(a) ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’

Shakespeare’s 1623 first folio was assembled by two members of the King’s Men who had worked alongside Shakespeare during his lifetime, and who were now themselves the leading members of his old company and the sole survivors of the original Chamberlain’s Men, established in 1594. They were John Heminges (or Heminge; baptised 1566, died 1630) and Henry Condell (baptised 1576?, died 1627). Their names appear as signatories to the dedication of the folio ‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren’ (William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Earl of Montgomery), and also to the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ which immediately follows the dedication on the preliminary pages of the volume. It is widely and not unreasonably assumed therefore that Heminges and Condell themselves were fully responsible for writing both the dedication and the address.

During the course of the eighteenth century, however, the Shakespearean editor George Steevens was led to wonder whether the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ might not have been inspired or partly written by Ben Jonson. In a note first published after his death in the 1803 Variorum Shakespeare (ed. Reed, 1803, 1.166), Steevens pointed to the similarity between a passage in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair and another passage in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’. ‘Perhaps Old Ben was the author of the Players’ Preface’, he wrote, ‘and, in the instance before us, has borrowed from himself’. A lengthier note, elaborating this suggestion and listing numerous verbal similarities between passages in Jonson’s writings and in the address, appeared in the 1821 edition of the Variorum Shakespeare (ed. Boswell, 2.663-75). This note, too, is attributed to Steevens, though W. W. Greg was led to wonder whether it might not have emerged from the papers of the late Edmond Malone (Greg, 1955, 26). Some years later James Boaden in his study of Shakespeare’s sonnets claimed it as ‘certain’ ‘that Ben Jonson held the pen’ for Heminges and Condell in the dedication to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomery, as well as the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, but produced no evidence to support this assertion (Boaden, 1837, 32).

These suggestions have had a mixed reception in modern times. Percy and Evelyn Simpson reviewed the evidence for Jonson’s authorship of the address at some length in the final volume of the Oxford Ben Jonson, but were cautious of accepting the attribution: ‘All this is delightfully ingenious, and the parallels are noteworthy. But a sober judgement will hesitate to apportion a signed preface, of no great length, between two alleged authors and a third conjectured to have written half of it’ (H&S, 11.140-4, at 143). Sir Walter Greg was more sympathetic to the suggestion, analysing the evidence in some detail. ‘One thing is certain’, Greg concluded, ‘whoever wrote the address – and we may fairly assume that the epistle came from the same pen – if it was not Jonson himself, was a close student of his works’ (1955, 17-27, at 21). Alfred W. Pollard, on the other hand, believed there was ‘no shred of evidence’ to support the idea of Jonson’s authorship (Pollard, 1909, 122), and Samuel Schoenbaum was equally dismissive, believing that Steevens was ‘at his most perverse’ in proposing this idea, and that Boaden was guilty of perpetuating an altogether ‘unlikely hypothesis’ (Schoenbaum, 1970b, 278).

It would be surprising however if Heminges and Condell had not consulted closely with Jonson while they were readying the 1623 folio for the press. He was the leading dramatist of the day, a former friend and colleague of Shakespeare, and a man experienced, as they were not, in the ways of printers and booksellers. He was moreover the author of another volume, published seven years earlier, that presented a powerful model for the 1623 Shakespeare first folio: the 1616 folio of his own Works, published by William Stansby. Heminges and Condell had known Jonson for many years, each man having acted in six of Jonson’s plays: Every Man In His Humour, Every Man Out of His Humour, Sejanus, Volpone, The Alchemist, and Catiline ( ODNB ). Condell was also a seasoned Shakespearean actor, though Heminges is not known to have acted in any of Shakespeare’s plays. Over the years, the two actors must have developed a strong working relationship with Jonson, and have committed hundreds of his lines to memory: a fact that (as we shall see) does not however entirely explain the many Jonsonian echoes in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’.

Jonson’s mark is clearly evident in the preliminary pages of the 1623 folio, which open with his verses ‘To the Reader’ (signed ‘B.I.’), vouching for the fact that Martin Droeshout’s engraved portrait of Shakespeare indeed represents the author of the texts that follow. After the dedication ‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren’ and the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ comes Jonson’s eloquent tribute ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us’, followed by a sonnet by Jonson’s friend, Hugh Holland, ‘Upon the Lines and Life of the Famous Scenic Poet, Master William Shakespeare’. Even if Jonson did not take the opportunity while the folio was in preparation to read through the entire Shakespearian canon – a possibility entertained by Anne Barton (1984, 258) – one might expect him at least to have examined these early pages of the volume with particular interest and care. The presence of so many parallels between his own writings and passages in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ suggests that, while he may not have actually initiated this address, he may at least have been tempted to strengthen or overwrite an earlier draft prepared by the two actors.

The more significant of these parallels – many of which were first noted by Steevens – are commented on below. The text of the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ is given here in modernized form, for ease of comparison with Jonsonian texts elsewhere in this edition.

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 the 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 diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters 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 divers 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 Heminge
Henry Condell

One section at least of this address – ‘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’ (24-6) – must have been drafted by Heminges and Condell rather than by Jonson, for it expresses a view that Jonson, writing some years later in his commonplace book, Discoveries, identified with the players, distancing himself from their opinion.

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out line. My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand.’ Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein most he faulted. And to justify mine own candour; for I loved the man, and do honour his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.

Discoveries, 468-76

Other passages in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, however, are strongly reminiscent of Jonson’s own style and own opinions. The distinction made at the outset between different kinds of readers recalls Jonson’s similar distinction between the reader ‘in ordinary’ and the reader ‘extraordinary’, proposed in the two addresses at the beginning of the 1611 quarto edition of Catiline. The opening sentences of ‘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’ – resemble a passage in Discoveries (366-9) almost certainly written after 1623, and not published until 1641 (after the death of Heminges, Condell, and Jonson himself): ‘Suffrages in Parliament are numbered, not weighed; nor can it be otherwise in those public councils, where nothing is so unequal as the equality: for there, how odd soever men’s brains or wisdoms are, their power is always even and the same’. Jonson is here following Pliny’s Epistolae, 2.12.5, a text with which the two players were unlikely to have been familiar. ‘From the most able to him that can but spell’ recalls Jonson’s mockery in Epigrams, 3.9-10 (‘To My Bookseller’) of the barely literate customers who come to examine the books which the stationer has displayed for sale, ‘some clerk-like serving man, / Who scarce can spell th’hard names, whose knight less can’; and anticipates a similar gibe in the ‘Dedication, To the Reader’ of The New Inn in 1629:

If thou be such [i.e. a reader], I make thee my patron and dedicate the piece to thee: if not so much, would I had been at the charge of thy better literature. Howsoever, if thou canst but spell and join my sense, there is more hope of thee than of a hundred fastidious impertinents who were there present the first day, yet never made piece of their prospect the right way. (1-5)

‘It is now public, and you will stand for your privileges we know: to read and censure’ (‘Great Variety’, 3-4) anticipates the insistence of Damplay in The Magnetic Lady (performed in 1632, after the death of both Heminges and Condell): ‘I will not have gentlemen lose their privilege, nor I myself my prerogative, for ne’er an overgrown or superannuated poet of ’em all! He shall not give me the law. I will censure, and be witty, and take my tobacco, and enjoy my Magna Carta of reprehension, as my predecessors have done before me’ (Chorus 3, 16-19). ‘Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says’ (‘Great Variety’, 5) echoes once more Jonson’s epigram to his bookseller, John Stepneth, who ‘Call’st a book good or bad, as it doth sell’ (Epigrams, 3.2).

‘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’ (‘Great Variety’, 7-9) anticipates another passage from The Magnetic Lady:

DAMPLAY Can anything be out of purpose at a play? I see no reason, if I come here and give my eighteen pence or two shillings for my seat, but I should take it out in censure on the stage.

BOY Your two shillingworth is allowed you, but you will take your ten shillingworth, your twenty shillingworth, and more. (Chorus 2, 45-9).

The notion that critical entitlement might be linked in this graduated fashion to entry payments is also found in the Articles of Agreement between the author and the spectators in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair:

It is further agreed that every person here have his or their free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their own charge, the author having now departed with his right. It shall be lawful for any man to judge his sixpenn’orth, his twelvepenn’orth, so to his eighteen pence, two shillings, half a crown, to the value of his place — provided always his place get not above his wit. And if he pay for half a dozen, he may censure for all them, too, so that he will undertake that they shall be silent. He shall put in for censures here as they do for lots at the lottery: marry, if he drop but sixpence at the door and will censure a crown’s worth, it is thought there is no conscience or justice in that. (64-72)

There may be here (as Steevens first suggested) ‘somewhat less propriety’ in applying this idea to book-buying than to theatre-going, for while theatre seats might be purchased at differing prices the cost of the folio would remain constant. For the Oxford editors, ‘this crude resetting of a joke of Jonson’s made in 1614 betrays a writer familiar with his work, and familiar with the theatre, but not with Paul’s Churchyard. By 1623 Jonson himself had had considerable experience in publishing, and it is inconceivable that he would have misapplied his own phrase’ (Simpson, 1914, 518; H&S, 11.143). Yet the joke may not have been altogether misapplied, for as Peter Blayney has shown, the price of Shakespeare’s first folio was in fact variable (Blayney, 1991, 25-6), as Jonson may have known. Though the purchase price never descended quite to the levels suggested in the present passage (‘your six-penn’orth, your shilling’s worth’), these lines may still be seen as a considered sally at those whose intellectual capacities were as meagre as their financial resources.

The idea that an author, in publishing his work, has ‘departed with his right’ – found in the passage from the Induction to Bartholomew Fair, just quoted – is commonly encountered in Jonson’s work, and returns in this address: Shakespeare is unable to oversee his own writings ‘since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right’ (‘Great Variety’, 17-18). ‘When we do give, Alfonso, to the light / A work of ours, we part with our own right’, Jonson wrote in an epigram to his friend Alfonso Ferrabosco (Epigrams, 131.1-2). ‘The muses forbid that I should restrain your meddling whom I see already busy with the title and tricking over the leaves’, he wrote again in his address ‘To the Reader in Ordinary’ prefixed to Catiline, ‘it is your own. I departed with my right when I let it first abroad’ (1-3). ‘Speak what you list; that time is yours. My right / I have departed with’ says Fabian Fitzdottrel in another context in The Devil Is an Ass (1.4.82-3).

‘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 trials already, and stood out all appeals . . .’ (‘Great Variety’, 10-12). Jonson often ironically compared the verdicts of playgoers with those of the judiciary. ‘But what will the noblemen think, or the grave wits here, to see you seated on the bench thus?’, asks the Prologue of the gossips in the Induction to The Staple of News. ‘Why, what should they think?’, replies Gossip Mirth, ‘But that they had mothers, as we had, and those mothers had gossips (if their children were christened), as we are, and such as had a longing to see plays and sit upon them, as we do, and arraign both them and their poets’ (13-18).

Come, leave the loathèd stage,
And the more loathsome age,
Where pride and impudence, in faction knit,
Usurp the chair of wit,
Indicting and arraigning every day
Something they call a play!

So run the famous opening lines (1-6) of Jonson’s ‘Ode: To Himself’, written after the failure of The New Inn. In his lines addressed ‘To the Worthy Author, Master John Fletcher’, prefixed to the 1610 edition of The Faithful Shepherdess, Jonson spoke scornfully of ‘The wise and many-headed bench that sits / Upon the life and death of plays and wits’ (and of the ‘brave spark’ who ‘may judge for his sixpence’: 1-2, 6-7).

Shakespeare’s texts are offered to the reader, so it is said later in the address (‘Great Variety’, 22-3), ‘cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’. The italicized phrase is one of which Jonson was fond. In the title of ‘Eupheme’ (The Underwood, 84), Jonson was later to describe Sir Kenelm Digby as ‘A Gentleman / Absolute in All Numbers’ (i.e. perfect in all ways): a rendering of a Latin phrase from Pliny (omnibus numeris absolutum, Epistolae, 9.38) with which, once again, it is unlikely that Heminges and Condell would have been familiar. In a letter addressed to Robert Cecil soon after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, Jonson reports on a conversation he has had with the Venetian ambassador’s chaplain, who has ‘engaged himself to find out one, absolute in all numbers’, to assist with Cecil’s investigations (Letter 9.9). Praising Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland, Jonson suggests that were Elizabeth’s father, Sir Philip Sidney, still living, ‘He should those rare and absolute numbers view / As he would burn, or better far, his book’ (Epigrams, 79.11-12).

‘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’ (‘Great Variety, 30-2). Here too is a characteristic emphasis. Jonson repeatedly offered his texts to readers in the hope they would understand them, and in the knowledge that many would not. ‘Pray thee take care, that tak’st my book in hand, / To read it well: that is, to understand’, is the advice offered in the first of Jonson’s Epigrams (1.1-2). ‘Who reads, who roves, who hopes to understand / May take thy volume to his virtuous hand’, Jonson wrote in lines addressed in 1613 ‘To His Much and Worthily Esteemed Friend, The Author’ of Cynthia’s Revenge, or Menander’s Ecstasy, John Stephens (7-8). The Alchemist is addressed ‘To the Reader’: ‘If thou be’st more, thou art an understander, and then I trust thee’ (1). Love’s Triumph through Callipolis is published in a wish ‘To make the spectators understanders’ (1).

The cumulative evidence of these many verbal traces strongly suggests that Jonson had a revising hand in the drafting of ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’. His hand is especially evident in the opening paragraph of the address, but appears to continue, with a lighter touch, to the end. In 1623, few writers in England were as adept as Jonson in addressing their readers and theatre-goers. Few did so with the same caustic wit, the same tendency to scold and berate, that is evident throughout this address, as it is elsewhere in Jonson’s own prologues, epilogues, inductions, choruses, epistles, and other meta-theatrical utterances. The folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, as Jonson recognized, would give permanence to his friend’s writings, carrying his name through to what he elsewhere called ‘remembrance with posterity’ (Epigrams, Dedication, 14). Jonson expresses this confidence in Shakespeare’s future fame without misgiving in his lines ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author’ (22-4) a page later in the folio:

Thou are a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

The address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ is alert (on the other hand) to the various accidents which might attend the folio’s publication, and to the ignorance and censoriousness of many of its potential readers. Both the confidence and the anxiety are entirely characteristic of Jonson, as he helped his friends the players to launch Shakespeare’s first folio, destined to be one of the most famous -- and, ironically, for those here imagined to be clutching their small change, one of the most highly valuable – of the world’s printed books.

(b) ‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren’

In a note published in 1914, the American scholar William Dinsmore Briggs set out the case for Jonson’s possible hand in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, without knowledge of Steevens’ earlier arguments to the same effect (Briggs, 1914a). Though none of Briggs’s own arguments concerning this address was new, he did extend his general claim by suggesting – again, with no apparent awareness of earlier and similar proposals – that Jonson had also been responsible for drafting the Epistle Dedicatory ‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren’, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. ‘If Jonson wrote these two bits of prose’, wrote Briggs, ‘he was the author of four out of seven pieces of preliminary matter. Otherwise reckoned, he wrote 167 lines out of a total of 211 lines. This places his relation to the folio in a new light.’

Briggs’s case rests upon a single but striking parallel between a passage in the Epistle Dedicatory to the folio and another in the Dedication of The Alchemist to Mary, Lady Wroth.

Country hands reach forth milk, cream, fruits, or what they have; and many nations (we have heard) that had no gums and incense, obtained their requests with a leavened cake. It was no fault to approach their gods by what means they could; and the most, though meanest, of things are made more precious when they are dedicated to temples.
(‘To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren’, Epistle Dedicatory of Shakespeare’s first folio)

Madam,
In the age of sacrifices, the truth of religion was not in the greatness and fat of the offerings, but in the devotion and zeal of the sacrificers. Else, what could a handful of gums have done in the sight of a hecatomb? Or how might I appear at this altar, except with those affections that no less love the light and witness than they have the conscience of your virtue?
(‘To the Lady Most Deserving Her Name and Blood, Mary, Lady Wroth’, Dedication to The Alchemist)

In each of these instances, the author apologizes for the modesty of his gift, but recalls that in earlier times humble sacrifices, devoutly offered, were acceptable to the gods. In the Dedication of The Alchemist, Jonson notes that a ‘handful of gums’ (i.e. the burning of incense) were once thought to please the gods as much as a large public sacrifice or ‘hecatomb’ (the burning of a hundred oxen). The Epistle Dedicatory of the folio appears to extend this thought. In those earlier times, if ‘no gums or incense’ were available, then ‘a leavened cake’ would have been deemed acceptable – or ‘milk, cream, fruits, or what they have’.

Percy Simpson responded immediately and sceptically to Briggs’s article. After having pointed out that Steevens had made all these suggestions more than a century earlier, Simpson then produced what he believed to be the decisive reason for rejecting them: the supposedly ‘crude resetting of a joke of Jonson’s’ from Bartholomew Fair in the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’: a point he would later elaborate in the Oxford Ben Jonson (Simpson, 1914, 518; see the foregoing discussion in (a) above). Simpson ignored entirely the one new item of evidence that Briggs had produced – the parallel between the Dedication to The Alchemist and the Epistle Dedicatory to the Folio – which Briggs in own belated response to Simpson chose not to pursue (Briggs, 1915a, 135-6). As a consequence, this small but telling piece of evidence has been largely lost to later discussion.

The similarity in thought and wording between the two passages that Briggs adduced suggests that Jonson, even if he was not responsible for the wording of the Epistle Dedicatory as a whole, might well have retouched the players’ draft at this point. Questions relating to ancient sacrifice were of some interest to him, as they were to his friend John Selden, whom Jonson consulted in 1616 on aspects of this subject (Electronic Edition, Letters to Jonson). In the first of his ‘Poems of Devotion’, ‘The Sinner’s Sacrifice’ (The Underwood, 1.1.9-13), Jonson recalls biblical passages (Psalms, 51.16-17, 1 Samuel 15.22) concerning the acceptability of modest, rather than ostentatious, forms of sacrifice:

All-gracious God, the sinner’s sacrifice,
A broken heart, thou wert not wont despise,
But ’bove the fat of rams or bulls to prize
An off’ring meet
For thy acceptance.

In other respects, however, the wording of the Epistle Dedicatory in the folio is not characteristic of Jonson’s thought or style. The Epistle has few, if any, of the Jonsonian echoes that so strikingly characterize the address ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’. Jonson would scarcely have described either his own writings or those of his greatest rival as ‘trifles’. It would have been especially incongruous for him to have used such a word – and to have declared Shakespeare’s writings hardly worth the two patrons’ attention – while simultaneously making such powerful claims, in his verses ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author’, for the supreme and enduring quality of this work. The apprehensive tone in which Pembroke and Montgomery are here addressed differs markedly from the more confident terms in which Jonson writes to Pembroke in the dedications to Catiline and the Epigrams, and in Epigrams, 101, and to Montgomery and Pembroke in Letters 7 and 8.

It seems likely, then, that Jonson’s hand in drafting the Epistle Dedicatory to the folio was less dominant than Briggs imagined, but not totally absent, as Simpson sceptically maintained: being arguably present in one single passage of the modernized text given below.

To the Most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren,
William, Earl of Pembroke, etc. Lord Chamberlain to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty
and
Philip, Earl of Montgomery, etc., Gentleman of His Majesty’s Bedchamber.
Both Knights of the most noble Order of the Garter, and our singular good Lords.
Right Honourable,
Whilst we study to be thankful in our particular for the many favours we have received from your lordships, we are fallen upon the ill fortune to mingle two the most diverse things that can be, fear and rashness: rashness in the enterprise, and fear of the success. For when we value the places your highnesses sustain, we cannot but know their dignity greater than to descend to the reading of these trifles; and while we name them trifles, we have deprived ourselves of the defence of our dedication. But since your lordships have been pleased to think these trifles something heretofore, and have prosecuted both them and their author living with so much favour, we hope that – they out-living him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be executor to his own writings – you will use the like indulgence toward them, you have done unto their parent. There is a great difference whether any book choose his patrons, or find them. This hath done both. For so much were your lordships’ likings of the several parts when they were acted, as before they were published, the volume asked to be yours. We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead to procure his orphans guardians; without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays to your most noble patronage. Wherein, as we have justly observed no man to come near your lordships but with a kind of religious address, it hath been the height of our care, who are the presenters, to make the present worthy of your highnesses by the perfection. But there we must also crave our abilities to be considered, my lords. We cannot go beyond our own powers. Country hands reach forth milk, cream, fruits, or what they have; and many nations (we have heard) that had not gums and incense, obtained their requests with a leavened cake. It was no fault to approach their gods by what means they could; and the most, though meanest, of things are made more precious when they are dedicated to temples. In that name therefore we most humbly consecrate to your highnesses these remains of your servant Shakespeare, that what delight is in them may be ever your lordships; the reputation his, and the faults ours, if any be committed by a pair so careful to show their gratitude both to the living and the dead, as is

Your lordships’ most bounden,
John Heminge
Henry Condell