extensive, as was done for the folio, even the best texts of the plays have reached us. Whether it is sound or not—I think that it probably is—there were other playwrights who were far from adopting Shakespeare's attitude of detachment from the literary fate of his works. Jonson was a careful editor. Marston, Middleton, and Heywood all apologize for misprints in various plays, which they say were printed without their knowledge, or when they were urgently occupied elsewhere; and the inference must be that in normal circumstances the responsibility would have rested with them.[1] Marston, indeed, definitely says that he had 'perused' the second edition of The Fawn, in order 'to make some satisfaction for the first faulty impression'.[2]
The modern editions, with their uniform system of acts and scenes and their fanciful notes of locality—'A room in the palace', 'Another room in the palace'—are again misleading in their relation to the early prints, especially those based upon the play-house. Notes of locality are very rare. Occasionally a definite shift from one country or town to another is recorded;[3] and a few edited plays, such as Ben Jonson's, prefix, with a 'dramatis personae', a general indication of 'The scene'.[4] For the rest, the reader is left to his own inferences, with such help as the dialogue and the presenters give him; and the modern editors, with a post-Restoration tradition of staging in their minds, have often inferred wrongly. Even the shoulder-notes appended to the accurate reprints of the Malone Society, although they do not attempt localities, err by introducing too many new scenes. In the
- ↑ Epistles to Heywood, Rape of Lucrece; Marston, Malcontent, Fawn; Middleton, Family of Love. In Father Hubburd's Tales Middleton says, 'I never wished this book a better fortune than to fall into the hands of a truespelling printer'. Heywood, in an Epistle to Apology for Actors (1612), praises the honest workmanship of his printer, Nicholas Okes, as against that of W. Jaggard, who would not let him issue errata of 'the infinite faults escaped in my booke of Britaines Troy, by the negligence of the Printer, as the misquotations, mistaking of sillables, misplacing halfe lines, coining of strange and neuer heard of words'.
- ↑ 'Proofs' and 'revises' had come into use before 1619, for Jaggard, criticized by Ralph Brooke for his ill printing of Brooke's Catalogue of Nobility (1619), issued a new edition as A Discoverie of Errors in the First Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility (1622), regretting that his workmen had not given Brooke leave to print his own faulty English, and saying, 'In the time of this his vnhappy sicknesse, though hee came not in person to ouer-looke the Presse, yet the Proofe, and Reuiewes duly attended him, and he perused them (as is well to be iustifyed) in the maner he did before'; cf. p. 261.
- ↑ Cf. pp. 106, 107, 117, 127.
- ↑ e.g. Cynthia's Revels (F_{1}), 'The Scene Gargaphie'; Philaster (F_{2}), 'The scene being in Cicilie'; Coxcomb (F_{2}), 'The Scene; England, France' (but in fact there are no scenes in France!).
