wick and Aspley, were still living and were associated with him in
publishing the Second Folio. Robert Allott, June 26, 1629, had bought
up Blount's title to the plays first registered in 1623, and was thus
also concerned in the publication, while Richard Hawkins and Richard
Meighen, who owned the rights of _Othello_ and _Merry Wives_, were
allowed to take shares. The editors of the Second Folio made only such
alterations in the text of the First Folio as they thought necessary to
make it more "correct." The vast majority of the changes are
unimportant grammatical corrections, some of them obviously right,
others as obviously wrong.

Five more Shakespearean quartos followed between 1634 and 1639.
Between 1652 and 1655 two other {125} quartos were published. The
Third Folio, 1664, was published by Philip Chetwind, who had married
the widow of Robert Allott and thus got most of the rights in the
Second Folio. Chetwind's Folio is famous, not only for the addition of
_Pericles_, which alone it was his first intention to include, but also
for the addition of six spurious plays--_Sir John Oldcastle, The
Yorkshire Tragedie, A London Prodigall, The Tragedie of Locrine,
Thomas, Lord Cromwell_, and _The Puritaine_, or _The Widdow of Watling
Streete_. Chetwind's reason for thus adding these plays was that they
had passed under Shakespeare's name or initials in their earliest
prints. The Fourth Folio, 1685, is a mere reprint of the Third.

With the Fourth Folio ends the early history of how Shakespeare got
into print. From that time to this a long line of famous and obscure
men, at first mostly men of letters, but afterwards, and especially in
our own times, trained specialists in their profession, have devoted
much of their lives to the editing of Shakespeare. Their ideal has
been, usually, to give readers the text of his poems and plays in their
presumed primitive integrity. Constant study of his works, and of
other Elizabethan writers, has given them a certain knowledge of the
words and grammatical usages of that day which go far to make
Elizabethan English a foreign tongue to us. On the other hand, more
knowledge about the conditions of printing in Shakespeare's time has
helped the editors very greatly in their attempts to set right a
passage which was misprinted in the earliest printed text, or a line of
which two early texts give different versions.

{126}

An example of the difficulties that still confront edi