Your lordships’ most bounden,

JOHN HEMINGES.

HENRY CONDELL.

To the Great Variety of Readers

From the most able to him that can but spell: there you are numbered; we had rather you were weighed, especially when the fate of all books depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well, it is now public, and you will stand for your privileges, we know: to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says. Then, how odd soever your brains be, or your wisdoms, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your six-penn’orth, your shilling’s worth, your five shillings’ worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But whatever you do, buy. Censure will not drive a trade or make the jack go; and though you be a magistrate of wit, and sit on the stage at Blackfriars or the Cockpit to arraign plays daily, know, these plays have had their trial already, and stood out all appeals, and do now come forth quitted rather by a decree of court than any purchased letters of commendation.

It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care and pain to have collected and published them, and so to have published them as where, before, you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them; who, as he was a happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who only gather his works and give them you, to praise him; it is yours, that read him. And there we hope, to your diverse capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you; for his wit can no more lie hid than it could be lost. Read him, therefore, and again, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his friends whom if you need can be your guides; if you need them not, you can lead yourselves and others. And such readers we wish him.

John Heminges, Henry Condell, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR

MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND what he hath left us

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name

Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;

While I confess thy writings to be such

As neither man nor muse can praise too much:

‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways

Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise,

For silliest ignorance on these may light,

Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right;

Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance

The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;

Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,

And think to ruin where it seemed to raise.

These are as some infamous bawd or whore

Should praise a matron: what could hurt her more?

But thou art proof against them, and indeed

Above th‘ill fortune of them, or the need.

I therefore will begin. Soul of the age!

The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!

My Shakespeare, rise. I will not lodge thee by

Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie

A little further to make thee a room.

Thou art a monument without a tomb,

And art alive still while thy book doth live

And we have wits to read and praise to give.

That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses:

I mean with great but disproportioned muses.

For if I thought my judgement were of years

I should commit thee surely with thy peers,

And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,

Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,

From thence to honour thee I would not seek

For names, but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,

Euripides, and Sophocles to us,

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,

To life again, to hear thy buskin tread

And shake a stage; or, when thy socks were on,

Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time,

And all the muses still were in their prime

When like Apollo he came forth to warm

Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!

Nature herself was proud of his designs,

And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines,

Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,

As since she will vouchsafe no other wit.

The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,

Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please,

But antiquated and deserted lie

As they were not of nature’s family.

Yet must I not give nature all; thy art,

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

For though the poet’s matter nature be,

His art doth give the fashion; and that he

Who casts to write a living line must sweat—

Such as thine are—and strike the second heat