Turned all to tears, and Phœbus clouds his rays:
That corpse, that coffin now bestick those bays,
Which crowned him Poet first, then Poets' King.
If Tragedies might any Prologue have,
All those he made, would scarce make one to this;
Where Fame, now that he gone is to the grave
(Death's public tiring-house) the Nuncius is.

For though his line of life went soon about.
The life yet of his lines shall never out.

HUGH HOLLAND.

TO THE MEMORIE

OF THE DECEASED AUTHOR MASTER

W. SHAKESPEARE.

SHAKESPEARE, at length thy pious fellows give
The world thy Works: thy Works, by which, out-live
Thy Tomb, thy name must when that stone is rent,
And Time dissolves thy Stratford Monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still. This Book,
When Brass and Marble fade, shall make thee look
Fresh to all Ages: when Posterity
Shall loath what's new, think all is prodigy
That is not Shakespeare's; every Line, each Verse
Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy Hearse.
Nor Fire, nor cankering Age, as Naso said,
Of his, thy wit-fraught Book shall once invade.
Nor shall I e'er believe, or think thee dead
(Though missed) until our bankrupt Stage be sped
(Impossible) with some new strain t'out-do
Passions of Juliet, and her Romeo;

Or till I hear a Scene more nobly take,
Than when thy half-Sword parlying Romans spake.
Till these, till any of thy Volumes rest
Shall with more fire, more feeling be exprest,
Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die,
But crowned with Laurel, live eternally.

L. DIGGES.

TO THE MEMORY OF M. W. SHAKESPEARE,

We wondered (Shakespeare) that thou wents't so soon
From the World's Stage, to the Grave's tiring room.
We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth,
Tells thy Spectators, that thou wents't but forth
To enter with applause. An Actor's Art,
Can die, and live, to act a second part.
That's but an Exit of Mortality,
This, a Re-entrance to a Plaudite.

J. M.

THE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

CONTAINING ALL HIS COMEDIES, HISTORIES AND
TRAGEDIES: TRULY SET FORTH, ACCORDING

TO THEIR FIRST ORIGINAL.

THE NAMES OF THE PRINCIPAL ACTORS

IN ALL THESE PLAYS.

PREFATORY
MATTER TO
FIRST FOLIO

TABLE OF

CONTENTS TO
FIRST FOLIO

A CATALOGUE

OF THE SEVERAL COMEDIES, HISTORIES, AND TRAGEDIES

CONTAINED IN THIS VOLUME.

The First Part of King Henry The Third Part of King Henry

The Second Part of King Henry The Life and Death of Richard
the Fourth.

The Life of King Henry the The Life of King Henry the
Fifth.

The Life and Death of Julius Anthony and Cleopatra.

THE TEMPEST

Preface.

The First Edition. The Tempest first appeared in the Folio of 1623, where it occupies pp. 1-19; no reference has been found to any earlier

edition.

The position of the play in the First Folio may perhaps be regarded as evidence of its contemporary popularity; or, it may have been merely due to a happy, if perhaps unconscious, intuition' on the part of the editors

It is a mimic, magic tempest which we are to see; a tempest raised by Art, to work moral ends with actual men and women, and then to sink into a calm. And in such a storm and calm we have the very idea of a Play or Drama, the fitting specimen and frontispiece of the whole volume of plays before us.' *

With the exception of The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest is the shortest of Shakespeare's plays; certain critics have held that the text was abridged for acting purposes; others refer its brevity to the unusual amount of stage-machinery introduced, or to the necessities of Court representation. The Epilogue to the play, as in the case of 2 Henry IV. and Henry VIII., is evidently by some other hand than Shakespeare's.

Some scholars hold the same opinion concerning the Masque in Act IV. Shakespeare may well have introduced it in compliance with the fashion of the time; it is obviously intended to celebrate some contemporary marriage. One must bear in mind the fondness for this species of poetical pageantry during the reign of James I. (cp. Ben Jonson's Masque).

Date of Composition. No positive evidence exists for the Date of Composition of The Tempest; the probabilities are in favour of 1610-12. The superior limit may be fixed at 1603; the speech of Gonzalo, describing his ideal Commonwealth (II. 1. 147, etc.), was certainly derived from a passage in Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays,' first pub

* Sir E. Strachey, Quarterly Review, July 1890, p. 116.