THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE: THE TEXT CAREFULLY RESTORED ACCORDING TO NOTES ORIGINAL AND SELECTED, AND A LIFE OF THE POET; BY THE REV. H. N. HUDSON, A.M. REVISED EDITION, WITH ADDITIONAL NOTES. IN TWELVE VOLUMES. VOL. IX. BOSTON: ESTES AND LAURIAT, 301 WASHINGton Street. 1883. HARVARD Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by NOYES, HOLMES, AND COMPANY, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. Copyright, 1881, BY ESTES AND LAURIAT. UNIVERSITY PRESS: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE OF TIMON OF ATHENS. THE LIFE OF TIMON OF ATHENS, as it is called in the original edition, is among the most difficult of Shakespeare's plays for an editor to deal with; which difficulty grows partly from the characteristics of the play itself, and partly from the lack of any contemporary notices concerning it. The only information we have respecting it is, that it was published in the folio of 1623, where it stands the fifth in the division of Tragedies, and that it was entered the same year at the Stationers' by Blount and Jaggard as one of "the plays not formerly entered to other men ; " which latter circumstance naturally infers that the play had not been published before. The original edition is without any marking of the acts and scenes, save that at the beginning we have "Actus Primus, Scœna Prima;" and at the end is given a list of the persons represented, headed 66 The Actors' Names." The original text is in divers respects very remarkable some parts are set forth in a most irregular manner, being full of short and seemingly-broken lines, with many passages printed as verse which cannot possibly be made to read as such; yet the sense is generally so complete as to infer that the irregularity came from the writer, not from the printer. In these parts, moreover, along with Shakespeare's peculiar rhythm and harmony, we miss also, and in an equal degree, his characteristic diction and imagery: the ruggedness and irregularity are not those of one who, having mastered the resources of harmony, knew how to heighten and enrich it with discords, but of one who was ignorant of its laws and incapable of its powers. Other parts, again, exhibit the sustained grandeur of the Poet's noblest and most varied music And in these parts the true Shakespearian cast of thought and imagery comes upon us in all its richness gushing, apparently, from the deepest fountains of his genius, and steeped in its most characteristic potencies. |