are noteworthy, and apparently not accidental, they will be discussed, in due course, as they occur in the following pages. As I have had occasion, more than once, to say, if this printed text of the Folio, over which we pore so earnestly, had been ever scanned by SHAKESPEARE's eyes, then we might accept it as a legacy where every comma becomes respectable; but since we know that, when the Folio was printed, SHAKESPEARE had been in his grave seven years, we discover that we are herein dealing merely with the skill, intelligent or otherwise, of an ordinary compositor; and that in our minute collation we are devoting our closest scrutiny to the vagaries of a printer. Thus we have the source of the Text of the Folio, but when we seek to discover that of the Quarto, we are met by the mystery which seems inseparable from all things connected with SHAKESPEARE'S outward life (I marvel that in the four thousand ways, devised by Mr WISE, of spelling SHAKESPEARE'S name no place is found for spelling it 'm-y-s-t-e-r-y'), and yet, in the present instance, I doubt that mystery is the exactest term. It is merely our ignorance which creates the mystery. To SHAKESPEARE's friends and daily companions there was nothing mysterious in his life; on the contrary, it possibly appeared to them as unusually dull and commonplace. It certainly had no incidents so far out of the common that they thought it worth while to record them. SHAKESPEARE never killed a man as JONSON did; his voice was never heard, like MARLOW's, in tavern brawls; nor was he ever, like MARSTON and CHAPMAN, threatened with the penalty of having his ears lopped and his nose slit; but his life was so gentle and so clear in the sight of man and of Heaven that no record of it has come down to us; for which failure, I am fervently grateful, and as fervently hope that no future year will ever reveal even the faintest peep through the divinity which doth hedge this king. We are quite ignorant of the way in which any of the Shakespearian Quartos came to be published. Were it not that HEMINGE and CONDELL pronounced them all to be 'stolne and surreptitious' we might have possibly supposed that SHAKESPEARE yielded to temptation and sold his Plays to the press,-a dishonest practice indulged in by some dramatists, as we learn from HEYWOOD'S Preface to his Rape of Lucrece where he says: 'some have used a double sale of their labours, 'first to the Stage, and after to the Presse.' But not thus dishonestly would the sturdy English soul of SHAKESPEARE act,—a trait not sufficiently considered by those who impute to him an indifference to the offsprings of his brain. His Plays once sold to the Theatre passed for ever from his possession, and to all allurements of subsequent money-getting from them he gave an honest kersey no. This vexed question of origin, the Quarto of Much Ado about Nothing shares in common with all the other Quartos, and, in addition, has a tidy little mystery of its own, which it shares with only three or four other Plays. The earliest mention of it appears in the Stationers' Registers as follows:-* 4. Augusti As you like yt a booke Euery man in his humour | a booke to be staied. This item does not stand in the body of the volume of the Stationers' Registers, but is on one of a couple of fly-leaves at the beginning, whereon are thirteen or fourteen other entries, all of which contain a caveat, such as: 'This to be entred to hym yf he can gett 'Aucthority for yt' or 'yf he can get yt aucthorised.' The year is not given. With one exception, all the other entries on this and the opposite page, nine in number, are dated 1603. The exception, immediately preceding the Much Ado entry, is dated in the margin: '27 May 1600.' It is quite possible to suppose, with MALONE, that the clerk seeing this date, 1600, in the preceding item, did not think it worth while to repeat it in the present. It is also quite possible to suppose, that the date being of less importance than the fact that the plays were to be staied,' the clerk believed that his memory would be sufficiently jogged by the heading, at the top of the page: 'my lord 'chamberlens menns plaies Entred.' But after all, here the date is of small importance; a subsequent entry gives us a date beyond gainsaying. The real mystery lies in the three words: 'to be staied.' Why they should be stayed, or at whose instigation, must for ever remain a problem. It is reasonable to suppose that, inasmuch as the plays were the property of my lord chamberlens menn,' the remonstrance against their printing, came from these proprietors. And yet if this remonstrance was effective in the first week in August, why did its efficacy fail in the last week of August, when the Quarto actually appeared? It never did fail in the case of As You Like It, whereof the appearance was stayed until it was issued in the Folio, in 1623. * ARBER'S Transcript, vol. iii, p. 37. Dr WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT, our highest living Shakespearian authority, suggests, in regard to this latter play, As You Like It, that the staying was due to the fact that the announcement was 'premature and 'that the play may not have been ready,' and he adduces certain signs of haste in the naming of the Dramatis Personæ, such as two Jaques, etc. But the staying in the case of Much Ado about Nothing was not permanent, as it was in the case of As You Like It, and yet we have in it a possible sign of haste rather more emphatic than any in As You Like It, in the introduction of a character, Innogen, who never speaks throughout the entire play. Moreover, to 'stay' the play because it was not ready, implies, I am afraid a certain complicity on the part of SHAKESPEARE in the publication of the Quartos which I, for one, should be loath to accept. Mr FLEAY suggested at one time† that all these four plays were ordered to be staied, because they were probably suspected of being 'libellous,' and were therefore 'reserved for further examination. Since 'the "war of the theatres" was at its height, they may have been ' restrained as not having obtained the consent of the Chamberlain, on 'behalf of the company, to their publication.' Inasmuch as Henry the Fifth, Every Man in his Humour, and Much Ado about Nothing, when they finally did appear, were issued by different publishers, Mr FLEAY afterward‡ said: 'it seems clear that the delay, of which so many hypothetical interpretations have been offered, was simply to enable Millington and Busby, who probably [Italics mine] had the 'copyrights of all four plays, to complete the sales thereof to the other 'publishers.' It seems equally clear, it must be acknowledged, that an explanation which rests on a probability is not far removed from all others of a hypothetical nature; and when once hypothesis has sway, what is to hinder us from supposing that in this, as in other cases, the cause of the 'staying' was JAMES ROBERTS? It has been assumed by all editors, I think without exception, since the days of MALONE, that the entry in the Stationers' Registers of August the fourth belongs to the year 1600, because the entry immediately preceding bears that date, and the clerk thought it needless to repeat it. But the preceding entry couples, with the date 1600, the name 'JAMES ROBERTS,' as the stationer who wished to enter two plays. Now, if the clerk thought it needless to repeat the 1600, why is it not equally likely that he thought it needless to repeat the name, JAMES ROBERTS, if to him both entries belonged? What may be assumed of a date, surely may * See As You Like It, p. 295, of this edition. † Life and Work, 1886, p. 40. Chronicle of the English Drama, 1891, vol. ii, p. 184. be assumed of a name, especially since all six plays belonged to the Chamberlain's company. Thus stand the entries on the page of the Register: my lord chamberlens menns plaies Entred viz 27 May 1600 A moral of clothe breches and velvet hose Is it straining the plain facts before us too far, to assume that all these plays were entered by JAMES ROBERTS, and that the caveat was due to his shifty character? It will be merely crambe repetita to rehearse what I have heretofore assumed as to the character of JAMES ROBERTS, and his influence in connection with SHAKESPEARE'S company, an influence, whereof the origin and extent must remain to us unknown, merely because we do not know and never shall know what was once the common gossip of the day. Nor, in reality, is the 'staying' of these Shakespearian Quartos of any real importance; it is worth mentioning only as another happy instance of our utter ignorance of SHAKESPEARE'S mortal life. But little more remains to be said about the Quarto. In the Stationers' Registers† under the running title: '42 Regin[a]e,' that is, 1600, we find as follows: Andrewe Wyse 23 Augusti Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens Two bookes. the one called Muche a Doo about nothinge. Thother the second parte of the history of kinge Henry the iiijth with the humours of Sir John Ffallstaff: Wrytten by master Shakespere xijd * As You Like It, p. 296, Merchant of Venice, p. 271, Midsummer Night's Dream p. xvi, of this edition. † ARBER'S Reprint iii, 170. Here, then, we have the exact, final date of the publication of the Quarto. ARBER remarks, in parenthesis, after the foregoing entry, that this is 'the first time our great poet's name appears in these Registers.' It is perhaps worth while to remark in reference to the spelling of the name, as there given, that both COLLIER and DYCE in reproducing the entry spell it Shakespeare, so uncertain is the reading of old chirography,especially if it be Court-hand or Chancery-hand, which SHAKESPEARE used when he subscribed to his Will, and to the Blackfriars Deed and in which, like other laymen, he was but little skilled. HALLIWELL-PHILLIPPS reproduces the same entry from the Stationers' Registers, and yet his copy varies from Arber's in ten or twelve minute particulars, such as twoo where the latter has 'Two,' adoo for 'a Doo,' Kinge for 'kinge,' humors for 'humours,' Mr. for 'master', &c.-quite insignificant all of them, it may be readily acknowledged, but, nevertheless, they are variations, and full of sad warning when we approach the awful problem of the spelling of the Poet's name as deduced from his written signature. For myself, I at once acknowledge that I prefer to accept the spelling, SHAKESPEARE, adopted by the Poet himself, and so printed by his fellow-townsman, RICHARD FIELD, in both Venus and Adonis and in Lucrece. This alone is for me quite sufficient, and evidently his contemporaries shared the same opinion. Out of all the twenty-eight editions of the Quartos bearing the author's name on the title-page, and published during the Poet's lifetime, fifteen spell the name SHAKESPEARE, twelve spell it SHAKE-SPEARE, and one spells it SHAK-SPEARE. To this unanimity (the hyphen is merely a guide to the pronunciation) we may add the Poet's personal friends, HEMINGE and CONDELL, who thus print it, SHAKESPEARE, in the First Folio. There is one other item, in reference to the Text, which I think worthy of note. When it is asserted that the Folio follows the text of the Quarto, we assume that the compositors of the Folio had before them, as 'copy,' the pages of the Quarto, either printed or in manuscript. If this assumption be correct, there will remain an unexplained problem. At the present day, when compositors set up from printed copy, they follow that copy slavishly, almost mechanically. Surely, the same must have been true of the less intelligent compositors of SHAKESPEARE'S time, and we might justly expect that the printed page of the Quarto which had served as copy would be exactly reproduced in the Folio, in spelling, in *Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1882, p. 528. |