Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called "The Isle of Dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the least guesse of his drifte or scope," were added by the printers. * The printers also assigned the authorship of the work to any name they thought would help sell the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. (Just as the first printer of the sonnets we call Shakespeare's, dedicated them to "W. H.," which two initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes of conjecture as to who "W. H." was.) Sometimes the author thus despotically assigned to the work rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own compositions in a collection of verses called "The Passionate Pilgrim," printed by one Jaggard, in 1599, upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey-wood publicly claimed his own, but William Shakespeare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, was removed by the printer from the title-page of the {110}third edition of the book, in 1612. * But, as a rule, the Stationers' Company were too powerful, and the author too poor, to bring the trick to exposure. * Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii. It was under these circumstances, and in times like these, that the Shakespearean plays began to appear in print. Where did they come from? They were written to be played. According to all accounts they were very valuable to the theater which produced them. Every personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that they should be kept in secret--least of all that they should be printed and made accessible to the public outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, must become patrons of the house where they were performed. That the author or authors of the plays could have made them of more profit by selling them to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that they personally entered them--or such of them as were entered--on the books of the Stationers' Company, is certainly not the fact; the only persons to whose interest it was to print them were the printers themselves, and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause them to be printed. But where did these printers procure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they printed? The question will never be answered. The manuscripts might have been procured by bribing individual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made up for the press. The fact that the plays never were printed without more or less of the stage directions or "business" included, lends probability to this theory: {111}but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion