office to her son, the Protector, addressing the young king, exclaims,

"My staff? here, noble Henry, is my staff:

To think I fain would keep it makes me laugh ;
As willingly I do the same resign,

As e'er thy father Henry made it mine."

The line in Italic type is met with in no old copy, but when we find it in a hand-writing of about the time; when we see that something has so evidently been lost, and that what is offered is so nicely dovetailed into the place assigned to it, can we take upon ourselves to assert that it was foisted in without necessity or authority? On the contrary, ought we not to welcome it with thankfulness, as a fortunate recovery, and a valuable restoration?

In several instances, it is easy, on other grounds, to understand how the blunders were occasioned. In more than one of those places, where Malone's printer was guilty of omissions of the sort, two consecutive lines ended with the same word, and he probably missed one of them, thinking that he had already composed it. Such was, doubtless, the predicament of the ancient printer; and we may quote a remarkable proof of the fact from "Coriolanus," that worst specimen of typography in the whole folio. In Act III. Scene II., Volumnia thus entreats her indignant and impetuous son to be patient :

"Pray be counsell'd.

I have a heart as little apt as yours,

But yet a brain, that leads my use of anger
To better vantage."

To what is Volumnia's heart as little apt as that of Coriolanus? She does not tell us, and the sense is undeniably incomplete; but it is thus completed in the folio, 1632, by the addition of a lost line:

"Pray be counsell'd. I have a heart as little apt as yours

It seems impossible to doubt the genuineness of this insertion, unless we go the length of pronouncing it not only an invention, but an invention of the utmost ingenuity; for while it renders perfect the deficient sense, it shows at once what caused the error: the recurrence of the same words, "use of anger," at the end of two following lines, deceived the old compositor, and induced him to fancy that he had already printed a line, which he had excluded.

Are we not entitled, then, to consider this copy of the folio, 1632, an addition to our scanty means of restoring and amending the text of Shakespeare, as important as it is unexpected? If it had contained no more than the comparatively few points to which we have adverted in this Introduction, would it not have rendered an almost inappreciable service to our literature, and to Shakespeare as the great example of every species of dramatic excellence? It strikes me as an impossible supposition, that such as these were purely conjectural and arbitrary changes; and it follows as a question, upon which I shall not now enlarge, how far such indisputable emendations and apposite additions warrant us in imputing to a higher authority, than we might otherwise be inclined to acknowledge, some of the more doubtful alterations recorded in the ensuing pages.

In order to give the reader an exact notion of the handwriting of the old corrector, and of his businesslike method of annotation, a facsimile has been prefixed, which faithfully represents the original. In this place the ink seems uniform, but our choice has been influenced, not so much by the worth of the play, or by the value of the emendations, as by the circumstance that it includes, in the compass of an octavo page, examples of the manner in which corrections of nearly all kinds are made, from the insertion of a single letter to the addition of a line, omitted in all the folios,

together with the striking out of a passage not considered necessary for the performance'.

It will be remarked, from the title-page, that the present volume is supplemental to the edition of Shakespeare's Works I formerly superintended. It was there my leading principle to adhere to the old quartos and folios, wherever sense could be made out of the words they furnished: that they were wrong, in many more places than I suspected, will now be evident; but I allowed myself no room for speculative emendation, even where it seemed most called for. Had the copy of the folio, 1632, the authority for nearly all that follows, devolved into my hands anterior to the commencement of that undertaking, the result would have been in many important respects different: as it is, those volumes will remain an authentic representation of the text of our great dramatist, as it is contained in the early editions; and all who wish to ascertain the new readings proposed in the present work, will have the means of doing so without disturbing the ancient, and hitherto generally received, language of Shakespeare.

It will, I hope, be clear from what precedes, that I have been anxious rather to underrate, than to overstate the claims of this annotated copy of the folio, 1632. I ought not, however, to hesitate in avowing my conviction, that we are bound to admit by far the greater body of the substitutions it contains, as the restored language of Shakespeare.

2 It also explains the mode in which the corrector proceeded, when the division of a new scene had been improperly introduced in the old copy; for the erasure of Actus Quintus, Scæna Prima, and the insertion of same in manuscript mean, that what follows is merely a continuation of a preceding scene. The word briefely, lower down in the margin, exactly illustrates the way in which, by the non-crossing of the letter f, it was frequently mistaken for the long s: of course in this case no such blunder could be made. Those who were present on any of the four occasions, last year, when this volume was exhibited before the Shakespeare Society and the Society of Antiquaries, had an opportunity of observing all these peculiarities on other pages. It has been separately shown to many who wished to see the character of the alterations. b

As he was especially the poet of real life, so he was emphatically the poet of common sense; and to the verdict of common sense I am willing to submit all the more material alterations recommended on the authority before me. If they will not bear that test, as distinguished from mere verbal accuracy in following old printed copies, I, for one, am content to relinquish them. Hitherto the quartos and folios have been our best and safest guides; but it is notorious that in many instances they must be wrong; and while, in various places, the old corrector does not attempt to set them right, probably from not possessing the means of doing so, the very fact, that he has here refrained from purely arbitrary changes, ought to give us additional confidence in those emendations he felt authorized to introduce.

I shall probably be told, in the usual terms, by some whose prejudices or interests may be affected by the ensuing volume, that the old corrector knew little about the spirit or language of Shakespeare; and that, in the remarks I have ventured on his emendations, I prove myself to be in a similar predicament. The last accusation is probably true: I have read and studied our great dramatist for nearly half a century, and if I could read and study him for half a century more, I should yet be far from arriving at an accurate knowledge of his works, or an adequate appreciation of his worth. He is an author whom no man can read enough, nor study enough; and as my ambition always has been to understand him properly, and to estimate him sufficiently, I shall accept, in whatever form reproof may be conveyed, any just correction thankfully.