We doubt if posterity owe a greater debt to any two men living in 1623
than to the two obscure actors who in that year published the first folio
edition of Shakespeare's plays. But for them, it is more than likely that
such of his works as had remained to that time unprinted would have been
irrecoverably lost, and among them were "Julius Caesar," "The Tempest,"
and "Macbeth." But are we to believe them when they assert that they
present to us the plays which they reprinted from stolen and
surreptitious copies "cured and perfect of their limbs," and those which
are original in their edition "absolute in their numbers as he
[Shakespeare] conceived them"? Alas, we have read too many theatrical
announcements, have been taught too often that the value of the promise
was in an inverse ratio to the generosity of the exclamation-marks, too
easily to believe that! Nay, we have seen numberless processions of
healthy kine enter our native village unheralded save by the lusty shouts
of drovers, while a wretched calf, cursed by stepdame Nature with two
heads, was brought to us in a triumphal car, avant-couriered by a band of
music as abnormal as itself, and announced as the greatest wonder of the
age. If a double allowance of vituline brains deserve such honor, there
are few commentators on Shakespeare that would have gone afoot, and the
trumpets of Messieurs Heminge and Condell call up in our minds too many
monstrous and deformed associations.
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