APPENDIX

THE TEXT

The Winter's Tale was first published in the Folio of 1623, wherein it appears as the last of the series of The Comedies. It was never printed in Quarto, although in a list of the editions of Shakespeare's plays, inserted in The British Theatre, Dublin, 1750, there appears: 'A winter Nighte Tale, an excellent Comedie, 1606.' This list was compiled, so the editor of The British Theatre says, from the papers of one CHETWOOD, a bookseller, and also prompter for twenty years in Drury Lane Theatre. Of many of the Quartos in this list, there is no record of their having been seen elsewhere, and the whole list is regarded as spurious.†

When the license to publish the First Folio was obtained, the following entry was made in The Registers of the Stationers' Company ‡ :

8° Nouembris 1623

:

Master Blounte Entred for their Copie vnder the hands of Master Doctor Worrall Isaak Jaggard and Master COLE warden Master WILLIAM SHAKSPEERS Comedyes Histories, and Tragedyes soe manie of the said Copies as are not formerly entred to other men.

vijs.

vizt.

* Malone's Inquiry, 1796, p. 350.

† See Midsummer Night's Dream, p. 247, of this edition.

ARBER'S Transcript, iv, 107. This entry, with slight variations in speiling and substance, is given in The Variorum of 1821, ii, 641.

In the Folio the play is divided into Acts and Scenes. This division has been followed in all subsequent editions, except in the allotment of the Chorus, which THEOBALD, WARBURTON, and JOHNSON place at the end of the Third Act, and do not regard as a separate Scene.

Twelfth Night, which immediately precedes The Winter's Tale, ends in the Folio on p. 275. Page 276 is left blank and The Winter's Tale begins on p. 277. This leads HUNTER (New Illust. i, 417) to suppose that we had been in some

danger of losing' The Winter's Tale. The blank page gives colour, he thinks, to the inference that Twelfth Night ended The Comedies, and The Histories were about to begin, and,' he adds, 'my copy of the First Folio actually wants The Winter's • Tale, the play of King John following immediately on the Twelfth Night! The pagination does not help us. A new pagination begins with King John. Nor do the signatures give us any aid. Twelfth Night ends with the alphabet Z 3; The Winter's Tale begins a new series, A a, which, however, lasts only through this play. A different series of signatures begins with King John. R. GRANT WHITE (ed. i, p. 275) concedes the possibility of Hunter's suggestion that this play may have been overlooked and inserted only at the last minute, but thinks it more probable that, finding it no more tragical in its course, or its catastrophe, than Cymbeline, [Heminge ' and Condell] at first intended to class it with the Tragedies, and after it was ready 'to be struck off restored it to its proper place among the Comedies.' If The Winter's Tale was restored from The Tragedies to The Comedies, it is not clear why the same restoration was not bestowed on Cymbeline. The best explanation of this blank page which I am able to offer is given in the Preface to this volume.

Whenever an opinion has been expressed in regard to the general accuracy of the text of this play in the Folio, it has been, with two exceptions, favourable.

'The original text,' says KNIGHT, 'is remarkably correct; and although the in'volved construction, which is peculiar to Shakespeare's later writings, and the free'dom of versification, which contrasts with the regularity of his earlier works, have 'occasionally tempted the commentators to try their hands at emendation, the ordi'nary text is upon the whole pretty accurate.'

'The corruptions of the text,' remarks R. G. WHITE (ed. i, p. 274), 'are com'paratively few, far fewer than we might reasonably expect from the style of the play, 'which is more open to the charge of obscurity than any other of Shakespeare's 'works. It abounds in elliptical passages, in which the gap to be bridged is unpre'cedently great; parentheses within parentheses, even to the third and fourth degree, 'require sustained attention and a clear head to unravel their involutions; thoughts 'incompletely stated, or only suggested, tantalize and bewilder the untrained or super'ficial reader. Under such circumstances, it is rather surprising that the text has come down to us in so pure a state; and the absolute incomprehensibility of one or 'two passages may safely be attributed to the attempt, on the part of the printers, to correct that which they thought corrupt in their copy, but which was only obscure.' In the same paragraph, White, still speaking of the text, says that it is printed with 'unusual care; the very punctuation, which throughout that volume [the First Folio] is extremely irregular and careless, being in a great measure reliable.' In his Second Edition he is still of the same mind,-and in Second Editions editors do not always adhere to the opinions expressed in their First; he there remarks: in the 'Folio its text appears in noteworthy purity, notwithstanding a few very doubtful 'passages.'

The first of the two exceptions to this favourable judgement is W. SIDNEY

WALKER, who observes (Crit. i, 87) that the ‘text of this play in the Folio is printed, by the way, with rather more than usual inaccuracy.' Walker's opinions are at all times worthy of respect, but in the present instance, having before him two examples of what he held to be misprints, I think that on the spur of the moment his generalisation was hasty. It was given, as we see, by the way,' and, on more thought, he would probably have modified it,-possibly, reversed it.

The second dissenting voice is that of my excellent and lamented friend, STAUNTON, who (Athenæum, 4 April, 1874) quotes Walker, with approval, to the effect that the text is more than usually inaccurate. But be it borne in mind that, at the outset of an undertaking confessedly to detect' unsuspected corruptions' in Shakespeare's text, Staunton assumed somewhat the position of a special pleader who was bound to find numerous flaws, and wished us to accede in advance to the existence of errors which he was about to emend. In his previous admirable edition he had made no

such charge against this text.

In the logical and metrical structure, and diction of the play, W. W. LLOYD (Singer's Second Edition, p. 131) finds a sympathy with the temper of the leading characters and incidents. The versification starts, breaks, and divides as in no other

play of Shakespeare's, and is in most marked contrast to that of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which shuns a cadence unless at the end of a line, the very position 'where it is here more constantly avoided.'

For what may be fairly termed a peculiar excellence in the printing of the text of this play, see II, i, 18, where a list is given of the instances where an apostrophe indicates the absorption of one syllable, or sound, by another. This absorption is of frequent occurrence throughout all the plays (of more frequent occurrence than is commonly supposed). Here, in The Winter's Tale, more than in any other, it has been indicated by the printers.

When a variation occurs,

The text of the Four Folios is substantially the same. the Second as a rule follows the First and the Fourth follows the Third. The spelling in the Fourth Folio shows, as is natural, the effect of the sixty-two years which separate it from the First. Of the metrical improvements attempted in the Second Folio I have spoken in the Preface.

DATE OF COMPOSITION

In a work like the present, where there is an endeavour to make each volume independent and self-contained, a certain amount of repetition is inevitable when treating of the same subject. In one regard, however, when dealing with the Date of Composition, repetition is needless. It is not needful that in each successive play the Editor should set forth in full his own individual opinion. It is sufficient briefly to state his indifference to the present subject, and his mistrust of the literary value of any investigations of the dates when the plays were written, as far as concerns any help to be thereby gained in comprehending their meaning or their charm. Let these investigations be relegated to their proper department, Biography, where the fullest scope may well be allotted to them, especially since the authentic facts of Shakespeare's Life are so meagre (most happily!) that these investigations must needs comprise the largest share of the duties of his biographer.

All evidence as to the date of a play must be found either within the play itself or without it, that is, it must be either internal or external. Of these, the internal proofs are, in general, less important and less trustworthy than the external. They are to be detected in allusions in the play itself to contemporaneous or to past events. They are, however, not only open to the suspicion of being later insertions to catch the passing hour, either by the author or by actors, but are also subject to ‘every gale and vary' of learned, unlearned, or fanciful commentators, who may set their imaginations at work to discover an allusion where none exists, and thereby see Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt. These internal proofs are to be detected also, it is alleged, in the structure of the verse, in end-stopped' lines, in feminine endings' in the use of rhymes, Alexandrines, etc. This method is but approximate, and only then receives full confirmation when it agrees with external allusions, which are generally documentary, and consist of references to the play or quotations from it. There is no gainsaying these external proofs, whereof the dates are fixed, and that provide a limit before which the play referred to, or quoted from, must have existed.

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CAPELL was the earliest to attempt an arrangement of the plays in chronological succession. The Winter's Tale he places between Henry VIII. and The Tempest (which he holds to be Shakespeare's last play), and from one item of internal evidence and another of external evidence, infers that it was written in 1613, probably after Shakespeare retired to Stratford. His internal evidence (Notes, ii, 176) is in the Song, beginning Get you hence, for I must go,' etc.—IV, iv, 324. From what 'is said of it,' he remarks, in that speech of Autolicus which begins, ["Why, this is 666 a passing merry one, and goes to the tune of two maids wooing a man: there's ""scarse a Maide westward but she sings it"], from parts of the song itself (its men❝tion of "grange & mill"), and from a stroke upon usurers [line 290], which 'John-a-Combe might give birth to, a writing for Stratford, or a writing at it, of this simple and irregular play, is no unlikely conjecture; the matter of the speech first ' refer'd-to seems a banter on that town's lasses, that would have great relish there, ' upon a London stage little :-And yet it should have come there too, and that a 'small matter earlier than a play which Jonson connects it with, [This is Capell's 'item of external evidence.] if a passage of his has been rightly seen into which a 'former note speaks of [viz: Jonson's allusion to "those who beget Tales, Tempests, "" and such like Drolleries ”], in which case the Poet's Henry the eighth" will have been its fore-runner, and at no greater distance, and that play the occasion of 'his setting down to the present.' Jonson's allusion, referred to above, is in the Induction to his Bartholomew Fair, and will be discussed further on by Halliwell and Fleay. It is sufficient here to mention that the belief dates from Theobald that Jonson there refers to The Tempest, and that it was WHALLEY, I think, who first suggested that in the nest of antiques' lies an allusion to the rustic dance of Satyrs in The Winter's Tale. (For Gifford's note on this subject see also The Tempest, pp. 282, 283 of this edition.)

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HORACE WALPOLE (Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third, 1768, p. 114) was the next to propose a date for the composition of The Winter's Tale; this he did vaguely, not specifying any particular year, but merely placing it during Queen Elizabeth's lifetime, that is, before 1603. It may not be 'unentertaining to observe,' he says, that there is another of Shakespeare's plays, that may be ranked among the historic, though not one of his numerous critics and 'commentators have discovered the drift of it; I mean The Winter Evening's Tale,