With Malone (1790) Shakespearian criticism enters upon a new phase--the historical one--when research and evidence take precedence of conjecture. What he says of the first editors of his century remains as true to-day as it was when written--"that the men never looked behind them, but considered their own era and their own phraseology as the standard of perfection." Malone, moreover, observes that the two chief duties of an editor are to show the genuine text of an author and to explain his obscurities. This, it must be admitted, is the view taken by all his contemporaries; and yet dramas are not poems any more than words are deeds. And while Malone spares no pains to amend a corrupt text in the hope of arriving at verbal accuracy, he has little scruple about marring Shakespeare's scheme of action. "All the stage-directions," he writes, "throughout this work I have considered as wholly in my power, and have regulated them in the best manner I could." To do this is to run counter to an editor's province and duty; for a dramatist to know that his text is correct affords him small consolation if his story has been misunderstood and mutilated. It is doubtful whether scholars who insist on editing Shakespeare's plays as if they were anything or everything but drama have any just appreciation of the work they undertake. When Dr. Johnson contends that Shakespeare was "read, admired, and imitated while he was yet deformed," he is indirectly praising deformity. All the eighteenth-century editors blame Shakespeare for the management of his "fable," and attribute it to his ignorance, while many modern editors altogether overlook his art of making a play. The late Dr. Furnivall's introduction to the "Leopold Shakespeare," which has been deservedly and universally praised, has yet one vital defect as dramatic criticism--his comments apply to the art of a novelist, not to that of a playwright.