Page:Shakespeare of Stratford (1926) Yale.djvu/133

Shakespeare of Stratford and Hamlet and all the quartos of Henry V, the Merry Wives, and Pericles, the text of which evidently depends upon truncated and very inexact reconstructions of the acted plays, obtained against the will of the company. Another group of bad quartos is a set of spurious editions issued in 1619 by Thomas Pavier with false earlier dates; these include the second editions of The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King Lear, and the third edition of Henry V. To the same group belong also the 1619 Pericles and Merry Wives, the dates of which have not been falsified.

Elizabethan printing was of indifferent quality, and the best printers of the day were not the ones who brought out the cheap play quartos. Misprints are numerous and differences of text frequently appear in different copies of the same quarto, owing to the slovenly habit of waiting to correct errors till they were casually observed as the sheets were being printed off. The tendency is for the text of a play to degenerate through the series of editions, each later quarto being printed from the one immediately preceding it and adding typographical errors to those its predecessor had accumulated. Except in the case of the two poems, it is unlikely that Shakespeare exercised supervision over the printing of any of his works. Some were undoubtedly printed fraudulently and without the aid of an authoritative manuscript.

Of the twenty titles which appeared in print before 1623, Titus Andronicus and Henry V are anonymous in all the quartos, and Shakespeare’s name appears for the first time on the title-page of certain copies of the fourth, undated, edition of Romeo and Juliet. The