SHAKESPEARE'S MANUSCRIPT.•
Ix has become the fashion amongst recent. commentators on Shake- speare to regard the Quartos in which nineteen of his plays first appeared in print as pirated editions devoid of much authority in deciding questions of interpretation or establishing a Round text "Sometimes," says Mr. Morton Luce in his admirable Handbook to Shakespeare's Works, " they may have been printed from an acting version, but they were mostly 'piratical,' being copies surreptitiously obtained by unscrupulous publishers. The manner of their production was probably as follows the publisher would send a shorthand writer to take clown what he could of the play ; this, written out, would be corrected at another performance, and then hastily printed." The object of the present work is to rehabilitate thecreclit of these Quartos, to show that in the majority of cases they were authorized versions honestly bought from the players whose property they were, and, quite probably, net up in typo direct from Shakespeare's manuscript.
The piracy theory, as we may call it, originated from a remark by Heminge sad Condell in the preface to the First Folio of 1623, that the public had previously been " abus'd with diuerso 8tolne and surreptitious eopies " ; and it is supported by a complaint made by Heywood in 1608 that his play of Queen Elizabeth had been taken down by stenography and put in print " scarce one word treys." We must remember, however, that it has never been fully demonstrated ; it is merely a working hypothesis which holds the field only in default of some better explanation of the facts ; and Mr. Pollard has various considerations to urge against it. In the first place, the suggested method of theft, although feasible as an occasional expedient, was too open to detection and summary checkmate to develop into a constant practice. Both the recog- nized Companies of Players were under the protection, respect- ively, of the Lord High Admiral and the Lord Chamberlain, two of the most important members of the Privy Council, which exer- cised complete control over the printing trade ; and even if it were not politic for the players to invoke the help of the Council against isolated acts of piracy, they would hardly tolerate wholesale in- vasions of their rights without effective protest to their patrons. Furthermore, to gain the full benefit of his theft, the thief would have to secure the copyright in the stolen work by entering it at Stationers' Hall. In the twenty years ending June, 1010, over a hundred and fifty plays were so entered on the Register, in some years only two or three appeasing, and in others from seventeen to twenty-eight. The pirates might, of course, be more audacious or fortunate on seine occasions than on others, lint accidents of luck or daring are insufficient normally to explain so great a variation in output as this.
If, however, we suppose with Mr. Pollard that the entries on the Register represent plays sold to publishers by the legitimate owners, it is easy to account for the discrepancy ; for although then, as now, it was generally more profitable to set a play than to print it, at times it was not so. There were the normal risks of waning popu- larity or the temporary withdrawal of Court favour ; there were epidemic outbursts of plague ; there was the growing Puritan dislike
of
Ai:ir"L7'1V.V.Vril.id'ion'w.: Alt:LIZ= ofieTAIT7tr" of the drama, which at least once restricted performances to two a week and stopped them altogether during Lent—all tending to curtail the players' income and close the theatres. In these seasons of depression it would be natural for them to try to make what they could out of their stock of plays by sending them to the preen ; and We find, as a matter of fact, that the periods of maximum registration coincide fairly closely with times which we know to have been peculiarly hard for the players. There is collateral evidence in support of this argument : Shakespearean editors concur in condemning five out of the nineteen Quartos ae excep- tionally bad texts ; none of these was registered by its publisher; while, of the remaining fourteen, all were eventually registered.
Having thus arrived at the conclusion that the Quartos entered at Stationers' Hall were legitimate editions, Mr. Pollard inquires further from what manuscript were they printed. Here, too, there is little doubt ; that they were set up from prompt copies is pretty clearly proved by the occasional substitution of the names of actors for those of the characters they represented, and by the in- sertion of the prompter's professional notes in the printed stage directions. Mr. Pollard then brings forward evidence indicating that the prompter probably worked on manuscripts submitted to the licenser of plays ; and he argues, partly from general con- siderations and partly from Heminge and Condell'e famous com- ment (" Woe have coarse received from him a blot in his papers "), that the licensed copies were, in all probability, in Shakespeare's own handwriting.
It may be asked what light does this throw on Shakespeare, or has it no importance except to those curious in bibliography. The lee; part of the book shows how the theory, if accepted, may modify nonce of our ideas of the interpretation of Shakespeare. Hitherto editors have usually followed Dr. Johnson in assuming full power to amend the punctuation wherever they thought it advisable; but this liberty can no longer be allowed if, making due allowance for printers' errors, we have the dramatist's own punctua- tion on record. In his time, stops were used less for reasons of syntax than as a guide to elocution. " A fullstop, except when a speech is completely finished, always means business—very often theatrical business ; at the least a change of tone or of the person addressed; occasionally a sob or a carrots." The restoration of the original punctuation is tho best available way of ascertaining how Shakespeare wished his speeches to be delivered.
We have outlined the principal thesis and some of the chief arguments of the present volume, which limitations of space prevent us from discussing in detail. It is undeniably an important contri- bution to the textual criticism of Shakespeare ; if the author has not proved his case to demonstration, he has at least thrown upon the opposition the onus of producing a better one. We would ask him, however, whence he think° the editors of the First Folio derived their text of Othello. It was not taken from the Quarto which, on his theory, was set up from the author's manuscript. Dose he admit, for this occasion only, the stenography method 7 Or does he hold with Professor Raleigh that Shakespeare was medi- tating a collected edition of his works and had prepared a revised version of this play for the press
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