It is believed by some scholars that in the second quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet, published in 1599, Shakespeare's revising hand can be seen, and that the differences between the first and second editions show the amendments, additions, and corrections with which Shakespeare saw fit to embellish his work in preparing it for the press. If this were actually the case; if we could lay the two texts on the table before us, convinced that one of them was Shakespeare's draft or acting copy, and the other Shakespeare's finished work; and if, by comparing the two, we could enter into the workshop and forge of his mind,--it would seem as if we had at last found an avenue of approach towards this great personality, this intellect the most powerful that has ever illumined human life. No other literary inquiry could compare in interest with such a study as this; for the relation which Shakespeare himself bore to the plays he created is one of the mysteries and blank places in history, a gap that staggers the mind and which imagination cannot overleap. The student who examines both texts will be apt to conclude that the second is by no means a revised edition of the first, but that (according to another theory) the first is a pirated edition of the play, stolen by the printer, and probably obtained by means of a reporter who took down the lines as they were spoken on the stage. The stage directions in the first edition are not properly the stage directions of a dramatist as to what should be done on the stage, but seem rather the records of an eye-witness as to what he saw happen on the stage. The mistakes of the reporter (or the perversions of the actors) as seen in the first edition generally injure the play; and it was from this circumstance--the frequency of blotches in the first edition--that the idea gained currency that the second edition was an example of Shakespeare's never-failing tact in bettering his own lines. Perhaps, after all, it would little advance our understanding of the plays, or solve the essential puzzle,--that they actually had an author,--if we could follow every stroke of his revising pen. We should observe, no doubt, refinement of characterization, changes of stage effect, the addition of flourishes and beauties; but their origin and true meaning, the secret of their life, would be as safe as it is at present, as securely lost in the midst of all this demonstration as the manuscripts themselves were in the destruction of the Globe Theatre. If we must then abandon the hope of seeing Shakespeare in his workshop, we may, nevertheless, obtain from the pirated text some notion of the manner in which Shakespeare was staged in his own day, and of how he fared at the hands of the early actors. Romeo and Juliet is an exceptionally difficult play to act, and the difficulties seem to have been about the same in Shakespeare's time as they are to-day. They are, in fact, inherent in the structure of the work itself.