Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/356

 352 Mason prised "their Principal Old Stock Plays" are accorded more than bare " enumeration " by Downes, for their casts are given at some length : it is a subsidiary list of twenty-one plays that baldly " mentions" the titles alone (including Titus and Merry Wives, but not Casar). IV. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ERRORS There are serious errors of omission in this volume, from the bibliographical standpoint. The failure to mention Jag- gard's "Bibliography," Anders' useful compendium "Shake- speare's Books," and the Furnivall-Munro "Allusion Book" is extraordinary, but the failure to mention Binz's article in Anglia, 1899, establishing a performance of Cczsar in 1599, is simply inexcusable. Despite the quotation from Genest, on page 238, there is no indication anywhere that Mr. Furness recognized a quarto edition earlier than 1691; there were however, five quarto editions before 1691, one of them definitely dated 1684 (cf. the Pollard-Bartlett "Census"). And why should Downes be omitted? There are also errors of commission. Mr. Furness has difficulties with his French accents. "Awglia" and "Macau- ley" are careless slips. Why not retain the spellings preferred by the various authors in their titles? Bradley wrote " Shake- spearean; " not " Shakespearian " ; Hazlitt wrote " Shakespear's " not "Shakespeare's"; Leo wrote "Shakespeare-Notes," with a hyphen. Genest's record stops at 1830, not 1832. And where so many excellent works are necessarily excluded through lack of space, why should H. W. Mabie's popular rechauffe be men- tioned? One serious error in judgment is the failure to give the date of the first edition of the works listed. Mr. Furness professes in his "Plan of the Work, Etc." (p. 465) to give variorum Notes "at times as illustrations of the History of Shakespearian criticism": surely a very obvious way to illustrate this history is to tell a student when the various works in a selected bibliog- raphy of the most important authorities first appeared. We don't so much mind being a few years out in the cases of Baynes, Bradley, Craik, Hunter, Moultori, aad others, but we do object to such darkening of counsel as dates Coleridge's "Notes and