made in the text make comparison with the original Folio versions impossible; but The Tempest, in the original 1670 version, the first (1673) edition of the “D’Avenant” Macbeth, before that play like The Tempest had been metamorphosed out of all likeness to the original, and Hamlet afford material for some possible conjecture. Elsewhere I have attempted a brief examination of the texts of the 1676 Hamlet and of the 1673 Macbeth,[1] and have come to the conclusion that both point back, not to printed originals, but to prompt-copies of the pre-Commonwealth period. This conclusion is arrived at from an examination of several facts: (1) that in neither play does one single Quarto or Folio seem to have been the original, readings being taken from various sources;[2] (2) that the Macbeth quarto gives the full text of those songs, the first lines only of which appear in the First Folio; (3) that the Hamlet quarto has excisions which seem more probably executed in the period before 1642 than in that after 1660. In The Tempest of 1670 only one act is left in something like its Shakespearian state, and, as a consequence, this play does not furnish such a sure basis for investigation. Yet even in this restricted field there are again indications that the original before Dryden and D’Avenant was a prompt-copy. A close examination of the speeches retained from the original play reveals the fact that there are readings occasionally from the First Folio, occasionally from the Second or from the Third. Sometimes, even, the text of the Dryden–D’Avenant adaptation points to an original which is more authentic than any of those three. It is manifest, for example, that the lines beginning:
“Abhorred Slaue,
Which any print of goodnesse wilt not take,”
cannot have been intended for Miranda, as they are given in the Folio, and the Dryden–D’Avenant “attribution” of them to Prospero has been followed by every later editor.
The Tempest, therefore, Macbeth and Hamlet, as printed in the time of the Restoration, all point back to some texts independent of the Folios and the previous Quartos. The conclusion to which this examination of the three Restoration play-lists along with those of 1639 and 1641 and along with an analysis of these Shakespeare
