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Updated: June 18, 2025
There was also the clown, Augustine Phillips, an excellent comic actor of the old school. These four became the most intimate friends of Shakespeare, and to Condell and Heminge posterity owes special gratitude, since it was they who, after the death of Shakespeare, undertook the publication of the first printed collection of his plays.
Heminge and Condell, the editor of this priceless treasure, the First Folio, wrote a long-winded dedication to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, which contains but one pertinent passage, in which they ask their readers to believe that it had been the office of the editors to collect and publish the author's 'mere writings, he being dead, and to offer them, not 'maimed and deformed, in surreptitious and stolen copies, but 'cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them, who as he was a happie imitator of Nature was a most gentle expresser of it.
Nevertheless, however strong a case may be made out against the Folio of 1623, whatever sins of omission we may lay to the charge of Heminge and Condell, or of commission to that of the printers, it remains the only text we have with any claims whatever to authenticity.
Spedding, in his recent edition of Bacon, comes independently to the same conclusion. We may be very sure that Heminge and Condell did not, as vicars, take upon themselves a disagreeable task which the author would have been too careless to assume.
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."
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