Shakespeare of Stratford/The Biographical Facts/Fact 69

by Tucker Brooke

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LXIX. INTRODUCTORY MATTER TO THE SHAKESPEARE FOLIO (1628).

(A) Dedicatory Epistle of Heminge and CondelL to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.

To the most noble and incomparable pair of brethren: William, Earl of Pembroke, &c., Lord Chamberlain to the King’s most excellent Majesty; and Philip, Earl of Montgomery, &c., Gentleman of his Majesty’s Bedchamber—both Knights of the most noble Order of the Garter, and our singular good lords.

Right Honorable:
Whilst we study to be thankful in our particular for the many favors we have received from your Lordships, we are fallen upon the ill fortune to mingle two the most diverse things that can be: fear and rashness—rashness in the enterprise, and fear of the success. For when we value the places your Highnesses sustain, we cannot but know their dignity greater than to descend to the reading of these trifles; and while we name them trifles, we have deprived ourselves of the defence of our dedication.

But since your Lordships have been pleased to think these trifles something heretofore, and have prosecuted both them and their author, living, with so much favor, we hope that (they outliving him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be executor to his own writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them you have done unto their parent. There is a great difference whether any book choose his patrons or find them. This hath done both. For so much were your Lordships’ likings of the several parts, when they were acted, as before they were published the volume asked to be yours. We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans guardians: without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our SHAKESPEARE by humble offer of his plays to your most noble patron age. Wherein, as we have justly observed no man to come near your Lordships but with a kind of religious address, it hath been the height of our care, who are the presenters, to make the present worthy of your Highnesses by the perfection.

But there we must also crave our abilities to be considered, my Lords. We cannot go beyond our own powers: country hands reach forth milk, cream, fruits, or what they have; and many nations, we have heard, that had not gums and incense, obtained their requests with a leavened cake. It was no fault to approach their gods by what means they could; and the most, though meanest, of things are made more precious when they are dedicated to temples. In that name, therefore, we most humbly consecrate to your Highnesses these remains of your servant Shakespeare: that what delight is in them may be ever your Lordships’, the reputation his, and the faults ours, if any be committed by a pair so careful to show their gratitude both to the living and the dead as is

Your Lordships’ most bounden

John Heminge
Henry Condell

(B) Epistle of Heminge and Condell to the readers of the Folio.

To the Great Variety of Readers.—From the most able to him that can but spell: there you are numbered. We had rather you were weighed; especially when the fate of all books depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well, it is now public, and you will stand for your privileges, we know: to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first: that doth best commend a book, the stationer says. Then, how odd soever your brains be or your wisdoms, make your license the same, and spare not. Judge your six-penn’orth, your shilling’s worth, your five shillings’ worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy! Censure will not drive a trade or make the jack go. And though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at Blackfriars or the Cockpit to arraign plays daily, know, these plays have had their trial already and stood out all appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree of court than any purchased letters of commendation.

It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you, do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain, to have collected and published them:—and so to have published them, as where before you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them,—who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who only gather his works and give them you, to praise him: it is yours’ that read him. And there, we hope, to your divers capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you; for his wit can no more lie hid than it could be lost. Read him, therefore, and again and again; and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him, and so we leave you to other of his friends whom if you need can be your guides. If you need them not, you can lead yourselves and others, and such readers we wish him.

John Heminge.
Henry Condell.

(C) Ben Jonson’s Eulogy.

To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame,
While I confess thy writings to be such
As neither man nor muse can praise too much.
’Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise:
For silliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;
Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin where it seem’d to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron: what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and indeed
Above th’ ill fortune of them, or the need.

I therefore will begin:—Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further, to make thee a room.^[1]
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so^[2] my brain excuses—
I mean with great but disproportion’d muses—
For if I thought my judgment were of years,^[3]
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Æschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,
Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova,^[4] dead
To life again, to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage: or, when thy socks^[5] were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain! Thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time;
And all the muses still were in their prime
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm.
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines,
Which were so richly spun and woven so fit
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,
But antiquated and deserted lie
As they were not of nature’s family.

Yet must I not give nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the poet’s matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he,
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat
(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat
Upon the muses’ anvil—turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame,
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn:
For a good poet’s made as well as born,
And such wert thou. Look, how the father’s face
Lives in his issue, even so the race
Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish’d at the eyes of ignorance.

Sweet swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanc’d and made a constellation there.
Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage,
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage
Which since thy flight fro hence hath mourn’d like night,
And despairs day but for thy volume’s light.
BEN: JONSON.

(D) Elegiac sonnet of Hugh Holland.

Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenic Poet, Master William Shakespeare.

Those hands which you so clapp’d, go now and wring,
 You Britons brave, for done are Shakespeare’s days:
 His days are done that made the dainty plays,
Which made the Globe of heaven and earth to ring.
Dried is that vein, dried is the Thespian spring,
 Turn’d all to tears, and Phoebus clouds his rays:
 That corpse, that coffin, now bestick those bays
Which crown’d him poet first, then poets’ king.

If tragedies might any prologue have,
 All those he made would scarce make one to this,
Where Fame, now that he gone is to the grave,
 Death’s public tiring-house, the Nuncius^[6] is:
  For though his line of life went soon about,
  The life yet of his lines shall never out.
HUGH HOLLAND

(E) Dedicatory verses by Leonard Digges.

To the Memory of the deceased Author, Master W. Shakespeare.

Shake-speare, at length thy pious fellows give
The world thy works: thy works, by which outlive
Thy tomb thy name must. When that stone is rent,
And time dissolves thy Stratford monument,
Here we alive shall view thee still: this book,
When brass and marble fade, shall make thee look
Fresh to all ages. When posterity
Shall loath what’s new, think all is prodigy
That is not Shake-speare’s every line, each verse
Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse.
Nor fire nor cankering age, as Naso said
Of his, thy wit-fraught book shall once invade.
Nor shall I e’er believe or think thee dead
(Though miss’d), until our bankrout^[7] stage be sped
(Impossible!) with some new strain t’ outdo
Passions of Juliet and her Romeo;
Or till I hear a scene more nobly take
Than when thy half-sword-parleying^[8] Romans spake.
Till these, till any of thy volume’s rest,
Shall with more fire, more feeling, be express’d,
Be sure, our Shake-speare, thou canst never die,
But, crown’d with laurel, live eternally.
L. DIGGES^[9]

(F) Memorial Verses by James Mabbe.

To the memory of M. W. Shake-speare.

We wondered, Shake-speare, that thou went’st so soon
From the world’s stage to the grave’s tiring-room.
We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth
Tells thy spectators that thou went’st but forth
To enter with applause. An actor’s art
Can die, and live to act a second part:
That’s^[10] but an exit of mortality,
This^[11] a re-entrance to a plaudite.^[12]
I. M.

(G) List of the Principal Actors in Shakespeare’s Plays.

The Names of the Principal Actors in all these plays.

William Shakespeare.	Samuel Gilburne.
Richard Burbadge.	Robert Armin.
John Heminings.	William Ostler.
Augustine Phillips.	Nathan Field.
William Kempt.	John Underwood.
Thomas Poope.	Nicholas Tooley.
George Bryan.	William Ecclestone.
Henry Condell.	Joseph Taylor.
William Slye.	Robert Benfield.
Richard Cowly.	Robert Goughe.
John Lowine.	Richard Robinson.
Samuell Crosse.	John Shancke.
Alexander Cooke.	John Rice.

1. Beaumont had been buried, a few months before Shakespeare’ death, in Westminster Abbey, where Chaucer and Spenser also lay.
2. I.e. with Chaucer, Spenser, and Beaumont.
3. I.e. mature.
4. Seneca, born at Cordova.
5. Comedies.
6. The messenger in Senecan tragedy who reported the deaths to the audience.
7. Bankrupt.
8. I.e. Brutus and Cassius, parleying with swords half drawn.
9. A longer poem by Digges, in the same strain but with more detail, was printed in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems.
10. Shakespeare’s death.
11. The appearance of the Folio.
12. The play’s successful close.