"I have preserved the common distribution of the plays into acts, though I believe it to be in almost all the plays void of authority. Some of those which are divided in the later editions have no division in the first folio, and some that are divided in the folio have no division in the preceding copies. The settled mode of the theatre requires four intervals in the play, but few if any of our author's compositions can be properly distributed in that manner. An act is so much of the drama as passes without intervention of time or change of place. A pause makes a new act. In every real and therefore in every imitative action, the intervals may be more or fewer, the restriction of five acts being accidental and arbitrary. This Shakespeare knew, and this he practised; his plays were written, and at first printed in one unbroken continuity, and ought now to be exhibited with short pauses, interposed as often as the scene is changed, or any considerable time is required to pass. This method would at once quell a thousand absurdities." Something must be said later on about the "short pauses." There is wisdom as well as humour in Johnson's observation: "Let him who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give read every play from the first scene to the last with utter negligence of all his commentators." To Steevens belongs the credit of being the first to collect and reprint (1766) in one volume the original quartos, of which a revised and completed edition is much needed. "Many of the quartos," he writes, "as our own printers assure me, were far from being unskilfully executed, and some of them were much more correctly printed than the folio." With regard to Shakespeare's text, he observes: "To make his meaning intelligible to his audience seems to have been his only care, and with the ease of conversation he has adopted its incorrectness." In fact, Steevens thinks that Shakespeare, of all the writers of his day, was the most ungrammatical. Capell (1768) is perhaps the least dogmatic of all the eighteenth-century editors, and the most cautious in his judgment, when he remarks: "Generally speaking, the more distant a new edition is from its original, the more it abounds in faults which is done by destroying all marks of peculiarity and notes of time." And in another passage: "That division of scenes which Jonson seems to have attempted, and upon which the French stage prides itself, Shakespeare does not appear to have any idea of." In a note he adds: "The current editions are divided in such a manner that nothing like a rule can be collected from any of them." Unfortunately, like all the other editors, Capell believes it necessary to divide Shakespeare's plays into acts and scenes.