Advertisement. THE text on which this edition of Shakespeare is based is that of Collier, carefully compared with the folio of MDCXXIII. and the impressions of Johnson, Steevens, Malone, Boswell, and Knight. Dyce's remarks have also been consulted. Of the numerous editions in one volume, there is, perhaps, hardly one of which it may not be said that the size is too great, or the print too small. It occurred to the Publisher that considerable improvements yet remained to be made on the plan of the Englishman's Vade-mecum. He thought that by printing the names of the characters at full length, in the centre of the text, and in red ink, considerable relief would be afforded both to the memory and the eye of the reader, and that particular passages might be referred to with peculiar ease. He ventures, therefore, to hope that the present edition of Shakespeare may be found, in purity of text, to equal, and in convenience of form to excel, any of its countless and multiform predecessors. LIST OF ENGRAVINGS. Painted by Portrait of Shakespeare, Fac-simile of the original DROESHOUT Portrait by Tempest. Act I. Sc. 2. Taming of the Shrew. Act IV. Sc. 3.. All's Well That Ends Well. Act I. Sc. 3. The Winter's Tale. Act V. Sc. 3. King John. Act IV. Sc. 1 King Richard II. King Henry IV. King Henry IV. STOTHARD. C. Marr WRIGHT STOTHARD. STOTHARD. Was born at Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick, on the 23d of April, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover, and at various times alderman and bailiff of the town; his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of an ancient but decayed family in the county. It is most likely that the poet received his education at the free-school of Stratford; and we have the assertion of Aubrey that he was for some time a schoolmaster, and the plausible conjecture of Malone, based upon the familiarity displayed in his writings with the technicalities of the law, that he likewise served in the office of an attorney. Nothing certain, however, is known of his youth, but that he married, soon after the 28th November, 1582, Anne Hathaway, of Stratford; and that their first child was christened on the 26th of May, 1583. Twins were born to them in 1585, soon after which event Shakespeare went to seek his fortune in London. The well known story that he left Stratford in order to avoid the consequences of stealing deer from the park of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote rests upon a tradition, picked up by Betterton, the actor, some fifty years after the poet's death, and neither shaken nor strengthened by the diligence of many subsequent inquirers. We first hear of him in London in 1589, as a shareholder and player in the Blackfriars Theatre; and he had doubtless already commenced author, by altering or adapting the writings of others to the stage; for a passage in Spenser's "Tears of the Muses," in which he seems to be alluded to as "our pleasant Willy," proves that in 1591, when the poem was first printed, he had achieved a considerable reputation as a dramatist. In 1593 he published his poem of "Venus and Adonis," and in 1594 that entitled Lucrece." Both works were dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who rewarded the author with a gift of a thousand pounds. It was this bounty, perhaps, which enabled him to become a leading shareholder in the New Globe Theatre on the bankside in Southwark, built by the Blackfriars company, and opened in 1595. In summer, the same company used to perform at a theatre at Newington Butts. Shakespeare remained on the stage till 1604, when his name ceases to be found amongst the actors. He continued, however, to live in London-near the Bear Garden in Southwark; and to write for the stage until 1612 or 1613, when he took up his permanent abode at Stratford. There his gains had been from time to time invested in a substantial house called the New Place, and built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the reign of Henry VII., some other detached tenements, a hundred and seven acres of land, a garden and orchard, and the great tithes of the parish-property which may have been worth between two and three hundred pounds a year. This property must have been acquired mainly by the representations of his plays, and his own exertions as an actor. From his printed dramas he seems to have derived no profit, nor |