irst Folio differs invariably, although in
varying degrees. The quarto texts of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'Midsummer
Night's Dream,' and 'Richard II,' for example, differ very largely and
always for the better from the folio texts. On the other hand, the folio
repairs the glaring defects of the quarto versions of 'The Merry Wives of
Windsor' and of 'Henry V.' In the case of twenty of the plays in the
First Folio no quartos exist for comparison, and of these twenty plays,
'Coriolanus,' 'All's Well,' and 'Macbeth' present a text abounding in
corrupt passages.

The order of the plays.

The plays are arranged under three headings--'Comedies,' 'Histories,' and
'Tragedies'--and each division is separately paged. The arrangement of
the plays in each division follows no principle. The comedy section
begins with the 'Tempest' and ends with the 'Winter's Tale.' The
histories more justifiably begin with 'King John' and end with 'Henry
VIII.' The tragedies begin with 'Troilus and Cressida' and end with
'Cymbeline.' This order has been usually followed in subsequent
collective editions.

The typography.

As a specimen of typography the First Folio is not to be commended.
There are a great many contemporary folios of larger bulk far more neatly
and correctly printed. It looks as though Jaggard's printing office were
undermanned. The misprints are numerous and are especially conspicuous
in the pagination. The sheets seem to have been worked off very slowly,
and corrections were made while the press was working, so that the copies
struck off later differ occasionally from the earlier copies. One mark
of carelessness on the part of the compositor or corrector of the press,
which is common to all copies, is that 'Troilus and Cressida,' though in
the body of the book it opens the section of tragedies, is not mentioned
at all in the table of contents, and the play is unpaged except on its
second and third pages, which bear the numbers 79 and 80.

Unique copies.

Three copies are known which are distinguished by more interesting
irregularities, in each case unique. The copy in the Lenox Library in
New York includes a cancel duplicate of a leaf of 'As You Like It' (sheet
R of the comedies), and the title-page bears the date 1622 instead of
1623; but it is suspected that the figures were tampered with outside the
printing office. {308} Samuel Butler, successively headmaster of
Shrewsbury and Bishop of Lich