e Second--was first published in 1663 by Peter
Chetwynde, who reissued it next year with the addition of seven plays,
six of which have no claim to admission among Shakespeare's works. 'Unto
this impression,' runs the title-page of 1664, 'is added seven Playes
never before printed in folio, viz.: Pericles, Prince of Tyre. The
London Prodigall. The History of Thomas Ld. Cromwell. Sir John
Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The Puritan Widow. A Yorkshire Tragedy. The
Tragedy of Locrine.' The six spurious pieces which open the volume were
attributed by unprincipled publishers to Shakespeare in his lifetime.
Fewer copies of the Third Folio are reputed to be extant than of the
Second or Fourth, owing to the destruction of many unsold impressions in
the Fire of London in 1666. The Fourth Folio, printed in 1685 'for H.
Herringman, E. Brewster, R. Chiswell, and R. Bentley,' reprints the folio
of 1664 without change except in the way of modernising the spelling; it
repeats the spurious pieces.

Eighteenth-century editors.

Since 1685 some two hundred independent editions of the collected works
have been published in Great Britain and Ireland, and many thousand
editions of separate plays. The eighteenth-century editors of the
collected works endeavoured with varying degrees of success to purge the
text of the numerous incoherences of the folios, and to restore, where
good taste or good sense required it, the lost text of the contemporary
quartos. It is largely owing to a due co-ordination of the results of
the efforts of the eighteenth-century editors by their successors in the
present century that Shakespeare's work has become intelligible to
general readers unversed in textual criticism, and has won from them the
veneration that it merits. {314}

Nicholas Rowe, 1674-1718.

Nicholas Rowe, a popular dramatist of Queen Anne's reign, and poet
laureate to George I., was the first critical editor of Shakespeare. He
produced an edition of his plays in six octavo volumes in 1709. A new
edition in eight volumes followed in 1714, and another hand added a ninth
volume which included the poems. Rowe prefixed a valuable life of the
poet embodying traditions which were in danger of perishing without a
record. His text followed that of the Fourth Folio. The plays were
printed in the same order, except that he transferred the spurious pieces
from the beginning to the end. Rowe did not compare his text with that
of the Fir