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@@ -1,6 +1,94 @@ *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1117 *** +Executive Director's Notes: + +In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think all +the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have +been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they +are presented herein: + + Barnardo. Who's there? + Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold +your selfe + + Bar. Long liue the King + + * * * * * + +As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words +or letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is the +original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling +to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions +that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, +above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming +Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . . + +The answer is that they MAY have packed "liue" into a cliche at a +time when they were out of "v"'s. . .possibly having used "vv" in +place of some "w"'s, etc. This was a common practice of the day, +as print was still quite expensive, and they didn't want to spend +more on a wider selection of characters than they had to. + +You will find a lot of these kinds of "errors" in this text, as I +have mentioned in other times and places, many "scholars" have an +extreme attachment to these errors, and many have accorded them a +very high place in the "canon" of Shakespeare. My father read an +assortment of these made available to him by Cambridge University +in England for several months in a glass room constructed for the +purpose. To the best of my knowledge he read ALL those available +. . .in great detail. . .and determined from the various changes, +that Shakespeare most likely did not write in nearly as many of a +variety of errors we credit him for, even though he was in/famous +for signing his name with several different spellings. + +So, please take this into account when reading the comments below +made by our volunteer who prepared this file: you may see errors +that are "not" errors. . . . + +So. . .with this caveat. . .we have NOT changed the canon errors, +here is the Project Gutenberg Etext of Shakespeare's play. + +Michael S. Hart +Project Gutenberg +Executive Director + + * * * * * + +Scanner's Notes: + +What this is and isn't. This was taken from a copy of +Shakespeare's first folio and it is as close as I can come in +ASCII to the printed text. + +The elongated S's have been changed to small s's and the +conjoined ae have been changed to ae. I have left the spelling, +punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the printed +text. I have corrected some spelling mistakes (I have put +together a spelling dictionary devised from the spellings of +the Geneva Bible and Shakespeare's First Folio and have unified +spellings according to this template), typo's and expanded +abbreviations as I have come across them. Everything within +brackets [] is what I have added. So if you don't like that you +can delete everything within the brackets if you want a purer +Shakespeare. + +Another thing that you should be aware of is that there are +textual differences between various copies of the first folio. So +there may be differences (other than what I have mentioned above) +between this and other first folio editions. This is due to the +printer's habit of setting the type and running off a number of +copies and then proofing the printed copy and correcting the type +and then continuing the printing run. The proof run wasn't thrown +away but incorporated into the printed copies. This is just the +way it is. The text I have used was a composite of more than 30 +different First Folio editions' best pages. + +David Reed + +===================================================================== + + The Second Part of Henry the Fourth @@ -4154,3 +4242,4 @@ for the Queene. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1117 *** + |