acquire texts for which they had not paid as a basis for 'surreptitious' or 'piratical' prints.[1] A hired actor might be bribed to disclose his 'part' and so much as he could remember of the 'parts' of others. Dr. Greg has made it seem probable that the player of the Host was an agent in furnishing the text of the Merry Wives.[2] A player of Voltimand and other minor parts may have been similarly guilty as regards Hamlet.[3] Long before, the printer of Gorboduc had succeeded in 'getting a copie thereof at some yongmans hand that lacked a little money and much discretion'. Or the poet himself might be to blame. Thomas Heywood takes credit in the epistle to The Rape of Lucrece that it had not been his custom 'to commit my playes to the presse', like others who 'have vsed a double sale of their labours, first to the stage, and after to the presse'. Yet this had not saved his plays from piracy, for some of them had been 'copied only by the eare' and issued in a corrupt and mangled form. A quarter of a century later, in writing a prologue for a revival of his If You Know not Me, You Know Nobody, he tells us that this was one of the corrupt issues, and adds that
Some by Stenography drew
The plot: put it in print: (scarce one word trew).
Modern critics have sought in shorthand the source of other 'bad' and probably surreptitious texts of plays, and one has gone so far as to trace in them the peculiarities of a particular system expounded in the Characterie (1588) of Timothy Bright.[4] The whole question of surreptitious prints has naturally been explored most closely in connexion with the textual criticism of Shakespeare, and the latest investigator, Mr. Pollard, has come to the conclusion that, in spite of the general condemnation of the Folio editors, the only Shakespearian Quartos which can reasonably be labelled as surreptitious or as textually 'bad' are the First Quartos of Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, andcan readily take a Sermon, Oration, Play, or any long speech, as they are spoke, dictated, acted, and uttered in the instant'.]
- ↑ The Folio editors of Shakespeare condemn the Quartos, or some of them, as 'stolne, and surreptitious copies'; 'piratical', although freely used by Mr. Pollard and others, is not a very happy term, since no piracy of copyright is involved. The authorized Q_{2} of Roxana (1632) claims to be 'a plagiarii unguibus vindicata'.
- ↑ Introduction, xxxvi of his edition.
- ↑ R. B. McKerrow in Bibl. Soc. Trans. xii. 294; J. D. Wilson, The Copy for Hamlet 1603 and the Hamlet Transcript 1593 (1918).
- ↑ C. Dewischeit, Shakespeare und die Stenographie (Sh.-Jahrbuch, xxxiv. 170); cf. Lee, 113, quoting Sir G. Buck's Third Universitie of England (1612; cf. ch. iii), 'They which know it [brachygraphy
