and 'Troilus
and Cressida' (both in 1609).

Five achieved only one edition, viz. 'Love's Labour's Lost' (1598), '2
Henry IV' (1600), 'Much Ado' (1600), 'Titus' (1600), 'Merry Wives' (1602
imperfect).

Posthumous quartos of the plays.

Three years after Shakespeare's death--in 1619--there appeared a second
edition of 'Merry Wives' (again imperfect) and a fourth of 'Pericles.'
'Othello' was first printed posthumously in 1622 (4to), and in the same
year sixth editions of 'Richard III' and 'I Henry IV' appeared. {302}
The largest collections of the original quartos--each of which survives
in only four, five, or six copies--are in the libraries of the Duke of
Devonshire, the British Museum, and Trinity College, Cambridge, and in
the Bodleian Library. {303} All the quartos were issued in Shakespeare's
day at sixpence each.

The First Folio. The publishing syndicate.

In 1623 the first attempt was made to give the world a complete edition
of Shakespeare's plays. Two of the dramatist's intimate friends and
fellow-actors, John Heming and Henry Condell, were nominally responsible
for the venture, but it seems to have been suggested by a small syndicate
of printers and publishers, who undertook all pecuniary responsibility.
Chief of the syndicate was William Jaggard, printer since 1611 to the
City of London, who was established in business in Fleet Street at the
east end of St. Dunstan's Church. As the piratical publisher of 'The
Passionate Pilgrim' he had long known the commercial value of
Shakespeare's work. In 1613 he had extended his business by purchasing
the stock and rights of a rival pirate, James Roberts, who had printed
the quarto editions of the 'Merchant of Venice' and 'Midsummer Night's
Dream' in 1600 and the complete quarto of 'Hamlet' in 1604. Roberts had
enjoyed for nearly twenty years the right to print 'the players' bills,'
or programmes, and he made over that privilege to Jaggard with his other
literary property. It is to the close personal relations with the
playhouse managers into which the acquisition of the right of printing
'the players' bill' brought Jaggard after 1613 that the inception of the
scheme of the 'First Folio' may safely be attributed. Jaggard associated
his son Isaac with the enterprise. They alone of the members of the
syndicate were printers. Their three partners were publishers or
booksellers only. Two of these, William Aspley and John Smethwick, had
already sp