INTRODUCTION: GENERAL

Summary

Editions of Shakespeare multiply; but it is now many years since the last attempt was made at a complete recension of Shakespeare's text, based upon a study and comparison, line by line, of the existing materials. In the interval scholars have made many discoveries, and not a few worthy to be called illuminating; since the new light they shed on these materials exhibits them (as we believe) in truer proportions with truer relative values.

We shall indicate, by and by, the most important of these discoveries, as justifying a belief that since the day, some three hundred years ago, when preparations were begun in the printing-house of William Jaggard and his son Isaac for the issue of the First Folio, no moment has been more favourable for auspicating a text of the plays and poems than that which begets the occasion of this new one. But no time must be lost in assuring the reader that we enter upon our task diffidently, with a sense of high adventure tempered by a consciousness of grave responsibility; and that at the outset we have chosen for phylactery these wise words by one of Shakespeare's wisest editors, William Aldis Wright—‘After a considerable experience I feel justified in saying that in most cases ignorance and conceit are the fruitful parents of conjectural emendation.’