The procuring of the Copy

The Winter's Tale is bibliographically one of the most interesting texts in the First Folio. In the first place, it is clear that it only just escaped being omitted from the Folio altogether, that Isaac Jaggard originally printed thirteen Comedies only, and that his men were well on with the Histories before the missing fourteenth comedy turned up. The evidence for all this has been brought together by a train of detective work, in which, as often happens in bibliography, several scholars have taken a hand.

It was, I believe, Sidney Lee who first noticed that there was something peculiar about the printing of this play. In the Introduction to the Oxford Facsimile (1902) of the First Folio he pointed out (i) that while the printer's signatures for the quires of the first thirteen Comedies run continuously from A to Z and those for the Histories run from a to x, a special set of signatures, Aa to Cc, are employed for The Winter's Tale, and (ii) that similarly, while the first thirteen plays of the Folio are printed straight on, without any blank pages being left between succeeding texts, The Winter's Tale has a blank at either end, one dividing it from Twelfth Night and the other from King John.

The following is a brief description of the punctuation and other typographical devices employed in the text, which have been more fully explained in the Note on Punctuation and the Textual Introduction to be found in The Tempest volume:

An obelisk (†) implies corruption or emendation, and suggests a reference to the Notes.

A single bracket at the beginning of a speech signifies an ‘aside.‘

Four dots represent a full-stop in the original, except when it occurs at the end of a speech, and they mark a long pause. Original colons or semicolons, which denote a somewhat shorter pause, are retained, or represented as three dots when they appear to possess special dramatic significance. Similarly, significant commas have been given as dashes.

Round brackets are taken from the original, and mark a significant change of voice; when the original brackets seem to imply little more than the drop in tone accompanying parenthesis, they are conveyed by commas or dashes.

In plays for which both Folio and Quarto texts exist, passages taken from the text not selected as the basis for the present edition will be enclosed within square brackets. Lines which Shakespeare apparently intended to cancel, have been marked off by frame-brackets.

The Winter's Tale was much liked in the reigns of the first two Stuart kings. The earliest known mention of it is in the manuscript Booke of Plates of Simon Forman, who saw it at the Globe playhouse on Wednesday, May 15, 1611. On November 5 of that year it was acted at Whitehall before the King. In the spring of 1613 it was one of fourteen plays acted at Whitehall during the festivities celebrating the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. In 1618 it was acted again before the King on Easter Tuesday. A slip of what may be waste paper from the Office of the Revels, now in the British Museum, suggests a performance at Court in or about 1619. On August 19, 1623, Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, licensed it for performance (‘an olde playe.…formerly allowed of by Sir George Bucke’); and on January 18, 1624, it was acted at Whitehall before the Duchess of Richmond in the King's absence. Almost exactly ten years later, on January 16, 1634, it was played again at Court, ‘and likt.’ In every case the actors were Shakespeare's company, the King's players, formerly the Lord Chamberlain's.

The stage-histories in the previous volumes of this edition have shown that Shakespeare's comedies for the most part fell out of favour in the Restoration period. The Winter's Tale was even less regarded than most.

No Quarto edition of this play has been discovered; and we must therefore rely on the First Folio for our authoritative text. Most fortunately it happens to be a good one, excellent among its companions in the volume, in details which the Textual Editor will indicate and discuss.

The date of the play, as we have it, can be fixed with, fair exactitude. Three lines of external evidence converge upon the year 1611.

(a) Dr Simon Forman—a somewhatnotorious character in his day, who combined medicine with clairvoyance—in a MS Booke of Plates and Notes Thereof…for Common Pollicie (Ashmole MSS 208) records that he witnessed a performance of The Winter's Tale at the Globe Theatre on May 15, 1611. The entry runs:

In the Winters Talle at the glob 1611 the 15 of maye g

Questions concerning the text of this play and the date of its first production will be treated in their proper place. It is enough to say here of the text that none is discoverable earlier than the 1623 Folio, and indeed this was probably its first appearance in print, if we may guess so much from the fact that the licence granted to the printer specifies ‘soe manie of the said copyes as are not formerly entred to other men,’ and Twelfth Night is one of these. For the date: It is not mentioned in Meres' list, of 1598: but it is mentioned in a diary discovered either by Collier or by Hunter among the Harleian MSS in the British Museum. Collier first published it in 1831, but it was Hunter who identified the diarist as one John Manningham, barrister of the Middle Temple. The entries extend, with gaps, from Christmas 1601 to April 14, 1603, and under ‘Febr. 1601’ occurs the following:

The following is a brief description of the punctuation and other typographical devices employed in the text, which have been more fully explained in the Note on Punctuation and the Textual Introduction to be found in The Tempest volume:

An obelisk (†) implies corruption or emendation, and suggests a reference to the Notes.

A single bracket at the beginning of a speech signifies an ‘aside.’

Four dots represent a full-stop in the original, except when it occurs at the end of a speech, and they mark a long pause. Original colons or semicolons, which denote a somewhat shorter pause, are retained, or represented as three dots when they appear to possess special dramatic significance. Similarly, significant commas have been given as dashes.

Round brackets are taken from the original, and mark a significant change of voice; when the original brackets seem to imply little more than the drop in tone accompanying parenthesis, they are conveyed by commas or dashes.

In plays for which both Folio and Quarto texts exist, passages taken from the text not selected as the basis for the present edition will be enclosed within square brackets. Lines which Shakespeare apparently intended to cancel, have been marked off by frame-brackets.

Single inverted commas (‘ ’) are editorial; double ones (“ ”) derive from the original, where they are used to draw attention to maxims, quotations, etc.

Stage-directions like ‘Enter Viola and Maluolio, at seuerall doores’ (2. 2. head) and ‘Maluolio within’ (4. 2. 22 S.D.) suggest that the manuscript from which Twelfth Night was printed in 1623 was, as we have found with most other texts hitherto issued in this edition, either itself a theatrical prompt-book or a transcript therefrom. This original, moreover, must have been a fine example of its kind, since the transmitted text contains very few verbal cruxes, most of them long ago solved, is furnished with stage-directions and punctuation which are on the whole both adequate and competent, and gives no serious trouble either in the arrangement of its verse or—except for some natural confusion between the speech-headings Fab. and Tob.—in the distribution of its speeches. In short, the Folio text is on the whole happy and well-ordered like the exquisite comedy it has preserved, and the task of an editor is light indeed in comparison with that presented him in All's Well, the play last issued in this edition. Yet there is one respect in which the editorial problems of the two plays are surprisingly alike. We found that All's Well had been neglected and that much work needed doing on its exegetic side. Twelfth Night, one of the most popular of all Shakespeare's productions, would have attracted, one might suppose, a full measure of attention from commentators.