THE COPY FOR THE TEXT OF 1623

Summary

[Whereas I hope most-of the facts in the following essay are correct, so much research has been done on the text of Shakespeare in the last thirty-seven years that all the theories advanced to explain them need revision, as do references to the Bad Quartos. The irregularities, for example, in speech-headings and stage directions are now taken as evidence that the copy was derived from the author's draft or ‘foul papers’. I am still inclined, however, to take the ‘normal’ spelling and ‘auditory misprints’ as evidence that the actual copy for the text 1623 was not Shakespeare's autograph MS but a transcript therefrom, such a transcript as might have been made for the Gray's Inn performance of 1594 or for the printers of the First Folio (1623). See Greg, The Sh. First Folio, 1955, pp. 200—2. 1961.]

The Folio gives us the earliest extant text of Errors, and as the play is entered to Blount and Jaggard, together with other Folio plays, in the Stationers' Register for 8 November 1623, there is a strong presumption that it had not previously seen the light of print. We make a point of this, because there are certain features of the text which might tempt one to believe that the Folio printers had here a lost Quarto to go upon, as they had Quartos, not lost, in the case of the succeeding four plays in the volume.