INTRODUCTION

Summary

On 20 May 1608, the publisher Edward Blount entered for his copy in the Stationers' Register ‘under thandes of Sir George Buck knight and M^r Warden Seton’ two ‘bookes’, namely Pericles, prince of Tyre and Antony and Cleopatra. Such entries normally imply publication shortly afterwards. But here we are in all probability confronted with a blocking entry, in other words with an attempt on the part of Shakespeare's company to protect themselves against an anticipated piracy by employing a friendly publisher, who later shared with Jaggard the responsibility for the issue of the First Folio, to register his copyright in the plays named ‘under the hands of’ His Majesty's Censor of Plays and the Warden of the Stationers. That this precaution was justified, if inadequate, is proved by the appearance in 1609, without entry in the Register or printer's name on the title-page, of an obviously ‘stolen and surreptitious’ text of Pericles. And if no similar ‘bad quarto’ of Antony and Cleopatra has come down to us, the blocking entry may have been more effective in this case. Or perhaps, inasmuch as such an entry suggests alarm, the pirates were detected at their little game before it was finished. Anyhow, the sole text an editor has to go upon is that printed in the Folio of 1623, which, as will be shown in the Note on the Copy, is, fortunately for him, of unimpeachable authority; being set up to all appearances direct from the author's manuscript.