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My father hath been hunting after thee the whole way up from London town!" There in the Great House garden under the mulberry-trees stood Master Will Shakspere, with Masters Jonson, Burbage, Hemynge, Condell, and a goodly number more, who had just come up from London town, as well as Alderman Henry Walker of Stratford, good old John Combe of the college, and Michael Drayton, the poet of Warwick.
The whole story is like the dream of a child. We therefore expect the Anti-Willians to endeavour to disable the evidence of Jonson, Heywood, Heminge, and Condell. Their attempts take the shape of the most extravagant and complex conjectures; with certain petty objections to Ben's various estimates of the MERITS of the plays. He is constant in his witness to the authorship.
The first collected edition of his works was the so-called "First Folio" of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, Heming and Condell. No contemporary of Shakspere thought it worth while to write a life of the stage-player.
His authorship is explicitly vouched for by his fellow-players, Heminge and Condell, to whom he left bequests in his will; and by his sometime rival, later friend, and always critic, Ben Jonson; Heywood, player and playwright and pamphleteer, who had been one of Henslowe's "hands," and lived into the Great Rebellion, knew the stage and authors for the stage from within, and HIS "mellifluous Shakespeare" is "Will," as his Beaumont was "Frank," his Marlowe "Kit," his Fletcher, "Jack."
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. What, then, is the value of the first folio as an authority?
The Peruvian was fast coming up astern, and could not now be more than a mile away. She was still firing remorselessly into the gunboat, and apparently had not noticed the smoke columns. "Now," shouted Condell to his men, "there is the Union, and yonder are two of our ships coming up.
Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot in the manuscripts they received from Shakespeare; and this is the natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which it embodied itself.
He was recalled to his senses by a short, sharp laugh from Condell, who remarked, with a grim smile: "Surely, Senor Douglas, you are not going to take away the command of my ship from me, are you?"
But Condell surmised that the Peruvians must have shrewdly guessed at his destination, and he knew that they would not give up the chase so long as there was a chance of getting him again under their guns. Moreover, he had still nearly three hundred and fifty miles to go before he could reach safety, more than a day and a half's steaming!
Now Titus Andronicus is to be found in the first folio edition of Shakspeare's works, which it is known was published by Heminge and Condell, for many years his friends and fellow-managers of the same theatre. Is it possible to persuade ourselves that they would not have known if a piece in their repertory did or did not really belong to Shakspeare?
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