineness.' As bibliographers we 
 must protest that it is not mere age, but proof of 
 independent access to a source, that gives an edition 
 authority, while with any other aim than that of 
 ascertaining what was on the sheets of paper which 
 Shakespeare wrote and handed to the players we 
 can have nothing to do, unless we find evidence 
 of his personal revision of this original text. That 
 is our first point, and it brings us into collision with 
 almost every editor of Shakespeare, even (although 
 to an exceptionally slight extent) with the honoured 
 editors of the Cambridge text. 
 
 II. The second deduction we have to draw is that, 
 although it is probable that the first authorized 
 printers of any play by Shakespeare had but scant 
 respeft for such spelling, pundluation and system 
 of emphasis capitals as they found in their copy, 
 yet as it requires less mental effort to follow copy 
 mechanically than consciously to vary from it, we 
 are bound to believe that in these matters, as well 
 as in the words of the text, the first authorized 
 edition of any play is likely to be nearer than any 
 other to what the author wrote. 
 
 In regard to these matters we cannot, as we 
 should like to do, claim that we still have Dr. 
 Johnson on our side. ' In restoring the author's 
 works to their integrity,' wrote the Dodlor, ' I have 
 considered the punftuation as wholly in my power ; 
 for what could be their care of colons and commas, 
 who corrupted words and sentences [?].' The argu- 
 ment which underlies this charmingly alliterative 
 sentence, which, however, with curious ill luck 
 
92 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 ends with a full stop instead of a mark of interroga- 
 tion — the argument is perfe<5lly sound. It is highly 
 probable that such pundluation as Shakespeare 
 bestowed on his manuscript is less, perhaps much 
 less, faithfully reproduced, than his words. But 
 what proportion of Shakespeare's words have we 
 any reason to believe were corrupted by his first 
 printers? Even on a pessimistic view certainly 
 not one in a hundred. If his punctuation, there- 
 fore, were ten times as carelessly reproduced as his 
 words, nine out of ten of the stops in a first 
 authorized Quarto would be as Shakespeare wrote 
 them. As against Dr. Johnson this seems a 
 very fair argument, though no doubt he would 
 have ' downed ' it more or less successfully. As a 
 matter of fadl, we have to take into consideration 
 quite another probability, the probability that 
 Shakespeare, unless it definitely occurred to him 
 that he would like to have a speech delivered in a 
 particular way, was himself much too rapid a writer 
 to be at all careful about his stops. If this is so, 
 his first printers, instead of simply following his 
 pundluation faithfully, must often have been called 
 upon to supply the lack of it as best they couW ; 
 so that all numerical estimates of their fidelity must 
 go by the board. 
 
 If, however, we ask whether there is any reason 
 to believe {a) that it did sometimes occur to 
 Shakespeare that he would like to have a speech 
 delivered in a particular way, {b) that he could and 
 did indicate this by pun(5i:uation, and [c) that this 
 pundluation, at least in some cases, is quite faith- 
 fully reproduced, the answers we can offer to these 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 93 
 
 questions do not encourage us to acquiesce at all 
 cheerfully in Johnson's assumption that the punftua- 
 tion of the plays was ' wholly in [his] power.' By 
 Johnson's day the pun6tuation which we find in 
 Elizabethan books, more especially in plays, may 
 be corre6tly described as a lost art. Dr. Johnson 
 might do what he pleased with colons and commas. 
 He could make them help to show how a sentence 
 of Shakespeare's should be parsed ; but he could 
 not make them show how it would be delivered 
 by a great aftor — because that might have inter- 
 fered with the parsing. Now, in his little book 
 on Shakespearian Pundtuation, though his method 
 of exposition may not in all respefts win accept- 
 ance, Mr. Percy Simpson has abundantly proved 
 that what could not be done in Johnson's days 
 could be done in Shakespeare's. Everyone inter- 
 ested not only in the Elizabethan drama, but in all 
 the outburst of poetry from Tottell's Miscellany to 
 Herrick, should buy and study Mr. Simpson's 
 book, which is published by the Clarendon Press 
 for five shillings. It is only right to say, however, 
 that he had been preceded in this field by Mr. A. E. 
 Thiselton, who, in a succession of separately printed 
 notes to various plays of Shakespeare, had paid 
 special attention to their pundiuation and already 
 discovered a method in what commentators have 
 accounted the madness of that found in the early 
 editions. Both Mr. Simpson (to whom I owe my 
 own conversion) and Mr. Thiselton have presented 
 their results mainly in terms of grammar and 
 syntax. My own way of restating the fadls as I 
 understand them, is that in Shakespeare's day, at 
 
94 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 any rate in poetry and the drama, all the four stops, 
 comma, semicolon, colon, and full stop, could be, 
 and (on occasion) were, used simply and solely to 
 denote pauses of different length irrespeftive of 
 grammar and syntax. On the other hand the 
 normal pun6luation was much nearer to normal 
 speech than is the case with our own, which 
 balances one comma by another with a logic in- 
 tolerable in talk. Thus the pundluation we find 
 in the plays omits many stops which modern 
 editors insert, and on the other hand insert others, 
 sometimes to mark the rhythm, sometimes to 
 emphasize by a preliminary pause the word, or 
 words which follow, sometimes for yet other 
 reasons which can hardly be enumerated. The 
 only rule for dealing with these supra-grammatical 
 stops, is to read the passage as punctuated, and 
 then consider how it is afFecSted by the pause at the 
 point indicated. In the same way, if there is no 
 stop where we expedt one, or only a comma where 
 we should expedl a colon or even a full stop, we 
 must try how the passage sounds with only light 
 stops or none at all, and see what is the gain or 
 loss to the dramatic impression. 
 
 As has already been admitted, the punfluation 
 of most of the early Quartos, even when the system 
 on which it is based is very liberally interpreted 
 at the risk of turning faults into sham beauties, is 
 inadequate and defeftive. But two points seem to 
 emerge from the study of almost any early Quarto 
 we take up. In the first place it seems clear that 
 the value of all the stops was greater than at 
 present. The comma is often used where we 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 95 
 
 should put a semicolon ; the semicolon for a colon ; 
 the colon for a full stop ; while a full stop is a 
 very emphatic stop indeed. If an Elizabethan 
 printer had been given a typical passage of Macau- 
 lay to pun6tuate, he would have replaced many of 
 his famous full stops by colons and some by commas. 
 In such a case, where each sentence was gram- 
 matically complete in itself, but all were diredled 
 to building up by accumulation a single efFedl, an 
 Elizabethan would have regarded all the sentences 
 as co-ordinate parts of a whole and would have 
 refused (unless rhetoric suggested an advantage in 
 seeming to pause between each for a reply) to 
 separate them by any stop heavier than a colon. 
 Moreover, if it were desired to indicate by punftua- 
 tion the rapidity of inventive or earnest pleading, 
 commas would have been made to do the work. 
 A full stop, except when a speech is completely 
 finished, always means business — very often theatrical 
 business : at the least a change of tone or of the 
 person addressed ; occasionally, a sob or a caress. 
 
 Our second point is that even when we make 
 ample allowance for the greater value of each of the 
 four stdps, and for his own carelessnees and that 
 of the printers, there is good evidence that Shake- 
 speare preferred a light to a heavy punftuation. 
 
 ' Speake the speech I pray you as I pronounc'd 
 it to you, trippingly on the tongue, but if you 
 mouth it as many of our Players do, I had as 
 li[e]ve the towne cryer spoke my lines.' So 
 Hamlet exhorted the players who were to test his 
 uncle's guilt, and so (the pundtuation of the early 
 Quartos suggests) he may often have exhorted the 
 
96 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 adlors at the Globe. In the 1604 Quarto of 
 ' Hamlet ' the thirty-three lines of the speech that 
 begins ' To be or not to be,' are pundluated with 
 commas, two semicolons anS a colon. The full 
 stop only comes before the words : ' Soft you now 
 The faire Ophelia.' 
 
 In Portia's famous speech in the ' Merchant of 
 Venice' there is a full stop after the plea that mercy 
 
 becomes 
 The throned Monarch better then his crowne 
 
 so that the idea may work its full effedt before 
 being followed by the gloss : ' His scepter shewes 
 the force of temporall power,' etc. But after this, 
 for thirteen lines there is no other full stop until 
 the appeal is ended, and with a change of tone the 
 pleadeif resumes : 
 
 I have spoke thus much 
 To mitigate the justice of thy plea, 
 Which if thou follow this strid court of Venice 
 Must needs give sentence gainst the Merchant here. 
 
 These particular pundluations are not held up for 
 special admiration. It is in no way the business 
 of bibliography to decide how Shakespeare's play 
 should be punctuated. But when we find this 
 notably light pun6luation in editions of several 
 different plays, set up by several different printers, 
 it seems a fair bibliographical deduction that this 
 light punftuation, though the printers may have 
 corrupted it grossly, yet refle(5ls a light punctuation 
 in their copy, and so, immediately or by one or 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 97 
 
 more removes, suggests what was Shakespeare's 
 own habit. 
 
 We can make a similar dedudtion as regards the 
 use of emphasis capitals, which may be taken to 
 have indicated a slight exaltation in the tone in 
 which the words they prefix were to be pronounced. 
 In the early Quartos we find them used for titles 
 of honour and respe<5t, for abstraft qualities and in 
 metaphors ; elsewhere only sparingly, and hardly 
 ever in such a way as to encourage an aftor to tear 
 a passion to tatters. Thus in a speech which lies 
 so exposed to over-emphasis as that of the Ghost 
 in ' Hamlet ' beginning : ' Aye, that incestuous, that 
 adulterate beast,' in the Quarto of 1604 there are 
 only ten capitals, and these with two exceptions 
 (Hebona and Lazerlike), merely follow the ordin- 
 ary rules. Thus we find capitals assigned to Queen 
 (twice), Crown, Uncle, Angel, Glowworm, Orchard 
 and Denmark, and these are all, though iht speech 
 runs to just fifty lines. In the First Folio, on the 
 other hand, there are just fifty emphasis-capitals, 
 or on an average one to every line, among the 
 words emphasised being Beast, Traitorous, Lust, 
 Lewdness, Garbage, etc., so that if an a(5lor, when 
 thus encouraged, resisted the temptation to mouth- 
 ing, his grace was the greater. ' In the very 
 torrent tempest, and as I may say, whirlwind of 
 your passion, you must acquire and beget a tem- 
 perance, that may give it smoothness^ Hamlet tells 
 the players, and bibliography may be permitted 
 once more to quote this corroboration of its de- 
 duction that Shakespeare's manuscript was only 
 moderately sprinkled with capitals. 
 
98 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 III. The comparison that has just been made 
 between thepra<5tice of the Quarto and Folio text of 
 'Hamlet' in this matter of emphasis-capitals brings 
 us to the last, point it is desired to make in these 
 papers, the point that the First Folio must be re- 
 garded as an edited text, perhaps to about the same 
 extent and in very much the same manner as the 
 EUesmere manuscript of Chaucer's ' Canterbury 
 Tales' deserves that charafter. The EUesmere scribe 
 had ideas of his own on spelling and other matters, 
 and a tendency if he did not find a verse smooth to 
 leave it so. We have seen how ready someone was 
 to smooth out lines in the First Folio. Probably 
 he was doing the best thing for the book and its 
 author that at that particular moment it was pos- 
 sible to do. Nor is it reasonable to be scornful if 
 a(5tors, who were responsible for bringing together 
 the copy, took it for granted that the adting- 
 versions then in use were the best possible, toler- 
 ated small verbal changes in the text, and thought 
 it good if emphasis-capitals and punftuation were 
 in accordance with the dramatic customs of their 
 own day, rather than imperfedt memoranda of 
 Shakespeare's views. 
 
 How far the editing extended is a question of 
 detail, from which the bibliographer must needs 
 hold aloof. It has been noted already that the 
 general editors of the Folio quickly tired of their 
 task, and perhaps the hired men who collated and 
 copied at the playhouse and the press corrector in 
 Jaggard's office may have tired also. It is possible 
 also, and if human nature be taken into account, 
 even probable, that when the copy arrived in 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 99 
 
 manuscript and not in the form of a previously 
 printed text, the craving to alter did not make 
 itself felt in so severe a form. It could hardly 
 have been otherwise than intensely interesting if 
 Dr. Aldis Wright, when fresh from revising the 
 Cambridge Shakespeare, or Dr. Howard Furness 
 the elder, when in the full swing of work, had 
 been tempted into a discussion as to whether the 
 ' textus receptus ' of the plays printed for the first 
 time in the Folio of 1623 ^^ better on an average, 
 or worse, than in the case of plays of which a good 
 Quarto as well as the Folio is available. 
 
 The literary side of editing a bibliographer 
 must leave to his betters. Our task has been 
 rescuing certain Quartos from most unbiblio- 
 graphical denunciations. We have quoted one 
 wise and one not-so-wise remark from Dr. John- 
 son's introdudlion to his edition of Shakespeare. 
 It is amusing to find that Johnson in the prospedlus 
 which preceded by nine years the publication of 
 his text out-heroded Herod in the vigour of his 
 language. Here is what he wrote : 
 
 The business of him that republishes an ancient book 
 is, to corredt what is corrupt, and to explain what is 
 obscure. To have a text corrupt in many places, and in 
 many doubtful, is, among the authors that have written 
 since the use of types, almost peculiar to Shakespeare. 
 Most writers, by publishing their own works, prevent all 
 various readings and preclude all conjedlural criticism. 
 Books indeed are sometimes published after the death of 
 him who produced them, but they are better secured from 
 corruptions than these unfortunate compositions. They 
 
loo THE IMPROVERS 
 
 subsist in a single copy, written or revised by the author ; 
 and the faults of the printed volume can be only faults 
 of one descent. 
 
 But of the works of Shakespeare the condition has been 
 far different ; he sold them, not to be printed, but to be 
 played. They were immediately copied for the a<5tors, 
 and multiplied by transcript after transcript, vitiated by 
 the blunders of the penman, or changed by the affectation 
 of the player ; perhaps enlarged to introduce a jest, or 
 mutilated to shorten the representation ; and printed at 
 last without the concurrence of the aijthor, without the 
 consent of the proprietor, from compilations made by 
 chance or by stealth out of the separate parts written for 
 the theatre ; and thus thrust into the world surreptitiously 
 and hastily, they suffered another depravation from the 
 ignorance and negligence of the printers, as every man 
 who knows the state of the press in that age will readily 
 conceive. 
 
 It is not easy for invention to bring together so many 
 causes concurring to vitiate a text. No other author ever 
 gave up his works to fortune and time with so little care; 
 no books could be left in hands so likely to injure them, 
 as plays frequently adted, yet continued in manuscript ; 
 no other transcribers were likely to be so little qualified 
 for their task, as those who copied for the stage, at a time 
 when the lower ranks of the people were universally 
 illiterate : no other Editions were made from fragments 
 so minutely broken, and so fortuitously re-^united ; and 
 in no other age was the art of printing in such unskilful 
 hands. 
 
 It is curious that when Johnson wrote the sen- 
 tence : ' It is not easy for invention to bring 
 together so many causes concurring to vitiate a 
 text,' he should not have paused to ask himself 
 how many of his confident statements were based 
 upon any kind of evidence and for how many a 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. loi 
 
 faculty not very distinft from that of invention 
 might be held responsible. The theory that the 
 plays must have been ' multiplied by transcript after 
 transcript ' has held the field from his day to our 
 own arrd has not one shred of evidence to support 
 it, nothing but an imaginative pessimism convinced 
 that this is what must have happened. The state- 
 ment that the plays were ' fragments minutely 
 broken, fortuitously reunited ' printed ' from com- 
 pilations made by chance, or by stealth out of the 
 separate parts ■y^^ritten for the theatre ' is on no 
 higher level. Indeed it may be questioned whether 
 for once in his life the great Dodlor did not descend 
 in this passage to writing sheer nonsense. That 
 the plays might have been ' compilations made by 
 stealth out of the separate parts written for the 
 theatre ' is conceivable, though there is no evidence 
 to support it, but that these compilations could 
 have been made by chance^ that the fragmentary 
 ' parts ' could have been ^fortuitously reunited ' is 
 surely not even conceivable, unless indeed the 
 theatrical ' parts ' of those days were fitted with 
 legs and we are to understand that they danced 
 themselves together in some order of their own 
 devising. 
 
 It is only fair to Dr. Johnson to remember that 
 he wrote this Prospedtus before he edited his 
 author, and that in ,his Introduftion after nine 
 years' experience he writes nothing in this vein, 
 though it seems clear that he pinned his faith with 
 much too absolute confidence to the First Folio. 
 The quotation from his Prospedlus is only given 
 here because it expresses with vigorous rhetoric 
 
102 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 about the worst view of the Quartos that even 
 invention can diflate. As a contrast with it we 
 may quote the much saner views of Malone in his 
 Introdu(5lion to the Shakespeare of 1790, He 
 there writes : 
 
 Fifteen of Shakespeare's plays were printed in quarto 
 antecedent to the first complete coUeftion of his works, 
 which was published by his fellow comedians in 1623. . . . 
 The players when they mention these copies, represent 
 them all as mutilated and imperfed: ; but this was merely 
 thrown out to give an additional value to their own edition 
 and is not striftly true of any but two of the whole 
 number; The Merry Wives of Windsor, and King 
 Henry V. — With respedl to the other thirteen copies, 
 though undoubtedly they were all surreptitious, that is, 
 stolen from the playhouse, and printed without the consent 
 of the author or the proprietors, they in general are pre- 
 ferable to the exhibition of the same plays in the folio ; 
 for this plain reason, because, instead of printing these 
 plays from a manuscript, the editors of the folio, to save 
 labour, or from some other motive, printed the greater 
 part of them from the very copies which they represented 
 as maimed and imperfedi, and frequently from a late, 
 instead of the earliest, edition ; in some instances with 
 additions and alterations of their own. Thus therefore 
 the first folio, as far as respecfts the plays above enumerated, 
 labours under the disadvantage of being at least a second, 
 and in some cases a third, edition of these quartos. I do 
 not, however, mean to say, that many valuable corrections 
 of passages undoubtedly corrupt in the quartos are not 
 found in the folio copy ; or that a single line of these 
 plays should be printed by a careful editor without a 
 minute examination and collation of both copies ; but those 
 copies were in general the basis on which the folio editors 
 built, and are entitled to our particular attention and 
 examination ^s first editions. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 103 
 
 It is well known to those who are conversant with the 
 business of the press, that, (unless when the author correds 
 and revises his own works,) as editions of books are multi- 
 plied their errors are multiplied also ; . . . The various 
 readings found in the different impressions of the quarto 
 copies are frequently mentioned by the late editors: it is 
 obvious from what has been already stated, that the first 
 edition of each play is alone of any authority [except, he 
 notes, in the case of Romeo and Juliet], and accordingly 
 to no other have I paid any attention. All the variations 
 in the subsequent quartos were made by accident or 
 caprice. Where, however, there are two editions printed 
 in the same year, or an undated copy, it is necessary to 
 examine each of them, because which of them was first 
 cannot be ascertained ; and being each printed from a 
 manuscript, they carry with them a degree of authority to 
 which a reimpression cannot be entitled. Of the tragedy 
 of King Lear there are no less than three copies varying 
 from each other, printed for the same bookseller, and in 
 the same year. Of all the plays of which there are no 
 quarto copies extant, the first folio, printed in 1623, is the 
 only authentick edition. 
 
 So far Malone, and if we have got beyond him in 
 some points, in others, notably in his clear recog- 
 nition that the Quartos ' were in general the basis 
 on which the folio editors built,' and that (with 
 stated exceptions) ' the first edition of each play is 
 alone of any authority — all the variations in the 
 subsequent Quartos were made by accident or 
 caprice ' — he is admirably sound. 
 
 What are the points in which we can claim to 
 have got beyond Malone after a century and a 
 quarter of further work ? Not so many, it must 
 be confessed, nor so important, as they should be. 
 One or two new Quartos have been discovered. 
 
I04 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 notably the 'Hamlet' of 1603, giving a bad text 
 of the play in its earlier form. We also know 
 thjtt there were only two early Quartos of ' King 
 Lear,' the belief that there were more being due 
 to the co-existence in the first edition of un- 
 correfted and correfted sheets such as those in 
 ' Richard H,' mentioned in our third paper. 
 
 So far as editors of Shakespeare are concerned it 
 is doubtful whether their improvements on Malone 
 can be shown to extend beyond these small points, 
 and on the other hand they have hardly kept to 
 his canon that only first editions can count as 
 authorities. Quite recently, however, the three 
 cases, the ' Merchant of Venice,' the ' Midsummer 
 Night's Dream ' and ' King Lear,' in which the 
 existence of two diflFerent editions bearing the same 
 date led Malone to suppose that each was derived 
 from a separate manuscript, have been resolved 
 into three original editions, two of 1600 and one 
 af 1608, and three reprints, all produced in 161 9, 
 and there is no longer any reas6n to believe in their 
 being derived from rival manuscripts. It is rather 
 strange that Malone did not make this discovery 
 himself. Half a discoverer's work is done for him 
 when the subjed: for investigation is rigidly iso- 
 lated, and in Malone's day there must have been 
 in existence nearly a dozen nice fat volumes, each 
 containing the same nine plays, three of them, viz., 
 the ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' ' Merchant of 
 Venice ' and ' Sir John Oldcastle,' dated 1 600 ; two 
 others, 'Henry V and 'King Lear,' dated 1608; 
 three, the ' Merry Wives of Windsor,' ' Yorkshire 
 Tragedy' and 'Pericles,' dated 1619; and one. 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 105 
 
 ' The whole Contention between the two famous 
 houses of York and Lancaster,' undated. One after 
 another of these fat little volumes got broken up 
 for convenience of sale or handling, and now, as 
 far as is known, only one exists, in the library of 
 Mr. Marsden Perry at Providence, Rhode [Island. 
 Chance, however, brought this in 1902, and in 
 1906 a similar volume from the Hussey colle6tion, 
 under the same pair of eyes, and though the 
 Hussey volume Was broken up while a wild search 
 was being made for a note of the contents of the 
 fellow to it seen four years-before, suspicion had 
 at last been aroused, and the unravelmeht of the 
 problem became only a question of time. Traces 
 of similar volumes were found in the Capell col- 
 ledtion at Trinity College, in the Garrick plays at 
 the British Museum and elsewhere, and a first 
 hypothesis was formed, that the plays with the 
 earlier dates, four of them duplicating another 
 edition of the same year, had sold badly and in 
 1 61 9 were being made up into a volume with 
 those printed in that year, as a kind of ' remainder.' 
 Then Mr. W. W- Greg made a spring at the true 
 explanation, that the plays were all printed together 
 in 1 61 9, and proceeded to prove it by the very 
 pretty, but very intricate evidence of the water- 
 marks. After this the quarry was in full view and 
 it was easy to hunt it down by a variety of proofs, 
 the ' coup de grace ' being given by an American 
 student, Mr. William Neidig, who showed photo- 
 graphically that the types used for the words 
 ' Written by W. Shakespeare,' which occur on the 
 three title-pages dated 1619, and also on that of 
 
 H 
 
io6 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 the 'Merchant of Venice' dated 1600, had re- 
 mained untouched in the forme while all four titles 
 were being printed — which could hardly have 
 happened if they were separated by an interval of 
 nineteen years. 
 
 The most lenient explanation of the five false 
 dates assumes an original intention to prefix a 
 general title-page to the coUedtion, there being 
 other instances of the short imprints and dates of 
 first editions being placed on the separate title- 
 pages of a volume of reprints by way of acknow- 
 ment of the source and ownership of the text. 
 The matter is complicated, however, by an appar- 
 ent desire to establish a claim to two copyrights, 
 those of the 'Merchant of Venice' and 'Midsummer 
 Night's Dream,' which may have seemed to be dere- 
 li6l. For our present purpose, however, it suiEces 
 to note that the controversies as to which of the 
 rival editions of these plays and of ' King Lear ' 
 should be considered the earlier have been decisively 
 settled in favour of those bearing the fuller im- 
 prints, and that it will be almost impossible for any 
 future editor to maintain, as has hitherto been the 
 fashion, that the falsely dated editions were printed 
 from separate manuscripts. It seems quite clear 
 that they must hav^e been reprinted from the 
 corre6lly dated First Editions, and that the variants 
 in the text all originated in the printing-house. 
 
 The second point in which we claim to have 
 improved on Malone is as to the interpretation to 
 be placed on the oft-quoted words 
 
 where (before) you were abus'd with diuerse stolne and 
 surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 107 
 
 and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that expos'd them : 
 euen those, are now ofFer'd to your view cur'd and perfedt 
 of their limbes. 
 
 Malone, though he distinguished between the bad 
 Quartos, such as those of the ' Merry Wives of 
 Windsor ' and ' King Henry V,' the text of which 
 was entirely rejected by the editors of the Folio, 
 and the good Quartos, which the Folio editors, 
 either (as he supposes) ' to save labour or from 
 Sonne other motive,' used as their text in reprinting 
 the plays, nevertheless says categorically : 
 
 Undoubtedly they were all surreptitious, that is stolen 
 from the playhouse, and printed without the consent of 
 the author or the proprietors. 
 
 It is confidently submitted that this assertion need- 
 lessly extends and enlarges the statement of the 
 editors of the Folio, at the cost of making them 
 decry their own property and tell foolish and 
 gratuitous lies. 
 
 There is some slight ambiguity about the exadt 
 meaning of the word ' where ' in the Preface to the 
 First Folio. It is at least possible that it should be 
 construed as equivalent to ' in those cases in which,' 
 ' where before you were abus'd ' — ' in those cases 
 in which you were abus'd ' — ' with diuerse stolne 
 and surreptitious copies, even those are how ofFer'd 
 to your view cur'd,' It is more probable, however, 
 that it should be taken as meaning ' whereas ' — 
 whereas before you were abus'd, even those copies 
 are now set right. Adopting this as the meaning 
 less favourable to our case, may we not reasonably 
 ask whether, if the players had intended to affix 
 
io8 THE IMPROVERS 
 
 the charge of surreptitiousness on all the Quartos, 
 they would have been content with so guarded a 
 statement ? Divers stolen and surreptitious copies 
 had been issued — the first ' Romeo and Juliet.' 
 ' Henry V,' the ' Merry Wives,' the first ' Hamlet,' 
 probably a first ' Loves Labors Lost,' which has 
 not come down to us. All these editions had been 
 rejedted by the Folio editors, who had replaced 
 them by good texts, and could therefore, without 
 reference to any other texts, truthfully say — ' even 
 those are now offer'd to your view cur'd and perfeft 
 of their limbes.' 
 
 It is possible, of course, that when they men- 
 tioned ' diuerse copies ' the Folio editors intended 
 their readers to add the mental comment ' to wit, 
 all the seventeen plays that have hitherto been 
 printed.' But if they wanted this to be under- 
 stood, why did they not say so ? They had plenty 
 of pi6turesque language at their command ! Why 
 should we make the words 'diuerse copies' apply 
 to any except the plays which the Folio editors 
 rejected, which bear their own evidence of a dis- 
 reputable origin, and were never regularly entered 
 on the Stationers' Register ? Why should we 
 extend it to the plays which the Folio editors 
 were a<5tually using as fhe source of their text, and 
 of which in some cases the copyrights were at that 
 moment vested in some of the publishers of the 
 Folio? 
 
 It has been the objeft of these papers to show 
 that the Quartos regularly entered on the Registers 
 of the Stationers' Company were neither stolen nor 
 surreptitious. I have gone further than this by 
 
OF SHAKESPEARE. 109 
 
 bringing together some little evidence that some 
 at least of these editions may have been set up 
 from Shakespeare's autograph manuscript, and have 
 further dangled before my readers the hope that in 
 some of these much vilified texts there may yet 
 survive evidence of how Shakespeare meant some 
 of his great speeches to be delivered. This is as 
 far as bibliography can take us. The literary 
 critics must be allowed their rights. But if, over- 
 stepping these, they raise the foolish old cry, ' all 
 stolne and surreptitious,' I hope in future they will 
 be received with the answering whoop, ' Printed 
 from the author's autograph,' for which there is at 
 least as much justification as the other, and I venture 
 to think a good deal more. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 'ABC and 'Catechism in Eng- 
 lish, privilege for, 1 6, 1 8, 39. 
 
 Aftors' names substituted for char- 
 acters, 66sqq. 
 
 Aftors, Peter, King's Stationer, 20. 
 
 Adams, Richard, fined, 22. 
 
 Almanacs, monopoly for printing, 
 16. 
 
 Arber, Dr., views as to formation 
 of Stationers' Company, losqq. 
 
 Authors, payment of in Shake- 
 speare's day, 18 jf., 25 sq., zjsqq. 
 
 Barker, Christopher, on grant of 
 Charter to Stationers, 10; his 
 monopoly for Bible-printing, 17. 
 
 Barwick, G. F., on restriftions on 
 Spanish printing, 11. 
 
 Bible-printing, monopoly in, 16 sq. 
 
 Blount, E., employed to block 
 piracies of Shakespeare's plays, 
 
 53^?- 
 
 Book-licences, how granted, 2 1 sqq. 
 
 Book-trade, regulation in the six- 
 teenth century, 1-26. 
 
 Buc, Sir George, his endorsements 
 on plays, 61, 69. 
 
 Burby, Cuthbert, an authorised 
 publisher of Shakespeare's plays, 
 SI sqq. 
 
 Busby, J., pirates Shakespeare's 
 plays, 42, 53Xf. 
 
 Capell, E., his readiness to accept 
 unauthoritative readings which 
 ' improve ' Shakespeare's text, 
 89/^^. 
 
 Capitals, use of for emphasis in 
 Shakespeare Quartos and First 
 Folio, 97 sq. 
 
 'Catechism in English,' Day's 
 monopoly for printing, 1 6. 
 
 Caxton, W., not attacked by book- 
 pirates, I sq. 
 
 Chamberlain's Men, 37, 46, 50 
 
 sqq., S7'!- 
 
 Chaucer, G., his works published at 
 joint risk of four stationers, 2 1 ; 
 old or modern spellings in, 90 ; 
 EUesmere MS. compared with 
 First Folio, 98. 
 
 Clergy, Elizabethan payment of, 
 z^sq. 
 
 Complutensian Polyglot, issue de- 
 layed by privilege for Erasmus's 
 Greek Testament, 3. 
 
 Copyright, early history of in Eng- 
 land, 1-36. 
 
 Curll, Edmund, his literary piracies, 
 30. 35- 
 
 Daborne, W., dramatist, made his 
 own fair copies, 58; but ' Poore 
 Man's Comfort,' attributed to 
 him, not in his autograph, 6 1 . 
 
 Danter, John, driven to literary 
 piracy by need, 42, 50/^. 
 
 Datingof books, ordered by Henry 
 VIII, 8. 
 
 Day, John, monopoly in 'ABC 
 and ' Catechism in English,' 16; 
 a Stringer, 21 ; fined by Sta- 
 tioners' Company, 22. 
 
112 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Dryden, John, his literary earnings 
 prior to the first Copyright Aft, 
 35- 
 
 Edward VI, his proclamation on 
 
 printing, 8. 
 Elizabeth, Queen, policy as to 
 
 printing, 1 3 sqf. ; unrewarded 
 
 dedication to, 28. 
 Erasmus, D., his Greek Testament 
 
 'privileged,' 3. 
 
 Faques, W., King's printer, 20. 
 
 First Folio of Shakespeare's Plays, 
 instances of guesswork in, 75 
 sq. ; its good readings not de- 
 rived from new MS., but from 
 prompter's correftions on printed 
 prompt copy, 80 sq. ; the only 
 one of the Four Folios of any 
 importance, 86 ; yet itself an 
 'edited' text, <)isq. 
 
 Fleay, F. G., his strange theory 
 how ' Romeo and Juliet ' was 
 pirated, 41. 
 
 Fulke, Dr.y-payment for his con- 
 futation of the Rhemish Testa- 
 ment, 25. 
 
 Glapthorne, his play ' The Lady 
 Mother,' 60. 
 
 Googe, B., publication of his 
 ' Eglogs and Epytaphes,' 'iosq. 
 
 Grafton, R., privileges for service 
 books, 1 6 ; a Grocer, 2 1 . 
 
 Greg, W. W., his theory how the 
 ' Merry Wives of Windsor ' was 
 pirated, 41 ; on Ant. Munday's 
 handwriting, 59; his proof of 
 false dates in Shakespeare Quartos, 
 105. 
 
 Hall, W., dealer in literary MSB., 
 
 32- 
 Hamlet's advice to the players, ap- 
 
 applicable to punfluation and 
 
 capitals in Shakespeare's text, 
 
 9S» 97- 
 
 Heming and Condell, their edi- 
 torial statements on the First 
 Folio, 62 sqq. 
 
 Herbert, Sir Henry, remits fee, 69. 
 
 Henry VIII, proclamations about 
 printing, 5 sqq. 
 
 Henslowe, P., dealings with 
 Daborne, 58. 
 
 Heywood, T., his evidence as to 
 piracy of plays, 40 {fiorrigendum : 
 the preface attributed to 1630 
 had already appeared in 1608, 
 and the depreciation of Heywood 
 as a witness is ill-advised), 54 ; 
 his play 'The Captives,' 60. 
 
 'Hired men' in theatres possible 
 pirates, 41. 
 
 Herman, his ' Vulgaria ' privileged, 
 3- 
 
 Injunftions, Elizabethan, fifty-first 
 on printing, 1 3 sq., 1 7. 
 
 James I, his example may have 
 weakened fashionable prejudice 
 against publication, 36. 
 
 Johnson, S., views on construftion 
 of Shakespeare's text, 86; scorns 
 punftuation of the early Quartos, 
 gisq.; extravagant depreciation 
 of the Quarto texts, ^gsqq. 
 
 Jonson, Ben, ' Masque of Queens ' 
 in his autograph, 60. 
 
 Jugge, R., Bible printing secured 
 to, by Archbishop Parker, 16. 
 
 'King Lear,' circumstances of its 
 publication, 53 /f, 10^ sq. 
 
 Lambe, Sir J., his note as to book- 
 licensing, 23. 
 
 Lant, R., imprisoned by Stationers' 
 Company, 22. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 II 
 
 Licensing of boolcs, 2 1 sqq. ; of 
 plays, endorsed on author's MS., 
 59, 61, 69. 
 
 ' Loves Labors Lost,' a pirated 
 edition probably lost, 49. 
 
 Machlinia,W.de, reprints Caxton's 
 
 ' Chronicles of England,' 2, 4. 
 Malone, Edmund, his estimate of 
 
 the Shakespeare First Quartos, 
 
 102/^^. 
 Marshe, Thomas, held monopoly 
 
 for printing Latin schoolbooks, 
 
 16. 
 Mary, Queen, policy as to printing, 
 
 %sqq. 
 Massinger, P., extant MS. of his 
 
 ' Believe as you List,' in his auto- 
 graph, 59, 64. 
 Mayors, books printed in a town 
 
 to be deposited with, 7. 
 * Merchant of Venice,' falsely dated 
 
 edition, 45, \o\sqq. 
 ' Midsummer Night's Dream,' 
 
 falsely dated edition, 45, 104/^^. 
 Milton, John, contraft for payment 
 
 for ' Paradise Lost ' prior to the 
 
 first Copyright Aft, 35. 
 Munday, Anthony, plays in his 
 
 autograph, 59. 
 
 Nashe, T., dedication to 'The 
 Terrors of the Night,' quoted, 
 
 33- 
 Neidig, W., photographic proof of 
 false dates in Shakespeare quartos, 
 105. 
 
 Pace, Richard, privilege granted in 
 1 5 1 8 for his sermon on Peace, 3 . 
 
 Pamphlet, payment for writing in 
 Shakespeare's day, 25, 38. 
 
 Parker, Archbishop, kept Bibler 
 printing in Jugge's hand, 16. 
 
 Patronage, effeft of on author's 
 
 earnings, 28 tq. 
 Pembroke and Montgomery, Earls 
 
 of, servility of dedication of First 
 
 Folio to, 63. 
 Percy, W., publication of his 
 
 'Sonnets to Coelia,' 32. 
 Perry, Marsden, owner of the only 
 
 unbroken copy of the 1619 
 
 volume of Shakespeare Quartos, 
 
 Piratical printing, precautions 
 against, 24 ; extent of in Shake- 
 peare's day, 34 sqq. 
 
 Place of printing, ordered by 
 Henry VIII to be stated in 
 books, 8. 
 
 Plays, Elizabethan payments for, 
 38 ; selling value, 39 ; possible 
 methods of pirating, 40 rqq. ; 
 entry on Stationers' Register 
 prima facie evidence of authen- 
 ticity, 43 sq. ; of Shakespeare's 
 time, extant in author's auto- 
 graph, 59 /?. 
 
 Pope, A., his shifts to get his letters 
 printed, 29. 
 
 Printers, when first admitted to 
 the Stationers' Company, 20, 
 
 Printing, subjeftion to Government 
 control, 5 sqq. ; avoided by 
 fashionable Elizabethans, 29-36. 
 
 Priuileginm ad imprimendum 
 solum, meaning of phrase, 6 sq. 
 
 Privileges for book-printing, 2^4; 
 for exclusive rights in classes of 
 books, \Ssq. 
 
 Privy Council, its control of print- 
 ing, 8, 13, \-l sqq., 36; its re- 
 lation to the players, 37 sqq. 
 
 Proclamations on printing, 5 4qq. 
 
 Prohibited books, English lists of, 
 
 5- 
 Prompt- copies, author's autograph 
 used for, subsequently printed, 
 66 sqq. 
 
114 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Prompter's notes, survival of, in 
 printed texts, 66 s^^. 
 
 Provinces, printing in the, 13. 
 
 Punftuation in first Quartos of 
 Shakespeare's plays may be au- 
 thoritative, 91 Sff. 
 
 Pynson, R., privilege granted to 
 books printed by, 3 ; whether 
 a stationer, 20 ; his assessment, 
 21. 
 
 Quartos of Shakespeare's plays, used 
 as prompt- copies and subse- 
 quently for First Folio, 68 sf. ; 
 the blunders in them, 7 1 sjj. ; 
 correfted and uncorredled sheets 
 in same edition, 72 sj. ; no fresh 
 MS. consulted for later Quartos, 
 74 sj. ; the First Quartos alone 
 authoritative, 84 xff. ; may re- 
 tain some of Shakespeare's own 
 punftuation, 92 sg^. ; Malone's 
 estimate of them only marred 
 by repetition of charge of sur- 
 reptitiousness, 102; the false 
 dates in the 16 19 reprints, 104 
 Sfg. ; the charge of surreptiti- 
 ousness reckless, 106 sgj. 
 
 Reformation, effeft of in subjefting 
 
 printing to control, 5, 24. 
 ' Richard II,' badness of Second 
 
 Quarto, 71 ; variations in copy 
 
 of First Quarto, 73. 
 Roberts, James, enters plays on 
 
 Stationers' Register to defeat 
 
 pirates, 44 Jf. 
 Robinson, R., his literary earnings, 
 
 25, 28. 
 ' Romeo and Juliet,' Fleay's theory 
 
 as to its piracy, 41. 
 
 Schoolmasters, Elizabethan, pay- 
 ments of, 2^Sf. 
 
 Scriveners, Nashe's grudge at their 
 profits, 33. 
 
 Secret presses, fewness of, under 
 Elizabeth, 16. 
 
 Shakespeare, W., only two of his 
 sonnets pirated during 1 5 years, 
 33 ; the attempts to pirate his 
 plays, 41-54; the transmission 
 of his text from manuscript to 
 Quartos and Folio, 55-83 ; treat- 
 ment of, by editors, 84-109. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Henry and Philip, gift 
 for a dedication, 28. 
 
 Si iipson, Percy, his treatise on 
 Shakespearian punfluation, 93. 
 
 Spain, restriftions on printing in, 
 1 1. 
 
 Stage-direftions, two kinds of, 
 65/??. 
 
 Star Chamber, its limitation of 
 presses partly direfted to securing 
 a livelihood for existing printers, 
 iSsf.; 36. 
 
 Stationers, wealthier than early 
 printers, 21. 
 
 Stationers' Company, grant of 
 charter to, 9 sgj. ; its early his- 
 tory, 19-26. 
 
 Stationers' Register, method of 
 entering books on, 2 1-2(4 ; entry 
 prima facie evidence of authority, 
 
 +3W-' 5o> 109- 
 Stenography, used in printing 
 plays, 40. 
 
 Taverner, J., stationer, his wealth, 
 21. 
 
 Tawyer with a trumpet, in stage- 
 direftions, 69, 
 
 Theobald, L., appraisal of editions 
 of Shakespeare, 85 sqq. 
 
 Thiselton, A. E., a pioneer in ex- 
 plaining Shakespearian punflua- 
 tion, 93. 
 
 Thorpe, T., dealer in literary MSS., 
 32 jf. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 115 
 
 Tottell, R., his privilege for law- 
 books, 16 sj. 
 
 ' Troilus and Cressida,' circum- 
 stances of its publication, S^'ii- 
 
 Venice, privileges for books first 
 given at, 2. 
 
 Ward, R., attacks privileged 
 
 printers, 17. 
 Watkins, R., monopoly in English 
 
 almanacs, 16. 
 
 Whitchurch, E., privileges for 
 
 service books, 1 6 ; a haberdasher, 
 
 21. 
 Wilson, Jack, his name in stage 
 
 direftions, 68. 
 Wither, George, his charges against 
 
 the Stationers, 26, 34. 
 'Within,' use of, in stage direftions, 
 
 Wolfe, John, attacks privileged 
 printers, 17. 
 
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