Учебное пособие 4 unit I. The renaissance 1485-1649

THE FOLIOS
Fortunately for posterity, John Heminges and Henry Condell, friends and
colleagues of Shakespeare in the Lord Chamberlain’s and King’s companies,
collected 36 of the plays now accepted as Shakespeare’s and published them
in a handsome folio edition in 1623. This volume preserved 18 plays that had
never before been printed. Heminges and Condell promised that they were
offering all the plays “cured and perfect of their limbs,” that is, purged of the
errors that marred the early editions. The First Folio nevertheless contains
many imperfections resulting from misreading of the manuscripts and
inevitable printer’s errors, and their claim of accuracy is little more than
advertising for the volume. Yet without the efforts of Heminges and Condell,
18 of the plays that we know as Shakespeare’s would not have been
preserved.
The demand for Shakespeare’s works was sufficiently great to warrant the
printing of the Second Folio in 1632. The Third Folio edition, printed in both
1663 and 1664, included, in its second printing, Pericles, which had been
omitted from the previous editions, and six other plays that are not regarded
by modern editors as Shakespeare’s. These are The London Prodigal, The
History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow,
A Yorkshire Tragedy, and The Tragedy of Locrine. In 1685 the Fourth Folio
appeared, which also included the unauthenticated plays. With each
reprinting of Shakespeare’s works some corrections were made but new
errors were introduced in spelling and punctuation, and the final text became

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more removed from the original work.
18TH-CENTURY EDITIONS
The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays with an editor’s name attached
was prepared by dramatist and poet Nicholas Rowe and printed in 1709.
Rowe based his six-volume edition on the Fourth Folio, with almost no
comparison with other editions. He added the first biography of Shakespeare
and attached a list of characters to each play. The folios had supplied such
lists for only a few plays. Rowe also divided the plays into acts and scenes
according to 18th-century practice.
The next edition (6 vols., 1723-1725) was prepared by English poet
Alexander Pope, who did some slight comparison of texts, relegated some
passages he considered inauthentic to the bottom of pages, and arbitrarily
omitted others. Although he frequently rewrote Shakespeare’s lines, mainly
to make the verse regular, Pope offered some valuable restorations of
readings, rearranged passages as verse that were incorrectly printed as prose
in the early texts, and rejected the six spurious plays that had been added to
the Third Folio.
English writer Lewis Theobald’s seven-volume edition of 1733 was the
earliest systematic restoration of Shakespeare’s texts. Many of Theobald’s
emendations, or textual corrections, are still accepted by scholars. Among the
other important 18th-century editions was that of English writer and
lexicographer Samuel Johnson, published in eight volumes in 1765.
Johnson’s edition was notable chiefly for its sensible interpretations and
critical evaluations of Shakespeare as a literary artist. Also important was
literary scholar Edmund Malone’s ten-volume edition published in 1790,
which was the most trustworthy text printed to that time. The first American
edition, published in Philadelphia in 1795 and 1796, was a reprinting of
Johnson’s text.