the modern spelling and punctuation of passages rendered obscure by the pointing and spelling of the Folio. Changes of the Elizabethan spelling and punctuation made in the Victorian or Globe text, when they do not affect the sense, are not noted; and, in general, these Elizabethan eccentricities in externals do not interfere with the understanding of the original by any intelligent modern reader. A little reading will soon acquaint one with these verbal habits — the I for ay or for Í alike, whether for whither, then for than, vilde for vile, or the question-mark used for exclamation with a questioning inflection, and the like. These antique habits, often ignorantly supposed to betoken illiteracy, more often simply reveal the plastic conditions of written speech then prevalent, and in the Folio they are, moreover, peculiarly interesting as indicative of the pronunciation, the meter, and of the general conditions under which the Plays of Shakespeare were published.

However inadequate and faulty these conditions were, the exposition of them, without change, is more desirable than questionable correction, and any later editorial correction must be questionable. The truth - the actual fact— is preëminently desirable.

Just as it stands, with all its imperfections on its head, the First Folio is, as Halliwell-Phillipps has well called it, the most interesting and valuable book in the whole range of English literature.'

This unrivaled volume it has been the aim of the present editors to place before the public faithfully, but in easily readable form. They have sought also to add to it such a systematized apparatus of brief textual footnotes and copious end-volume notes, together with glossaries, lists of Variorum readings, and introductions for each Play, as may combine with the Elizabethan

text the advantages of a thoroughly modern editorial equipment, embracing the results of Shakespearian scholarship.

Deeply conscious of the large legacies bequeathed them by their predecessors, the editors desire here, finally, to express their grateful appreciation of all the work and research which has enriched their own. Especially are they indebted to the archæological researches of Halliwell-Phillipps, and to the labors of the Cambridge editors in collation of the texts, to Dr. Rolfe, and to Dr. Furness, whose new and thoroughly American lead they have followed in adopting for this edition the First Folio text.

CHARLOTTE PORTER.

HELEN A. CLARKE. Boston, January 5, 1903.

INTRODUCTION

AN is but an ass if he go about to expound this

to be a most rare vision, a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was; and who shall gainsay the broad hint of his design the poet has thus whimsically put in the mouth of that one of his human mortals' who had the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens '!

From the discernment of handicraftsmen, including Shakespearian critics, of all capitals and countries, the dazing witchery of the play has refused its beauty to be hidden. Only such bygone gentlemen as Pepys, in the disenchanting Restoration period, and Lord Orford, in the broad noon of the mid-eighteenth century, have been able to keep their own prosaic eyes wide open to the preposterous stuff whereof it is made. Looking not with that eye of fancy the play has been potent to gift other men with, these two have sniffed at it, and writ themselves down concerning it in this fashion: Pepys, in his Diary,' recording to the King's Theatre, where we saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life'; and Orford, in a letter

complaining of the detestable’ English opera Garrick had produced, writing — And to regale us with sense, it is Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, which is forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera books.'

Here and there, perchance, a voice resists the spell and breaks out enough to point at some defects in the realism; but, as if ashamed of its temerity, a burst of praise is sure to follow, and defects are relegated to minus quantities in the sum of so many beauties. .

Chaucer's favorite device for spinning enchanting yarns was to fall asleep and dream his whole story-a device borrowed, of course, from his French and Italian predecessors. The laurel-bound band down the centuries having handed on to him the ever-living lyre tuned to this key, he sang on in the same vein at England's daybreak in the strange new English speech where the French syllabling still lingers.

It is interesting to see the young Shakespeare, in his turn, in the growing glow of the Elizabethan morning, take up the same device. In this the last and most triumphantly skilful of the four early comedies,— Love's Labour's Lost,' «The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' • The Comedy of Errors, and this, making up the group of plays generally conceded to be the first whereon the initial promptings of his own genius were wreaked, he employs, indeed, the old poetic device, but with what strange and beautiful complexities!

The merely lyrical simplicity, the direct narrative, of the old-time dream-device is here enriched with an effectiveness altogether dramatic and novel. Instead of dreaming himself, the poet lulls to sleep his dramatis personæ and makes them dream dreams and see visions. For prologue and epilogue he introduces — in presenting