73475.20 В. Copyright, 1903, by THOMAS Y. CROWELL & Co. Published February, 1903 HARVARD THE DE VINNE PRESS EDITORS' PREFACE CHAL reach the modern reader in the forms of speech befitting them and belonging to their time. Shakespeare, as it happens, has not hitherto been permitted to become familiar in the quaint Elizabethan setting befitting him and betraying the conditions belonging to the first publication of the Plays. Yet Chaucer is, of course, far more archaic, and Spenser is, though so little earlier, much more affected and remote in style, than Shakespeare. Without as much need for it, Shakespeare has been modernized to suit each succeeding epoch. Yet — barring only the longs for s, the interchangeable i and j, u and y, an occasional y for th, and the for them, the sign of abbreviation commonly used in printing of that age in order to get in all the words of a line without overlapping — there is practically nothing in the form of the first complete text of the Plays published in 1623, and commonly called the First Folio, particularly if these few changes mentioned be made, which should cause the present-day reader to stumble in reading it. The advantage of typographical fidelity to the first edition, so long withheld from the public, is obvious, and with no other changes whatever beyond those mentioned, either in wording, spelling, punctuation, or in general style of capitalizing and italicizing, that edition is here reproduced. Though the preservation of the original flavor of the first edition of Shakespeare be reason enough for such reproduction, stronger reasons remain to be stated. The First Folio is not merely the first collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works. It is the sole authority for twenty of the Plays, namely, The Tempest,'The Two Gentlemen of Verona,' Measure for Measure,' The Comedy of Errors,'' As You Like It,' The Taming of the Shrew,' ́All's Well that Ends Well,' Twelfth Night,' The Winter's Tale,' King John,' 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI,' Henry VIII,' Coriolanus,' Timon of Athens,' Julius Cæsar,' Macbeth,' Antony and Cleopatra,' and Cymbeline.' It furnishes the first complete text of at least two more - The Merry Wives of Windsor' and 'Henry V'—the earlier Quarto issues of which were incomplete as well as unauthorized. The separate earlier appearance in sixpenny Quarto form of the remaining fourteen Plays does not mean that the Quarto issue was more authoritative than the Folio issue of the same Plays, for the reason that all such Quarto issues were surreptitious. They may or may not have been derived from copies of Shakespeare's manuscripts, as has in some cases been supposed. It is possible, although without actual evidence; but it is against probability, for the Quartos certainly were unauthorized. And though the Folio editors exercised little supervision, and may be convicted, in certain instances, of not printing from any better copies, and of using the Quartos so conveniently already in type when they made up their collective edition, still the Folio, it must be admitted, has what measure of |