Note note 25 — PREFACE.

25 Ben Jonson’s commendatory verses prefixed to the Folio Edition of 1623, cannot be included among the contemporary notices. They were not written until seven years after Shakespere’s death. Ben Jonson failed to write aught about Shakespere while the latter lived. His sneers at the early “Shakespere plays,” as shown in the Prologue to “Every Man In His Humor” and his sonnet “On Poet-Ape,” are too well known to need quotation; and, being a “contemner and scorner of others,” one must look to self interest as being the motive for the production of those commendatory lines to his “beloved, the author, Master William Shakespere.” Was not this self interest a financial one in the Shakespere plays? Shakespere died in 1616. The first folio edition appeared in 1623. The address, therein, attributed by Malone and many other commentators, to Jonson, recited that the plays are now offered to “view cured and perfect of their limbs,” and “we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” If these statements were true of manuscripts, unmentioned in the will of Shakespere, and “collected” by Heminge and Condell from the playhouses, it must be that some master mind arranged, revised and recopied them during the seven years between Shakespere’s death and this publication. From the date of the death of Shakespere (1616) to 1625, “Jonson did not write one line for the stage!” It was this revision that kept him silent, and as editor of the folio edition he sought for reimbursement for his labors in its sale. “But whatever you do, buy,” reads the address in that edition; and the commendatory verses are praise enough to excite purchases.