1 छ *The above autograph of "WILLM. SHAKSPERE" is copied from his undoubted signature in the volume of Montaigne's Essays, by John Florio, which was purchased, for a large sum, by the Trustees of the British Museum, NOTICE OF THE ORIGINAL EDITIONS OF THE PLAYS. We propose here to give a very brief account of the Original Copies, upon which the Text of every edition of our author must be founded. We reserve a more detailed notice for a General Preface, when this new impression of the 'Pictorial Shakspere,' with large corrections and additions, is more advanced. "Mr. William Shakspeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, published according to the True Originall Copies," is the title of this first collection of our poet's plays. This volume is "printed by Isaac Iaggard and Ed. Blount;" but the Dedication bears the signatures of "John Heminge, Henry Condell." That Blount and Jaggard had become the proprietors of this edition we learn from an entry in the Stationers' registers, under date November 8, 1623; in which they claim "Mr. William Shakespeere's Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedyes, soe many of the said copies as are not formerly entered to other men." Most of the plays " formerly entered to other men" had been previously published— some in several editions-at dates extending from 1597 to 1622. These are what are commonly spoken of as the quarto editions. John Heminge and Henry Condell were amongst the "principal actors" of the plays of Shakspere, according to a list prefixed to their edition. In 1608 they were shareholders with Shakspere in the Blackfriars Theatre. In his will, in 1616, they are honourably recognized in the following bequest"To my fellows, John Hemynge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, twenty-six shillings eight-pence apiece, to buy them rings." In 1619, after the death of Shakspere and Burbage, they were at the head of their remaining "fellows." B 2 This first folio edition is dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery. The two friends and fellows of Shakspere, in an Address "to the great variety of readers," use very remarkable words :-"It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he, by death, departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them; and so to have published them, as where, before, you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured, and perfect of their limbs; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” That the editors of Shakspere were held to perform an acceptable service to the world by this publication, we may judge from some of the verses prefixed to the edition. Ben Jonson's celebrated poem, "To the Memory of my beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us," follows the preface, and it concludes with these lines: "Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage, Or influence, chide, or cheer, the drooping stage; Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night, And despairs day, but for thy volume's light." Another poem in the same volume, by Leonard Digges, is in the same tone: "Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellows give The world thy works; thy works by which outlive Here we alive shall view thee still. This book, When brass and marble fade, shall make thee look The edition of 1623 secured from a probable destruction, entire or partial, some of the noblest monuments of Shakspere's genius. The poet had been dead seven years when this edition was printed. Some of the plays which it preserved, through the medium of the press, had been written a considerable period before his death. We have not a single manuscript line in existence, written, or supposed to be written, by Shakspere. If, from any notions of exclusive advantage as the managers of a company, Heminge and Condell had not printed this edition of Shakspere,-if the publication had been suspended for ten, or at most for fifteen, years, till the civil wars broke out, and the predominance of the puritanical spirit had shut up the theatres,—the probability is that all Shakspere's manuscripts would have perished. What then should we have lost, which will now remain when "brass and marble fade!" We will give the list of |