f variation in text arose from the treatment of the
manuscript in the playhouse. Cuts, additions, and alterations were made
for acting purposes, stage directions were added with or without the
assistance of the author, revivals of the play called for revision by
the original writer or another. The majority of stage directions in
modern editions, except exits and entrances, are due to editors from
Rowe onwards, and these unauthorized additions are distinguished in the
Tudor edition by brackets. Almost all notes of place at the beginnings
of scenes belong to this class.

[Page Heading: Corruptions of Text]

The defects to which the texts of the surreptitiously obtained Quartos
are particularly subject include omissions and alterations due to lapse
of memory on the part of the actors, additions due to the tendency to
improvise which Shakespeare censures in _Hamlet_, omissions due to the
reporter's failure to hear or to write quickly enough, garbled
paraphrases made up to supply such omissions, and the writing of prose
as verse and verse as prose.

Such are the most important of the causes of the corruptions which the
long series of editors of Shakespeare have devoted their study and their
ingenuity to remedying. The series really begins with the second Folio
of 1632 and is continued with but slight improvements in the third Folio
of 1663, reprinted with the addition of _Pericles_ and six spurious
plays in 1664, and in the fourth Folio of 1685. The emendations made in
the seventeenth-century editions are mainly modernizations in spelling
and such minor changes as occurred to members of the printing staff. In
no case do they have any authority except such as may be supposed to
belong to a man not far removed from Shakespeare in date; and they add
about as many mistakes as they remove.

The difficulty of the task of the modern editor varies greatly from play
to play. It is least in the twenty plays for which the First Folio is
the sole authority, greater in the eight in which the Folio reprints a
Quarto with some variations, greatest in the nine in which Folio and
Quarto represent rival versions. In these last cases, it is the duty of
the editor to decide from all the accessible data which version has the
best claim to represent the author's intention, and to make that a basis
to be departed from only in clear cases of corruption. The temptation,
which no editor has completely resisted, is naturally towards an
eclecticism