SHAKESPEARE SAVED

Evening Star, Issue 18258, 24 April 1923, Page 3

SHAKESPEARE SAVED

STORY OF THE FIRST FOLIO. [Written by Cyrano for the ‘ Evening Star.’] This week they will be celebrating at Home and in other parts of the world the tercentenary of the most valuable secular book in the world —the ‘ First Folio Shakespeare.’ The actual date of publication of the ‘Folio’ was near the end of 1625, but it was decided to celebrate the tercentenary on the date of Shakespeare’s birth and death, April 23. ‘ The First Folio ’ is part of the exasperating mystery of Shakespeare. He spent the last years of his life in semiretirement in Stratford, and there was plenty of time for him to collect and revise his plays; but he did not do so, and seven years elapsed after his death before that complete edition was issued that is the foundation of the Shakespearean text. The risks to which he was exposing his fame were grave. His plays existed either in manuscripts in the hands of actors and managers, or in the printed Quartos, which were unauthorised and full of blemishes. _ Many had not been printed. Why was it that while ho was quick to protect his rights to other propertv, he took no action about his plays! Was he indifferent or lazy: Did the bother of getting the manuscripts together and obtaining the consent of the theatrical managers deter him? Was he satisfied with the fame he had already won, or blind to the value of his work out-side the theatre! To us lie is a man judged, and it seems an extraordinary thing that the greatest of writers should have been so indifferent to the ultimate fate of his creations, Shakespeare himself, however, may have been concerned with nothing more than the fact that he had won success as a dramatist, and that theatre copies of his plays were available for any desired revivals. Probably we shall never know. Through his active years in London his sole anxiety seems to have been, says a biographer, to provide for the adequate representation ot his plays on the stage. Ho took no interest in the .surreptitious printing of them, neither substituting correct versions Tor the garbled ones m circulation, nor taking active stops against the offenders. The custom was to. frown upon publication of plays. Theatrical managers owned the copyrights, and did not wish to see the material broadcasted. One theatre threatened with fine and dismissal any actor sunnlv'ng “copy” to a printer. There was, 'however, a popular thirst for something to read, and there were few English classics to meet the enterprise oi. the host of competitive stationers and printer-publishers, so naturally these men turned to the drama that had burst into such popularity. Shakespeare was drawing the town, so why not print him . One method was to induce an actor or some one else behind the scenes to procure an acting copy; another was to send a man into the audience to take down the lines in a kind of rough shorthand. Probably the two methods were sometimes combined. The result was highly unsatisfactory, but this was the only means by which the _ people could read Shakespeare during his lifetime, and np to tho date of the ‘First Folio m 1620. In many cases these Quartos provided the best material for the editors Ql the and in others they have proved of the utmost value in helping commentators to fix the text. For some years after Shakespeare s death, twenty-one of his plays were in jeopardy. These were the plays that had not been printed during his lifetime; • The Tempest; ‘ The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ ‘Measure for Measure, Iho Comedy of Errors,’ ‘As You Like It, ‘ All’s Well That Ends Well,’ ‘Twelfth * 'The Winter Tale,’ the first, iecond, and third parts of ‘Henry VI., ‘Henry VIII.’, ‘King John.’ 'Conolanus,’ ‘ Tiraon of Athens,’ ‘ The Taming cf the Shrew,’ ‘.Tulips Caesar, ‘Macbeth,’ ‘ Antony and Cleopatra, ‘ Cymbeiine,’ and ‘Othello.’ These existed only in manuscripts in the theatres, and m a few private hands, and were exposed to -fie risk of fire and the carelessness and Indifference of man. The Globe Theatre had been burnt in 1613, an<l when, the Fortune Theatre was destroyed m 1621 all the manuscripts there were lost. It i=; estimated that between 1582 and 1642 three thousand plays were produced on the English stage, and that scarcely more than one in six is preserved in print; the rest have practically disappeared. Ut these twenty-one plays of Shakespeare s ‘OthGlo’ was printed separately in 1622 and the others were given to the world (with those already published in quarto form) in the ‘ First Folio ’of 1623. The two men nominally responsible for this venture wer John Heminges and Henry Condell, both of whom had been fellowactors of Shakespeare's. Heminges had been business manager of Shakespeare s company. The folio is therefore not only the chief source of the Shakespeare text: it gives the best proof of Shakespeare's identify. These actors had worked with Shakespeare, and their avowed aim was, in tho language of the address in the folio, to keep his memory alive. Had it been suggested to them, arid to the other men who had a hand in the folio —Ben Jonson contributed two sets of verses on Shakespeare--that the author was Francis Bacon and that William Shakespeare was only a “ blind,” it would have taken many a cup of wine at the Mermaid to “'drown the memory of this insolence.” The editors used as ‘‘copy” for the complete works the editions of the phvs already published, and manuscripts of the others. There is a tradition that no manuscript of ,‘ Macbeth ’ existed and that the lines were taken down from the mouths of the actors. What Mr Masefield so finely calls “ the unspeakable splendor of vision" might easily have been lost to the world. Judged by modern standards, the folio was poorly edited, and indifferently printed, and it has remained for subsequent editors to do the laborious work of comparing the folio editions with the quartos, and producing, with infinite pains, the best possible text from material that was often put together under very unfavorable conditions. Numbers of scholars have given years of their lives to this work, but the average leader of Shakespeare cannot realise how much he owes to their devoted labors. The first folio was a volume of nearly 1,000 double-columned pages, and was sold at £l. The value of a copy in good condition to-day runs into thousands of pounds. Sir Sidney Lee, the most industrious of Shakespeare’s biographers, traced nearly 200 of these volumes out of an edition estimated to number 500 copies. The Auckland Public Library, through tho generosity of Sir George Grev, is the fortunate owner of a copy. It is imperfect in that the title page and the page before it are in facsimile, which Would detract from its value in the auction room, but the text is there as it flame from the press in 1623. A largo number of tho folios are in the United , States, where the drawing power of millionaires is often irresistible. One millionaire is credited with having more than thirty copies in his cellar! —a form - of hoarding that for selfish acquisitiveness must be hard to beat. Shall we know more than the quartos and folios tell us? Will facts draw aside the curtain behind which tho imagination of Mr Maurice Baring, Miss Clemence Dane, and others has penetrated? Mr Baring’s exquisitely humorous account of the first production of ‘ Macbeth,’ with Burbage behaving just like a modern egotistical “ star,” and “ Mr Shakespeare ” filling an unobtrusive place in the background, and producing after a few minutes’ scribbling In the wings, as something to improve a scene of which Burbage disapproves, that awful and tremendous passage “ To-mor-row, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” which flight the actor regards as an insult to his profession—will the past ever throw up a record to show that this shaft is not altogether wide of the mark? Shakespeare’s ease is not unique in the disappearance of suoh evidence. There were other great writers in .Shakespeare’s age, of whose hand writing not a scrap, not even a legal signature, remains. Recently, however, » new poem of Milton’s