text was criticized by
Joseph Ritson in 1783 and 1788, and by J. Monck Mason in 1785. The first
American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1795-1796 from
Johnson's text; the first continental edition at Brunswick in 1797-1801
by C. Wagner.

[Page Heading: Nineteenth-Century Editors]

The editions of the nineteenth century are too numerous for detailed
mention here. Passing by the "family" Shakespeare of T. Bowdler, 1807
and 1820, and the editions of Harness, 1825, and Singer, 1826, we note
the editions of 1838-1842, and 1842-1844 in which Charles Knight
resorted to the text of the First Folio as an exclusive authority. J. P.
Collier in his edition of 1844 leaned, on the other hand, to the side of
the Quartos, but later became a clever if somewhat rash emendator, who
spoiled his reputation by seeking to obtain authority for his guesses by
forging them in a seventeenth-century hand in a copy of the second
Folio. The colossal volumes of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps's edition,
1853-1865, contain stores of antiquarian illustration; and in the
edition of Delius, 1854-1861, we have the chief contribution of Germany
to the text of Shakespeare. Delius, like Knight, though not to the same
extreme, exaggerated the authority of the First Folio; but for the plays
for which that is the sole source, his text has earned high respect.
Alexander Dyce, wisest of Elizabethan scholars, produced in 1857 a
characteristically sane text, on the whole the best to this date; while
in America in 1857-1860 and 1859-1865 the brilliant but erratic Richard
Grant White produced editions which show a commendable if puzzling
openness to conviction in successive changes of opinion.

From 1863 to 1866 appeared the first issue of the Cambridge Shakespeare,
edited originally by W. G. Clark, J. Glover, and W. A. Wright. The
responsibility for the later revised edition of 1891-3 is Dr. Wright's.
The exceedingly careful and exhaustive collation of all previous textual
readings in the notes of this edition make it indispensable for the
serious student, and its text, substantially reprinted in the Globe
edition, is the most widely accepted form of the works of Shakespeare
which has ever been circulated. The over-emphasis on the First Folio
which has been noted in Knight and Delius is no longer found here, and
in general the comparative value of Quarto and Folio is weighed in the
case of each play. Occasionally, in cases like that of _Richard III_,
where b