The fact that Pericles was Dot included in the First Folio has thrown discredit upon Heminge and Condell; for even if, as has been conjectured, difficulties of copyright prevented their publishing this very popular play, it is felt that they should not have claimed that they presented in their volume all of Shakespeare's dramas. Since the play could scarcely be ignored, as some of the earlier dramas of divided authorship might have been, the most natural conjecture seems to be that Pericles was generally regarded as substantially another man's play. I believe that in 1623 not only those friends and fellows of Shakespeare who had access to his papers (and who made no other mistake so far as we can determine), but many of those who were urged to buy, would think of the play as “Heywood's Pericles,” in a way that they would not think of “Fletcher's Henry VIII”—nor of any play in the Folio as being essentially the work of an important living dramatist. Most critics believe that Shakespeare was only the reviser of the piece, and assign to him Acts III-V without the choruses and brothel scenes. This leaves only 754 lines, including some we do not really prize and which may not be his. If these scenes were a mere revamping of scenes already in existence, we need not bother about the omission of Pericles from the Folio; if Shakespeare was the original composer of those scenes, and wrote the brothel scenes also, we are put to shifts to explain it. Of course no such consideration would prevent the play's being printed in quarto as Shakespeare's, for we know that in the case of other dramas no warrant at all was needed.