The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  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

  Upon the muses’ anvil, turn the same,

  And himself with it that he thinks to frame;

  Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,

  For a good poet’s made as well as born.

  And such wert thou. Look how the father’s face

  Lives in his issue, even so the race

  Of Shakespeare’s mind and manners brightly shines

  In his well-turned and true-filèd lines,

  In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

  As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.

  Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were

  To see thee in our waters yet appear,

  And make those flights upon the banks of Thames

  That so did take Eliza and our James!

  But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere

  Advanced, and made a constellation there!

  Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage

  Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,

  Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like

  night 80

  And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.

  Ben Jonson, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

  Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenic Poet, Master William Shakespeare

  Those hands which you so clapped go now and wring,

  You Britons brave, for done are Shakespeare’s days.

  His days are done that made the dainty plays

  Which made the globe of heav’n and earth to ring.

  Dried is that vein, dried is the Thespian spring,

  Turned all to tears, and Phoebus clouds his rays.

  That corpse, that coffin now bestick those bays

  Which crowned him poet first, then poets’ king.

  If tragedies might any prologue have,

  All those he made would scarce make one to this,

  Where fame, now that he gone is to the grave—

  Death’s public tiring-house—the nuntius is;

  For though his line of life went soon about,

  The life yet of his
lines shall never out.

  Hugh Holland, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

  TO THE MEMORY of the deceased author Master William Shakespeare

  Shakespeare, at length thy pious fellows give

  The world thy works, thy works by which outlive

  Thy tomb thy name must; when that stone is rent,

  And time dissolves thy Stratford monument,

  Here we alive shall view thee still. This book,

  When brass and marble fade, shall make thee look

  Fresh to all ages. When posterity

  Shall loathe what’s new, think all is prodigy

  That is not Shakespeare’s ev‘ry line, each verse

  Here shall revive, redeem thee from thy hearse.

  Nor fire nor cank’ring age, as Naso said

  Of his, thy wit-fraught book shall once invade;

  Nor shall I e‘er believe or think thee dead—

  Though missed—until our bankrupt stage be sped—

  Impossible—with some new strain t’outdo

  Passions of Juliet and her Romeo,

  Or till I hear a scene more nobly take

  Than when thy half-sword parleying Romans spake.

  Till these, till any of thy volume’s rest

  Shall with more fire, more feeling be expressed,

  Be sure, our Shakespeare, thou canst never die,

  But crowned with laurel, live eternally.

  Leonard Digges, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

  To the memory of Master William Shakespeare

  We wondered, Shakespeare, that thou went‘st so soon

  From the world’s stage to the grave’s tiring-room.

  We thought thee dead, but this thy printed worth

  Tells thy spectators that thou went’st but forth

  To enter with applause. An actor’s art

  Can die, and live to act a second part.

  That’s but an exit of mortality;

  This, a re-entrance to a plaudite.

  James Mabbe, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

  The Names of the Principal Actors in all these Plays

  William Shakespeare.

  Richard Burbage.

  John Heminges.

  Augustine Phillips.

  William Kempe.

  Thomas Pope.

  George Bryan.

  Henry Condell.

  William Sly.

  Richard Cowley.

  John Lowin.

  Samuel Cross.

  Alexander Cook.

  Samuel Gilburn.

  Robert Armin.

  William Ostler.

  Nathan Field.

  John Underwood.

  Nicholas Tooley.

  William Ecclestone.

  Joseph Taylor.

  Robert Benfield.

  Robert Gough.

  Richard Robinson.

  John Shank.

  John Rice.

  In Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1623)

  An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, William Shakespeare

  What need my Shakespeare for his honoured bones

  The labour of an age in piled stones,

  Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

  Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

  Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

  What need’st thou such dull witness of thy name?

  Thou in our wonder and astonishment

  Hast built thyself a lasting monument,

  For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art

  Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart

  Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book

  Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

  Then thou, our fancy of herself bereaving,

  Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,

  And so sepulchered in such pomp dost lie

  That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

  John Milton (1630), in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1632)

  Upon the Effigies of my Worthy Friend, the Author Master William Shakespeare, and his Works

  Spectator, this life’s shadow is. To see

  The truer image and a livelier he,

  Turn reader. But observe his comic vein,

  Laugh; and proceed next to a tragic strain,

  Then weep. So when thou find’st two contraries,

  Two different passions from thy rapt soul rise,

  Say—who alone effect such wonders could—

  Rare Shakespeare to the life thou dost behold.

  Anonymous, in Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies (1632)

  On Worthy Master Shakespeare and his Poems

  A mind reflecting ages past, whose clear

  And equal surface can make things appear

  Distant a thousand years, and represent

  Them in their lively colours’ just extent;

  To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,

  Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates

  Of death and Lethe, where confused lie

  Great heaps of ruinous mortality;

  In that deep dusky dungeon. to discern

  A royal ghost from churls; by art to learn

  The physiognomy of shades, and give

  Them sudden birth, wond’ring how oft they live;

  What story coldly tells, what poets feign

  At second hand, and picture without brain

  Senseless and soulless shows; to give a stage,

  Ample and true with life, voice, action, age,

  As Plato’s year and new scene of the world

  Them unto us or us to them had hurled;

  To raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse,

  Make kings his subjects; by exchanging verse

  Enlive their pale trunks, that the present age

  Joys in their joy, and trembles at their rage;

  Yet so to temper passion that our ears

  Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears

  Both weep and smile: fearful at plots so sad,

  Then laughing at our fear; abused, and glad

  To be abused, affected with that truth

  Which we perceive is false; pleased in that ruth

  At which we start, and by elaborate play

  Tortured and tickled; by a crablike way

  Time past made pastime, and in ugly sort

  Disgorging up his ravin for our sport,

  While the plebeian imp from lofty throne

  Creates and rules a world, and works upon

  Mankind by secret engines; now to move

  A chilling pity, then a rigorous love;

  To strike up and stroke down both joy and ire;

  To steer th’affections, and by heavenly fire

  Mould us anew; stol’n from ourselves—

  This, and much more which cannot be expressed

  But by himself, his tongue and his own breast,

  Was Shakespeare’s freehold, which his cunning brain

  Improved by favour of the ninefold train.

  The buskined muse, the comic queen, the grand

  And louder tone of Clio; nimble hand

  And nimbler foot of the melodious pair,

  The silver-voiced lady, the most fair

  Calliope, whose speaking silence daunts,

  And she whose praise the heavenly body chants.

  These jointly wooed him, envying one another,

  Obeyed by all as spouse, but loved as brother,

  And wrought a curious robe of sable grave,

  Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most brave,

  And constant blue, rich purple, guiltless white,

  The lowly russet, and the scarlet bright,

  Branched and embroidered like the painted spring,

  Each leaf matched with a flower, and each string

  Of golden wire, each line of silk; there run

  Italian works whose thread the sisters spun,

  And th
ere did sing, or seem to sing, the choice

  Birds of a foreign note and various voice.

  Here hangs a mossy rock, there plays a fair

  But chiding fountain purled. Not the air

  Nor clouds nor thunder but were living drawn

  Not out of common tiffany or lawn,

  But fine materials which the muses know,

  And only know the countries where they grow.

  Now when they could no longer him enjoy

  In mortal garments pent: death may destroy,