1604, by "his Majesty's Servants"; but Mr. White has given some very good reasons for believing that this was an older play by another author, and probably founded upon Cinthio's novel called "The Moor of Venice," especially as the names of Othello and Iago appear to have been taken from the "History of the Prince of Denmark," which was not printed until 1605, and that it was not the "Othello" of Shakespeare, which bears internal evidence of the matured hand of the master; the composition of which he would place as late as 1611, or afterwards, mainly on the ground that it contains an unmistakable allusion to the creation of the order of baronets, which took place in that year, supported by the consideration of the rather extraordinary circumstance that it was not printed before 1622, thirteen years having then elapsed since the last quarto of a new play had appeared, and when there were nineteen other plays, which had never been printed, and were known to the public only upon the stage; that is, such of them as were known at all; for, of some of them, as the "Coriolanus," the " Antony and Cleopatra," and the "Timon of Athens," there is no evidence that they had ever appeared upon the stage, or were known to the public, before they were printed in the Folio. This is, indeed, very remarkable; and, taking Mr. White's opinion to be well founded, since Mr. Collier's entry of the "Othello" in the Egerton Papers of the date of 1602 has been clearly shown to be a downright forgery, there remains on record no notice whatever of this "Othello" until it was entered at Stationers' Hall in October, 1621. But that this play should have made its first appearance at Court as so many others did, or even at the house of the Lord Keeper Egerton, a friend of Sir Francis Bacon, need not be considered as anything extraordinary in itself, and that it had not fallen into the hands of the printers before 1622, though it had been upon the stage some years before that date, Richard Burbage, who died in 1619, having been famous in the character of Othello, may be considered less surprising, when it is remembered that the same is true of several other of the later and greater plays of this author.1 The previous quartos may be considered under three heads first draughts, surreptitious editions of stolen copies, and completed plays. Of some of these first draughts and surreptitious copies, the completed and perfected plays appeared for the first time in the Folio of 1623; of others of them, as the "Hamlet" for instance, we have quartos nearly complete before 1604; and of nineteen of the plays, the first known editions are in the Folio. And of those which had previously appeared in quarto, it is found that some of them had been remodelled and rewritten, that others had undergone extensive revision, with important additions, alterations, omissions, and emendations, and that nearly all of them had received such critical correction and emendation as necessarily to imply that they were made by the hand of the master himself. The "Othello" of the Folio was printed at about the same time as the quarto, and, as Mr. Knight thinks, was probably struck off before it, but from the original manuscript without reference to the quarto; Mr. White agrees that it was printed from another and an improved text; and it is regularly divided into acts and scenes, while the quarto is not, and contains one hundred and sixty-three lines, the most striking in the play, which are not found in the quarto, while the quarto does not contain ten lines which are not in the Folio; 2 and both these critics agree that the additions and corrections are of such a nature as to indicate the agency of the author's own hand, as in the case of the "Hamlet," the "Lear," the " Richard II.," the "Richard III.," the " Henry IV.," and, indeed, of nearly all the plays. Now, whence this difference in the manuscript copy? According to Mr. White, the "Love's Labor's Lost" of 1 White's Shakes., XI. 362-4. 2 Knight's Stud. of Shakes.; White's Shakes., XI. 360-4. the Folio corrects a great many more errors than it makes, and has variations which must have come from some other source than the previous quarto. The "Henry V." of the Folio contains nineteen hundred lines more than the quarto of 1600, and, according to Mr. Knight, is not only augmented by the addition of new scenes and characters, but there is scarcely a speech which is not elaborated. The "Merry Wives of Windsor" in the Folio contains nearly double the number of lines that are found in the quarto of 1602, and it is greatly remodelled, whole scenes rewritten, speeches elaborated and emended, and characters heightened by the addition of new and distinctive features. Slender is a small affair in the quarto, and Shallow a different person altogether in the Folio. The "Titus Andronicus" appears in the Folio with a whole new scene added, and the "Much Ado About Nothing" in the Folio, according to White, has important corrections of a nature to indicate that they were made by authority; and it is greatly superior to the quarto in respect of editorial supervision. The "Lear" of the Folio, as compared with the quarto of 1608, contains large additions, corrections, and omissions. Some fifty lines of the Folio are not found in the quarto, and some two hundred and twenty-five lines of the quarto, comprising one whole scene and some striking passages, are omitted in the Folio. The omissions can no more be attributed to Heming and Condell than the additions, which, says Knight, "comprise several such minute touches as none but the hand of the master could have superadded." "1 The "Tempest," the "Winter's Tale," the "Measure for Measure," the "Cymbeline," the "Midsummer Night's Dream," the "Henry VIII.," the "Julius Cæsar," the "Lear," the "Troilus and Cressida," and the "Antony and Cleopatra," (according to both Knight and White), are among those which are printed with singular correctness in the Folio, some of them even to the niceties of punctua1 Stud. of Shakes., 337. tion, furnishing the most decisive evidence of unusual care in the supervision of the press; while some few others appear to have had but little attention from editor or proofreader. But here is enough, without dwelling further upon particular instances, to warrant the conclusion, not merely that the Folio of 1623 must be taken as the most authentic edition of the plays that we have, but that it had an editorial revision, as compared with all previous editions, far beyond anything that can safely be imagined for Heming and Condell. Indeed, as to the greater part of the corrections and all the additions and principal emendations, they can only be attributed, as they have been, to the author himself. And then the proposition for William Shakespeare must be, that they were all made before his death, if not before he retired from London; and this (it is perhaps conceivably possible) he might have done as easily as he could write the "Tempest," the "Winter's Tale," and the "Henry VIII.," between 1610 and 1613, and the "Othello" before 1616. But the theory also requires us to believe that he furnished the new and amended manuscript copies to the theatre, which were "the true original copies" in the hands of Heming and Condell, seven years later, the "Othello" inclusive. Having no regard for his reputation and fame as an author, why should he take all this trouble and pains merely for the benefit of the theatres which he had left? Or, having such regard, why should he wholly neglect to collect and publish them himself? Or if prevented by death, how should he fail to make any provision for their preservation and publication afterwards? And finally, having furnished to the theatre the finished manuscript of the "Othello," before 1616, how should there be such a difference between the quarto and the folio, when the manuscript for both must have come from the theatre, if not from the hands of Heming and Condell? And, in either case, how should an old and imperfect copy have been put into the hands of the printer, when the complete and perfect manuscript had been in the actual use of the theatre for more than seven years! But if the real author were still living to make these revisions himself, the whole mystery would be explained, and especially this enigma of the "Othello," which so much requires explanation; and the comparison of a single passage like the following is almost enough of itself to raise a strong suspicion that the fact was so. In the first scene of the second act, we find this expression "the thought whereof Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards ": and these lines, not found in the quarto of 1622, were inserted in the speech of Brabantio (Act I. Sc. 2) in the Folio: 1. "Judge me the world, if 't is not gross in sense, All this is in exact keeping with Bacon's ideas of " mineral medicines," that were "safer for the outward than inward parts," and of the effects which they may produce; as in a speech he uses the figure of "a certain violent and mineral spirit of bitterness." It is possible, too, to suppose that these improved original manuscripts may have passed from the theatre into the hands of Heming and Condell; that they were submitted to the Master of the Revels for license and then placed in the hands of the printers; and that, being superseded in the use of the stage by the printed plays, they may have finally gone to destruction; but it is extremely difficult, as Mr. Halliwell observes, to account for their total disappearance. And it is certainly a little remarkable, that neither these editors, who took the pains to collect and publish these works, should have preserved a single manuscript as 1 White's Shakes., XI., Notes, 494. |