то HENRY O. HOUGHTON, Esq., M. A. OF RIVERSIDE. MY DEAR MR. HOUGHTON: Shakespeare's Sonnets were dedicated by their publisher to a sort of editor of them, because he was their "onlie begetter." The editor of this edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works dedicates it to the publisher for much the same reason. For if you are not its only begetter, it was at least undertaken and has been completed to carry out a plan in the design of which you had a considerable share. For that reason, too, your colaborer has placed upon its title-page the name of the great Press established by you and directed in a spirit which seems to have been caught from those eminent printers and scholars, the Aldi. There is, moreover, a certain appropriateness_in_the_name borne by this edition. It seems fit and of good omen that what was played to the general public at the Bankside in Old England should be printed for the general public at Riverside in the New. There is yet one more reason why your name should appear upon this page: it is to acknowledge here my longfelt personal interest in your labors and the interest which you have shown in those of Yours most truly, R. G. W. 395416 PUBLISHERS' NOTE. WHEN Mr. Collier published the emended folio of 1623, there appeared in Putnam's Magazine, October and November, 1853, a very able examination of the authenticity of these emendations, and the next year the articles were issued with other studies in a volume entitled Shakespeare's Scholar. The author was Mr. Richard Grant White, a man of letters in New York, whose work on the Courier and Enquirer of that city had been marked by great brilliancy, at the same time that the author himself was so persistent in courting seclusion that he won for himself the sobriquet of "the private gentleman of the Courier." So sensitive was he on this point that, when that paper praised his articles in Putnam's, he wrote to the editor, begging that "the paper shall never laud me or my doings while I am part of it and above ground." When Shakespeare's Scholar was published, Mr. White was thirty-two years old, born of a family very markedly American. As he said a few years later: "For more than two hundred years my forefathers on both sides have been New England men; and, besides, not one of us, myself included, has ever been across the water." He had, however, a most generous acquaintance with the great England of literature, and he did both his own country and the England of his day a most important service when, during the war for the Union, he wrote a series of letters, signed "A Yankee," to the London Spectator, which were singularly enlightening as to the politics and social life of the United States. Besides his facility in letters, Mr. White was a thorough student of music, and himself an ardent musician. His criticisms, for the most part unsigned, were of the highest intelli gence, and for years his greatest delight was in a quartet of which he was a member that met regularly for the playing of classical music. As Mr. Church, in his sketch,1 has said: “As a player, he was much above the average of amateur performers, though he had taken up the violoncello comparatively late in life. He had studied earnestly under the tuition of Frederick Bergner, the well-known violoncello virtuoso, and his knowledge of music was precise and extensive. Literature was his work, music his pleasure and his passion." In 1857 Mr. White began the publication of a new edition of Shakespeare, issuing Volumes II.-V. in that year, and completing the series of twelve volumes in 1865 with Volume I., which was devoted to a study of Shakespeare's life and genius. These volumes at once attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad, and gave Mr. White a distinguished place amongst Shakespeareans. During the progress of the work he wrote also a very acute study of the authorship of the three parts of Henry IV. Mr. James Russell Lowell was editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857, and wrote a very full review of the four volumes first published. The review was in two articles, and in the first article he said: "We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakespeare; second, enough logical acuterress of mind and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that Shakespeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books; and last, what is perhaps of more importance than all, so great a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakespeare, as will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to understand fully that the Gothic Shakespeare 1 Atlantic Monthly, March, 1891. |