What is the Second Folio of William Shakespeare?
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The Second Folio is actually the second edition in the same format of Mr.
William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. In fact the Second Folio was basically a
page-by-page reprint of the First Folio and was published in 1632, nine years after the first
was published. It was printed and published by people closely connected to the people in
the first folio publishing syndicate. The names of the printer and publishers involved can
be identified by the colophon of the Second Folio (Sig. ddd4):
The colophon of the Second Folio
The printer, Thomas Cotes, took over the printing house of his master
and his son, William and Isaac Jaggard, after they had deceased in
1623 and 1627 respectively. John Smethwick and William Aspley were
also members of the First Folio publishing syndicate. Richard Hawkins
and Richard Meighen were included as the current rights holder for
Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Robert Allot is thought to
have taken over the role of Edward Blount, the principal
publisher. Edward Blount died in 1632 leaving his shop, The Black
Bear, St. Paul's Churchyard to be taken over by Allot. While the
First Folio syndicate needed one and the same title page for all the
copies in that edition, the Second Folio syndicate seemed to have found it
convenient for each member to have a separate title page with
different imprint telling the purchasers the location of each
bookshop. The following are some available from the Meisei Shakespeare
Collection:
Hawkins imprint (MR 3199)
Meighen imprint (MR 4355)
Allot imprint, first issue, first state (MR 3606)
The Allot imprint has been recognised in four variant patterns:
Allot imprint, first issue, second state (MR 3571)
Allot imprint, second issue (MR 782)
Allot imprint, third issue (MR 783)
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The First English Poem of Milton's to Appear in Print
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Whatever the imprint versions, the title page was printed on sig. πA2
(verso blank) and on its conjugate leaf, sig. πA5 (verso blank),
which is the other side of the other half of the same sheet, was
printed an unsigned poem `An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke
Poet, W. Shakespeare'. It is known to be written by John Milton
(1608-74), whose Poems published in 1645 gives the date `1630' to
this poem. Milton's father was a successful London scrivener and had
his shop in the vicinity of St. Paul's Churchyard. Andrew Murphy in
his Shakespeare in Print (2004) suggests it might have been the Cotes'
idea to add a commendatory poem by a son of their neighbour's to
their preliminaries.
Milton's poem and `Vpon the Effigies of my worthy Friend, the Author
Master William Shakespeare, and his Workes' also printed anonymously
on sig. πA5, and `On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his poems'
signed I.M.S. on sigs. *3 and *3v are all that were introduced to the
Folio for the first time in the second edition, which made the Second
Folio preliminaries longer than those of the First Folio by two
pages. The total number of pages, however, remained the same by the
number of blank pages among the text pages reduced from four to two on
the part of the Second Folio.
The Second Folio's page-for-page reprinting has been notorious among
scholars for
introducing many new typographical errors to the Folio texts, probably
due to very insufficient proof reading, but it has also been noted to
contain quite a number of corrections done to `improve' the First
Folio texts, many of which have been counted worthy and found valid
still to this day. This might well deserve to be called a work of
editors, anonymous though they are. Apart from the hundreds of
corrections of obvious typographical errors Matthew W. Black and
Matthias A. Shaaber in their Shakespeare's Seventeenth-Century
Editors, 1632-1685 (1937) listed 1679 `deliberate editorial'
changes: 459 alterations of grammar, 374 changes affecting the
thought, 359 affecting meter, and 357 affecting style, and 130 changes
pertaining to the action (p. 45). The `editors' of the Second Folio
apparently did not make use of earlier quartos of Shakespeare, modern
editors' abc, when `editing' but they seem to have been quite
competent in their classical and mythological knowledge to produce,
for example, such a keen emendation as:
F1: Plantaginet I will, and like thee,
Play on the Lute, beholding the Townes burne:
F2: Plantaginet I will, and Nero like will,
Play on the Lute, beholding the Townes burne: (1 Henry VI, 1.4.95-96)
After further twists and turns proposed by the subsequent editors like
Pope and Malone, all aknowledging `Nero' here, The Riverside
Shakespeare (1972) now reads the lines as:
Plantagenet, I will, and like thee, [Nero,]
Play on the lute, beholding the towns burn:
The Arden 3 (ed. Edward Burns, 2000) reads, without brackets,
`Plantagenet, I will; and like thee, Nero, / Play on the lute,
beholding the towns burn'.
March 31, 2006
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