When we take up and examine the volume itself, we find it to present the very characteristics which these considerations would lead us to expect. As a typographical production it is better executed than the common run of the English popular printing of that date. It is rather superior, for instance, in point of appearance, and very decidedly in correctness, to the Second Folio, produced nine years later. Nevertheless it is obviously, to the most cursory inspection, very far from what would now be called even a tolerably well printed book. There is probably not a page in it which is not disfigured by many minute inaccuracies and irregularities, such as never appear in modern printing. The punctuation is throughout rude and negligent, even where it is not palpably blundering. The most elementary proprieties of the metrical arrangement are violated in innumerable passages. In some places the verse is printed as plain prose; elsewhere, prose is ignorantly and ludicrously exhibited in the guise of verse. Indisputable and undisputed errors are of frequent occurrence, so gross that it is impossible they could have been passed over, at any rate in such numbers, if the proof-sheets had undergone any systematic revision by a qualified person, however rapid. They were probably read in the printing-office, with more or less attention, when there was time, and often, when there was any hurry or pressure, sent to press with little or no examination. Everything betokens that editor or editing of the volume, in any proper or distinctive sense, there could have been none. The only editor was manifestly the head workman in the printing-office.

On closer inspection we detect other indications.

In one instance at least we have actually the names of the actors by whom the Play was performed prefixed to their portions of the dialogue instead of those of the dramatis persona. Mr. Knight, in noticing this circumstance, observes that it shows very clearly the text of the Play in which it occurs (Much Ado About Nothing) to have been taken from the play-house copy or what is called the prompter's book.* But the fact is that the scene in question is given in the same way in the previous Quarto edition of the Play, published in 1600; so that here the printers of the Folio had evidently no manuscript of any kind in their hands, any more than they had any one over them to prevent them from blindly following their printed copy into the most transparent absurdities. The Quarto, to the guidance of which they were left, had evidently been set up from the prompter's book, and the proof-sheets could not have been read either by the author or by any other competent person. For how many more of the Plays the Folio in like manner may have been printed only from the previously published separate editions we cannot be sure. But other errors with which the volume abounds are evidence of something more than this. In addition to a large number of doubtful or disputed passages, there are many readings in it which are either absolutely unintelligible, and therefore certainly corrupt, or, although not purely nonsensical, yet clearly wrong, and at the same time. such as are hardly to be sufficiently accounted for as the natural mistakes of the compositor. Sometimes what is evidently the true word or expression has given place to another, having possibly more or less resem* Library Shakspere,' II. 366.

C

blance to it in form, but none in signification; in other cases, what is indispensable to the sense, or to the continuity and completeness of the dramatic narrative, is altogether omitted. Such errors and deficiencies can only be explained on the supposition that the compositor had been left to depend upon a manuscript which was imperfect, or which could not be read. It is remarkable that deformities of this kind are apt to be found accumulated at one place; there are as it were nests or eruptions of them; they run into constellations; showing that the manuscript had there got torn or soiled, and that the printer had been obliged to supply what was wanting in the best way that he could by his own invention or conjectural ingenuity.*

*

Of the other Folio Editions, the Second, dated 1632, is the only one the new readings introduced in which have ever been regarded as of any authority. But nothing is known of the source from which they may have been derived. The prevailing opinion has been that they are nothing more than the conjectural emendations of the unknown editor. Some of them,

* I have discussed the question of the reliance to be placed on the First Folio at greater length in an article on The Text of Shakespeare in the 40th No. of the North British Review (for February 1854). It is there shown, from an examination of the First Act of Macbeth, that the number of readings in the First Folio (including arrangements of the verse and punctuations affecting the sense) which must be admitted to be either clearly wrong or in the highest degree suspicious probably amounts to not less than twenty on an average per page, or about twenty thousand in the whole volume. Most of them have been given up and abandoned even by those of the modern editors who profess the most absolute deference to the general authority of the text in which they are found.

nevertheless, have been adopted in every subsequent reprint.

The manuscript of Henry the Fourth (belonging to Sir Edward Dering, Bart., of Surrenden in Kent), is curious and interesting, as being certainly either of Shakespeare's own age or close upon it, and as the only known manuscript copy of any of the Plays of nearly that antiquity. But it appears to have been merely transcribed from the common printed text, with such omissions and modifications as were deemed expedient in reducing the two Plays to one. The First Part of Henry the Fourth had been printed no fewer than five times, and the Second Part also once, in the lifetime of the author. The Dering MS., however, exhibits a few peculiar readings. Like nearly every modern editor, the person by whom it was prepared, had felt dissatisfied with the word entrance in the speech by the King with which the First Part opens:

"No more the thirsty entrance of this soil

Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood ;"

and for entrance he has substituted bosome. Those who stand up for or accept the old reading explain the entrance of the soil as meaning the mouth of the soil. That is apparently a notion suggested by the lips in the next line. The her lips, however, and the her own children must of course be the lips and the children of the soil. Steevens, indeed, conceives that by her lips Shakespeare may mean the lips of peace mentioned four lines before; but such an interpretation, which, independently of other objections, would give the, her of "her lips" one reference and the her

of "her own children" another, is hardly deserving of notice. Well, then, we have the mouth of the soil daubing the lips of the soil,-which is plainly nonsense. Nor can anything better be made of entrants (as conjectured by Steevens), or entrails (as proposed by Douce). Erinnys, suggested by Mason, would give us a very good sense; the Spirit of Discord presiding over the soil might very well be said to daub with blood. the lips of the soil; and the circumstance of the word being a Shakespearian ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, or not elsewhere found, would make it more likely to have been mistaken by the printer. But I should be rather inclined to suspect the true reading to be "the thirsty Genius of this soil." The Genius is a familiar and favourite expression with Shakespeare. The word would probably be written with a capital initial; and in one form of our old handwriting the & and E very much resembled each other, as they still do in the German printed character. On this outside page of the manuscript put into the hands of the printer the body of the word might be nearly rubbed out and invisible. Five lines before, in the first line of the speech, it is doubtful whether we ought to read "wan with care" or worn with care;" the latter is the correction of Mr. Collier's MS. annotator, and certainly it would seem to be more natural for the King to speak of his anxieties as wearing him down and wasting him away than as merely blanching his complexion. This outside leaf of the manuscript was evidently in a somewhat dilapidated state.

It is only upon this supposition of the old text of the Plays having been printed from a partially obliterated or otherwise imperfectly legible manuscript,