medyes, The
Tempest. The two gentlemen of Verona. Measure for Measure. The
Comedy of Errors. As you like it. All's well that ends well. Twelfth
Night. The winter's tale. Histories The third parte of Henry the
sixth. Henry the eight. Tragedies. Coriolanus. Timon of Athens.
Julius Caesar. Mackbeth. Anthonie and Cleopatra. Cymbeline." This
entry preluded the publication of the First Folio. Associated with
Blount and Jaggard were Jaggard's son Isaac, who had the contract for
the printing of the book, I. Smethwick, and W. A. Aspley. Smethwick
owned at this time the rights of _Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and
Juliet_, and _Hamlet_, and also the _Taming of a Shrew_, which latter
right apparently carried with it the right to print Shakespeare's
adaptation of it, the _Taming of the Shrew_. Aspley owned the rights
to _Much Ado About Nothing_, and to _II Henry IV_. These four
printers, making arrangements with other printers, such as Law, who
apparently had the rights of _I Henry IV, Richard II_, {122} and
_Richard III_, and others, were thus able to bring out an apparently
complete edition of Shakespeare's plays. One play, _Troilus and
Cressida_, was evidently secured only at the last moment and printed
very irregularly.[3] Blount and Jaggard apparently got the manuscripts
of the sixteen plays on the Register from members of Shakespeare's
company, two of whom, John Hemings and Henry Condell, affixed their
names to the Address to the Reader which was prefixed to the volume.
It will be remembered that these men received by Shakespeare's bequest
a gold ring as a token of friendship. Their intimacy with the
dramatist must have been both strong and lasting. Their actual share
in the editing of the volume cannot be ascertained. It may be that all
the claims are true which are made above their names in the Address to
the Reader as to their care and pains in collecting and publishing his
works "so to have publish'd them as where before you were abused with
diverse stolne and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed, the
stealthes of injurious copyists, we expos'd them; even those are now
offer'd to your view, crude and bereft of their limbes, and of the rest
absolutely in their parts as he conceived them who as he was a happie
imitator of nature was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and
hand went together and what he thought he told with that easinesse that
wee have scarse received from him a {123} blot in