What Will Shakspere had to his literary credit when he died, was
men's impressions of the seeing of his acted plays; with their
knowledge, if they had any, of fugitive, cheap, perishable, and often
bad reprints, in quartos, of about half of the plays. Men also had
Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and the Sonnets, which sold very poorly,
and I do not wonder at it. Of the genius of Shakespeare England
could form no conception, till the publication of the Folio (1623),
not in a large edition; it struggled into a Third Edition in 1664.
The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did
not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after
1664--and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate
Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless.
What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at
Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.
CHAPTER XI: THE FIRST FOLIO
"The First Folio" is the name commonly given to the first collected
edition of Shakespeare's plays. The volume includes a Preface signed
by two of the actors, Heminge and Condell, panegyrical verses by Ben
Jonson and others, and a bad engraved portrait. The book has been
microscopically examined by Baconians, hunting for cyphered messages
from their idol in italics, capital letters, misprints, and
everywhere. Their various discoveries do not win the assent of
writers like the late Lord Penzance and Mr.
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