Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A REVIEW OP THE PRESENT STATE OF THE SHAKESPEARIAN CONTROVERSY. A Most important literary question has engaged public attention since last July. Not that it is new to those who take an interest in dramatic, and more especially Shakespearian, literature; for it has been before the world since January 1852, when Mr. Collier first announced, in the Athenaeum that he had discovered in a copy of the second folio edition of Shakespeare's Plays, published in 1632, a large body of Notes and Emendations, amounting to nearly 20,000, in a hand not much later than the time when this edition emanated from the press, and that in his belief the Annotator had made these emendations from better authority than that of the Editors of the first folio. This announcement naturally created a great desire on the part of Shakespearian critics, and other literary men, for a detailed account of these Notes and Emendations; and in order that any person interested in the subject might have an opportunity of inspecting them, Mr. Collier, as he states, exhibited the book before the Shakespearian Society, and, on three occasions, before the Society of Antiquaries. Further to gratify the curiosity that had then been raised, in the year 1852 Mr. Collier published a volume professing to contain the greater part, but not all, of these manuscript alterations, with a fac-simile of a portion of one page. No sooner had Mr. Collier made public some of the emendations of this annotated folio, than the most lively interest was excited, not only in England, but on the Continent as well. The new readings were, however, violently assailed by critics of every denomination; one alone (Professor Mommsen) accepting them as genuine. In England, Mr. Singer, Mr. Dyce, Mr. Staunton, Mr. Hunter, and Mr. C. Knight repudiate...