Greenwood.
The mystery as to the sources, editing, and selection of plays in the
Folio (1623) appears to be impenetrable. The title-page says that
ALL the contents are published "according to the true original
copies." If ONLY MS. copies are meant, this is untrue; in some cases
the best quartos were the chief source, supplemented by MSS. The
Baconians, following Malone, think that Ben Jonson wrote the Preface
(and certainly it looks like his work), {207a} speaking in the name
of the two actors who sign it. They say that Shakespeare's friends
"have collected and published" the plays, have so published them
"that whereas you were abus'd with divers stolne and surreptitious
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious
impostors that exposed them: EVEN THOSE" (namely, the pieces
previously ill-produced by pirates) "are now offered to your view
cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and ALL THE REST" (that is, all
the plays which had not been piratically debased), "absolute in their
numbers, as he conceived them." So obscure is the Preface that not
ALL previously published separate plays are explicitly said to be
stolen and deformed, but "DIVERS stolen copies" are denounced. Mr.
Pollard makes the same point in Shakespeare Folios and Quartos, p. 2
(1909).
Now, as a matter of fact, while some of the quarto editions of
separate plays are very bad texts, others are so good that the Folio
sometimes practically reprints them, with some tinkerings, from
manuscripts.
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