Setting aside those who care merely to see a play on the stage, it may be said that of Shakespeare there are readers and readers; and both classes have rights and privileges which should be treated with deference. The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all. Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare's through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds? When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop and philosophically investigate what Hamlet means by a "_dram of eale"_? Must we lose a scruple of the sport by turning aside to find out what Malvolio means by the "_lady of the Strachey_"? If Timon chooses to invite _Ullorxa_ to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before? No: let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants. We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven's gate. Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without let or hinderance. But, fair and softly, is not this the very point at which we are striving? With all our twistings and turnings, our patchings and piecings, have we aught else in view than to decipher just what Shakespeare wrote? Where are Shakespeare's exact words to be found? Not in the so-called Quartos; for they are said by Shakespeare's intimate and dear friends to have been "maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors," and taken down perhaps from the lips of some of the actors, bribed by stoops of liquor at _Yaughan's_ (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to be feared that the potations were at times pottle deep). Nor can we take the Folio in which all his dramas were first collected: Shakespeare never saw a line of it; for seven years he had been hid in death's dateless night when that volume was printed. What, then, is to be done? The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have, and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably Shakespeare's exact words. In dealing with the text we must never for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors. Is such a text, thus transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of Shakespeare? Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to hang over his text? Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken, in our opinion, to believe this. Rather, let us regard these pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases--namely, as but