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The Text of Shakespeare: Its History from the Publication of the Quartos and Folios Down to and Including the Publication of the Editions of Pope and Theobald
The Text of Shakespeare Its History from the Publication of the Quartos and Folios Down to and Including the Publication of the Editions of Pope and Theobald Author:Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DIFFERENCES OF THE EARLY TEXTS It is evident from the facts given in the preceding chapter that, whatever may have been Shakespeare's individua... more »l sentiments, his practice conformed to that of his contemporaries. The same agencies which affected the conduct of his brother dramatists and the fortunes of what they wrote operated also more or less upon him and his works. As they revised and recast previous pieces, so did he. As they entered into partnership with other writers in the composition of plays, so did he. As their productions have come down to us in varying degrees of textual excellence, or as it might sometimes seem, of textual corruption, so have his. As some of theirs have been lost, it is to be feared that some of his may have suffered the same fate. We know from Meres that a play of his called ' Love's Labor's Won,' had been produced before 1598. It is a title that would serve for a large majority of all the comedies which have ever been written. Conjecture finds it still existing in several of his pieces which go under other names, notably in ' All's Well that Ends Well.' This may be so; we can never be absolutely sure that it is so. One thing is fairly certain. Had not Ileming and Con- dell performed the pious duty of collecting and printingthe works of their old comrade, we are more than likely to have missed seeing some of the dramas which made their appearance in the folio of 1623; and included in the list of those then first published are such tragedies as ' Julius Ciesar,' ' Antony and Cleopatra,'Corio- lanus,' and ' Macbeth,' and such comedies as ' Twelfth Night,' ' As You Like It,'' The Winter's Tale,' and ' The Tempest.' We can never form a correct estimate of the difficulties which beset the establishment of the text of Shakespeare, or dis...« less