Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/396

 restored in 1882, and now possesses 9,640 volumes relating to Shakespeare.

At the time of Shakespeare's death in 1616 there had been printed seven editions of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ (1593, 1594 in 4to, 1596, 1599, 1600, and two in 1602 in 8vo); five editions of his ‘Lucrece’ (1594 in 4to, 1598, 1600, 1607, 1616 in 8vo); one edition of the ‘Sonnets’ (1609, facsimiled in 1862), and three editions of the piratical ‘Passionate Pilgrim,’ containing a few poems by him (1599, 1600 unknown, 1612). (The first editions of these four volumes were reproduced in facsimile at Oxford in 1905.) A sixth edition of ‘Lucrece’ (1624) and six later editions of ‘Venus’ (1617, 1620, 1627, two in 1630, and 1636) preceded the issue of the first collected edition of the ‘Poems’ in 1640 (London, by T. Cotes for I. Benson). Marshall's copy of the Droeshout engraving of 1623 formed the frontispiece. There are prefatory poems by Leonard Digges and John Warren, as well as an address ‘to the reader’ signed by the initials of the publisher, together with ‘an addition of some excellent poems to those precedent by other Gentlemen,’ which are mainly from Thomas Heywood's ‘General History of Women.’ A reprint appeared 1885.

Of Shakespeare's plays there were in print in 1616 only sixteen (all in quarto), or eighteen if we include the ‘Contention,’ the first draft of ‘2 Henry VI’ (1594 and 1600), and ‘The True Tragedy,’ the first draft of ‘3 Henry VI’ (1595 and 1600). Of the sixteen fully authenticated quartos, two plays reached five editions before 1616, viz. ‘Richard III’ (1597, 1598, 1602, 1605, 1612) and ‘1 Henry IV’ (1598, 1599, 1604, 1608, 1615). Three reached four editions, viz. ‘Richard II’ (1597, 1598, 1608 supplying the deposition scene for the first time, 1615), ‘Hamlet’ (1603 imperfect, 1604, 1605, 1611), and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (1597 imperfect, 1599, two in 1609). Three reached three editions, viz. ‘Titus’ (1594, 1600, 1611), ‘Henry V’ (1600 imperfect, 1602, 1608), ‘Pericles’ (two in 1609, 1611). Four reached two editions, viz. ‘Midsummer Night's Dream’ (both in 1600), ‘Merchant of Venice’ (both in 1600), ‘Lear’ (both in 1608), and ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (both in 1609). Four achieved only one edition, viz. ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ (1598), ‘2 Henry IV’ (1600), ‘Much Ado’ (1600), ‘Merry Wives’ (1602 imperfect).

A second edition of ‘Merry Wives’ (again imperfect) and a fourth of ‘Pericles’ are both dated 1619. ‘Othello’ was first printed in 1622 (4to), and in the same year sixth editions of both ‘Richard III’ and ‘1 Henry IV’ appeared. Lithographed facsimiles of most of these volumes, with some of the quarto editions of the poems (forty-eight volumes in all), were prepared by Mr. E. W. Ashbee, and issued to subscribers by Halliwell-Phillipps between 1862 and 1871. A cheaper set of quarto facsimiles, undertaken by Mr. W. Griggs, and issued under the supervision of Dr. F. J. Furnivall, appeared in forty-three volumes between 1880 and 1889. The largest collection of the original quartos—each of which only survives in four, five, or six copies—are in the libraries of the Duke of Devonshire, the British Museum, the Bodleian, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Perfect copies range in price, according to their rarity, from 200l. to 2,000l. In 1864, at the sale of George Daniel's library, quarto copies of ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ and of ‘Merry Wives’ (first edition) each fetched 346l. 10s. On 23 April 1904 a copy of the quarto of ‘The Second Part of Henry IV’ (printed in 1600) was sold at Sotheby's for 1,035l. All the quartos were issued in Shakespeare's day at sixpence each.

On 8 Nov. 1623 Edward Blount and Isaac (son of William) Jaggard obtained license to publish sixteen hitherto unprinted plays, viz. ‘The Tempest,’ ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ ‘Measure for Measure,’ ‘Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As you like it,’ ‘All's Well,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Winter's Tale,’ ‘3 Henry VI,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ ‘Coriolanus,’ ‘Timon,’ ‘Julius Cæsar,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ In the same year Blount and Jaggard produced a folio volume of nearly a thousand pages containing all the plays mentioned, with the exception of ‘Pericles,’ and with the addition of ‘King John,’ ‘1 and 2 Henry VI,’ and the ‘Taming of the Shrew’ (none of the latter pieces received a license). Thirty-six pieces in all were thus brought together. The volume was sold at a pound a copy, and was described in the colophon as printed at the charges of W. Jaggard, I. Smithweeke, and W. Aspley, as well as of Blount. The latter doubtless saw it through the press (cf. Bibliographica, i. 489 seq.). The plays are arranged under three headings—‘Comedies,’ ‘Histories,’ and ‘Tragedies’—and each division is separately paged. ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ which is absent from the list of contents, was inserted hastily after the volume was printed off; it is placed at the end of the ‘Histories,’ and is unpaged. Doubtless the large work was long in printing. A unique copy in the Lenox Library, New York, bears the date 1622, and includes two cancelled leaves of sheet R (‘As you like it’).