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Updated: June 29, 2025
My bookseller has dwelt so long in his corner with folios and quartos and other antique tomes that he talks in black-letter and has the modest, engaging look of a brown old stout binding, and to the delectation of discriminating olfactories he exhaleth an odor of mildew and of tobacco commingled, which is more grateful to the true bibliophile than all the perfumes of Araby.
Everybody knows that Colley Cibber improved upon the text of the old folios and quartos: for what was listened to with delight by Ben Jonson could not satisfy Congreve, and William III. needed better verses than those applauded by Queen Elizabeth. None of us knew how great or how many these improvements were.
Ben Jonson's 'Underwoods' with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's 'Poems, with autograph notes; manuscript volumes of letters, containing almost every famous name known to English literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled the muniment room upstairs; books which had belonged to Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole; the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the quartos everything that the heart of the English collector could most desire was there.
His chair was surrounded by folios and quartos, piled upon the floor, and his table was covered with books and manuscripts. The cause of his seclusion was a work which he had recently received, and with which he had retired in rapture from the world, and shut himself up to enjoy a literary honeymoon undisturbed.
Meantime, however, his pen has not been idle; for, previously to 1773, he had written and published no less than sixteen octavo volumes relating mostly to agricultural subjects, besides two ponderous quartos filled with tabular details of "Experiments on the Cultivation of all Sorts of Grain and Pulse, both in the Old and New Methods."
Twenty thousand copies were sold within the year, two thousand of which were costly quartos; and while there can be no doubt that this was the highest point of Scott's poetical vogue, there is, I believe, not much doubt that the poem has always continued to be a greater favourite with the general than any other of his.
There is a parody on one of Ophelia's songs which is of some interest in regard to the question of the critical value of the quarto of 1604; the occurrence of the word "all" before "flaxen" showing that the former word was incorrectly omitted in all the early quartos excepting in that of 1603.
These two latter devils have in the play managed to exchange the final vowels of their names, and appear as Modo and Mahu. The passage in question occurs only in the quartos, and therefore the fact that there is no stop at all after the word "Pur" cannot be relied upon as helping to prove the correctness of this supposition.
A man does not require much learning to feel pretty sure, when he takes one of those solid, smooth, velvet-leaved quartos, say a Baskerville Addison, for instance, bound in red morocco, with a margin of gold as rich as the embroidery of a prince's collar, as Vandyck drew it, he need not know much to feel pretty sure that a score or two of shelves full of such books mean that it took a long purse, as well as a literary taste, to bring them together.
What, then, is to be done? The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have, and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably Shakespeare's exact words. In dealing with the text we must never for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors.
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