the tallest
extant copy 13-3/8 x 8-1/2 inches. A reduced facsimile of the title page
with the familiar wood-cut portrait appears on the opposite page. The
text is printed in two columns with sixty-six lines to a column. The
typography is only fairly good, and many mistakes occur in the
pagination. Extant copies, of which there are at least 156, vary in some
respects, on account of the practice of making corrections while the
sheets were being printed. The printer was William Jaggard, and his
associates in the publishing enterprise were his son Isaac and the
booksellers, William Aspley, John Smethwick, and Edward Blount.
Estimates of the size of the edition vary from five to six hundred.

Many of the causes which made the text of these early editions
inaccurate are common to all the plays, while some are peculiar to those
obtained by reporters in the theater. Of the first, the most fundamental
is, of course, the illegibility or ambiguity of the author's original
manuscript. Such flaws were perpetuated and multiplied with each
successive transcript, and when the manuscript copy came into the
printer's hands, the errors of the compositor--confusion of words
sounding alike, of words looking alike, unconscious substitution of
synonyms, mere manual slips, and the like--were added to those already
existing. The absence of any uniform spelling, and carelessness in
punctuation, which led to these being freely modified by the printer,
increased the risk of corruption. The punctuation of both Quartos and
Folio, though by no means without weight, cannot be regarded as having
the author's sanction, and all modernized editions re-punctuate with
greater or less freedom. Most nineteenth-century editors carry on with
minor modifications the punctuation of Pope, so that their texts show a
composite of sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century
methods; the text used in the Tudor edition is frankly punctuated, as
far as the syntax permits, according to modern methods, with, it is
believed, no loss in authority. There is no clear evidence that, in such
productions as plays, proof was read outside of the printing-office. The
theory, insisted on by Dr. Furness in successive volumes of the _New
Variorum Shakespeare_, that the Elizabethan compositor set type to
dictation is without foundation, the phenomena which he seeks to explain
by it occurring commonly to-day when there is no question of such a
practice.

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