In the Folio of 1623, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA stands between the Histories and the Tragedies. The Tragedies at first began with _Coriolanus_. Then followed _Titus Andronicus_ and _Romeo and Juliet_, and it appears upon examination that the editors intended _Troilus and Cressida_ to be next in order. With this view the first three pages were actually printed and paged so as to follow _Romeo and Juliet_, and the play was called 'The Tragedie of Troylus and Cressida.' Whether it was found that the title of tragedy could not with propriety be given to it, or whatever may have been the cause, the editors changed its position, cancelled the leaf containing the end of _Romeo and Juliet_ on one side and the beginning of _Troilus and Cressida_ on the other, but retained the other leaf already printed, and then added the prologue to fill up the blank page, which in the original setting of the type had been occupied by the end of _Romeo and Juliet_. The rest of the play was printed with a new set of signatures and without any pagination, and was simply called 'Troylus and Cressida.' There are very remarkable discrepancies between the Quarto and the Folio text of this play, similar in character to those which are found on comparing the two texts of _Richard III_. In the present case, however, they are not nearly so frequent, nor, as a general rule, so important. Some of the most important have been mentioned specially in the notes at the end of the play, and all the others recorded in the foot-notes. We find in the Folio several passages essential to the sense of the context which do not exist in the Quarto, and which therefore must have been omitted by the negligence of a copyist or printer. On the other hand we find some passages in the Quarto, not absolutely essential to the sense, though a decided improvement to it and quite in the author's manner, which either do not appear in the Folio at all, or appear in a mutilated form. Sometimes the lines which are wrongly divided in the Quarto are divided properly in the Folio, and vice versa: in this point, however, the former is generally more correct than the latter. The two texts differ in many single words: sometimes the difference is clearly owing to a clerical or typographical error, but in other cases it appears to result from deliberate correction, first by the author himself, and secondly by some less skilful hand. The main duty of an editor must be to discriminate the one from the other, and in the first case to prefer the text of the Folio, and in the second to reject it in favour of the Quarto. On the whole we are of opinion that the Quarto was printed from a transcript of the author's original MS.; that this MS. was afterwards revised and slightly altered by the author himself, and that before the first Folio was printed from it, it had been tampered with by another hand. Perhaps the corrections are due to the writer who did not shrink from prefixing to Shakespeare's play a prologue of his own.