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are printed from Shakespeare's own holograph copies.
Among the plays spoken of as "all the rest," namely, those not hitherto published and not deformed by the fraudulent, are, Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Measure for Measure, Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, All's Well, Twelfth Night, Winter's Tale, Henry VI, iii., Henry VIII, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. Also Henry VI, i., ii., King John, and Taming of the Shrew, appeared now in other form than in the hitherto published Quartos bearing these or closely similar names. We have, moreover, no previous information as to The Shrew, Timon, Julius Caesar, All's Well, and Henry VIII. The Preface adds the remarkable statement that, whatever Shakespeare thought, "he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."
It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form. The Preface takes it for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays "absolute in their numbers as he conceived them." But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare's own handwriting. After "as he conceived them," it goes on, "Who, as he was a most 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."
This may be meant to SUGGEST, but does not AFFIRM, that the actors HAVE "all the rest" of the plays in Shakespeare's own handwriting. They may have, or may have had, some of his manuscripts, and believed that other manuscripts accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words. Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have everywhere left themselves loopholes and