I. THE HISTORY OF THE PLAY.

THE earliest edition of Romeo and Juliet was a quarto published in 1597 with the following title-page:

AN EXCELLENT conceited Tragedie | OF Romeo and Iuliet. As it hath been often (with great applause) | plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon

his Seruants.* | LONDON, | Printed by Iohn Danter. [ 1597.

This was followed in 1599 by a second quarto edition, the title-page of which is as follows:

THE MOST EX-cellent and lamentable | Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet. | Newly corrected, augmented, and amended: As it hath bene sundry times publiquely acted, by the | right Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine | his Seruants |· LONDON Printed by Thomas Creede, for Cuthbert Burby, and are to be sold at his shop neare the Exchange. | 1599. A third quarto appeared in 1609 with the following titlepage:

THE MOST EX | CELLENT AND | Lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet. | As it hath beene sundrie times publiquely Acted, by the KINGS Maiesties Seruants | at the Globe. Newly corrected, augmented, and amended: | LONDON | Printed for IOHN SMETHVVICK, and are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstanes Church-yard, | in Fleetestreete vnder the Dyall | 1609.

A fourth quarto has no date, and there is some doubt whether it was a reprint of the one of 1609, or that a reprint of this. The Camb. editors consider that "internal evidence conclusively proves" the former; Halliwell thinks "it is very difficult to say which is the earlier," but inclines to the opinion that the undated copy was published in 1608. The text is more correct than that of the quarto of 1609. The earlier of the two, whichever it may have been, was undoubtedly a reprint of the second quarto with some corrections, and the later was a reprint of the earlier.

The undated quarto is the first that bears the name of the author. On the title-page, which in other respects is

* Here follows a vignette, with the motto AVT NVNC AVT NVNQUAM.

This quarto is reprinted in full in Furness's "New Variorum" ed. of the play, and also in the Camb. ed.

substantially identical with that of the third quarto, "Written by W. Shakespeare" is inserted as a separate line after the word "Globe." According to Halliwell, this line is found only in early copies of the edition, having been suppressed before the rest were printed.*

The above are the only editions known to have been issued before the folio of 1623, in which the play occupies pages 53-79 in the division of "Tragedies." The text of the folio seems to have been taken from the third quarto.

A fifth quarto, evidently reprinted from the fourth, and with substantially the same title-page, except that it is said to be printed "by R. Young for John Smethwicke," was published in 1637.

The first quarto is much shorter than the second, the former having only 2232 lines, including the prologue, while the latter has 3007 lines (Daniel). Some editors (among whom are Knight and Verplanck) believe that the first quarto gives the author's first draught of the play, and the second the form it assumed after he had revised and enlarged it; but the majority of the best critics (including Collier, White, the Cambridge editors, Mommsen, Furness, Daniel, Dowden, and Stokes) agree substantially in the opinion that the first quarto was a pirated edition, and represents in an abbreviated and imperfect form the play subsequently printed in full in the second. The former was "made up partly from copies of portions of the original play, partly from recollection and from notes taken during the performance;" the latter was from an authentic copy, and a careful comparison of the text with the earlier one shows that in the meantime the play "underwent revision, received some slight augmentation, and in some few places must have been entirely rewritten."†

*The copy in the British Museum is without the author's name (Daniel).

† See the introduction to Mr. P. A. Daniel's Romeo and Juliet: Par

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The date of the play is placed by all the critics some years earlier than the publication of the first quarto. They generally agree that it was probably begun as early as 1591, though it may not have assumed its final form until 1596 or 1597. Romeo is alluded to as a popular character of Shakespeare's by Weever in an epigram, written probably before 1595. The title-page of the first quarto tells us in 1597 that the play had been "often plaid publiquely ;" and from the additional statement that Lord Hunsdon's servants were the performers, Malone shows that it must have been acted between July, 1596, and April, 1597. The Lord Chamberlain, Henry Lord Hunsdon, died July 22, 1596; his son, George Lord Hunsdon, was appointed Chamberlain in April, 1597. It was only in the interval between these dates that the company would have been called "Lord Hunsdon's servants" instead of the more honourable designation of "the Lord Chamberlain's servants." This, however, does not prove that the play was then first brought out; and Weever's epigram proves that it had been put on the stage at least a year earlier.

The Nurse's allusion in i. 3. 23 (""T is since the earthquake now eleven years") has been quoted in support of the assumed date of 1591, a memorable earthquake having been felt in London in 1580; and the repetition of the "eleven years” (in i. 3. 35), as Stokes remarks, favours this view, in spite of the fact that the Nurse is somewhat confused in her reckoning as to Juliet's age.*

allel Texts of the First Two Quartos, published for the New Shakspere Society in 1874; also White's introduction to the play in his ed. of Shakespeare, vol. x. p. 10 fol. On this subject and on the question of the date of the play, cf. the summary of the views of the leading editors in F. p. 408 fol.

*Other historical allusions have been suspected to exist. For instance, the reference in v. 2. 8 fol. to the sealing-up of plague-stricken houses has been thought to be connected with the pestilence of 1593;

The internal evidence confirms this opinion that the tragedy was an early work of the poet, and that it was subsequently "corrected, augmented, and amended." There is a good deal of rhyme, and much of it in the form of alternate rhyme. The alliteration, the frequent playing upon words, and the lyrical character of many passages also lead to the same conclusion.*

II. THE SOURCES OF THE PLOT.

Girolamo della Corte, in his Storia di Verona, 1594, relates the story of the play as a true event occurring in 1303; but he is very untrustworthy as a historian, and the earlier annalists of the city are silent on the subject. A tale in and ii. 2. 82 fol. may have been suggested by the voyages of Drake and Hawkins in 1594-5 or of Raleigh in 1595, etc.

* White sees traces of another hand than Shakespeare's in the earlier version of the play-"not many," but "quite unmistakable;" and he believes that the difference between the two versions "is owing partly to the rejection by him of the work of a colaborer, partly to the surreptitious and inadequate means by which the copy for the earlier edition was obtained, and partly, perhaps, but in a much less degree, to Shakespeare's elaboration of what he himself had written." The date of the first form of the play W. is inclined to put as early as 1591. He says: "that in 1591 Shakespeare and one or more other 'practitioners for the stage' composed a Romeo and Juliet in partnership, and that in 1596 Shakespeare 'corrected, augmented, and amended' it, making it to all intents and purposes entirely his own, and that it then met with such great success that an unscrupulous publisher obtained as much as he could of it, by hook or by crook, and had the deficiencies supplied, as well as could be, by bits from the play of 1591, and, when that failed, by poets as unscrupulous as himself, is entirely accordant with the practices of that day, and reconciles all the facts in this particular case; even the two that the play contains a reference which indicates 1591 as the year when it was written, and that in 1596 it was published in haste to take advantage of a great and sudden popularity." Fleay (Shakespeare Manual, p. 32) expresses the opinion "that G. Peele wrote the early play about 1593; that Shakespeare in 1596 corrected this up to the point where there is a change of type in the 1st quarto (end of ii. 3), and in 1597 completed his corrections as in the 2d quarto."