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LUCRECE
# V
The text and typography of the first edition.
HARRISON and Field’s first edition of 1594 is the sole authentic source of the text of the poem. That alone followed the author’s manuscript. The later editions were set up from those that went before. Small typographical changes were introduced into the reissues, but all the alterations may be put to the credit of correctors of the press acting on their own responsibility, excepting possibly in the case of the edition of 1616, which came out soon after Shakespeare’s death. In that volume there are traces of a clumsy editorial revision.
Discrepancies among extant exemplars.
It is improbable that the author supervised the production of the first edition, but greater care was taken in its typography than in the case of any other of Shakespeare’s works,—not excepting *Venus and Adonis*. The work is not free from misprints nor from other typographical irregularities. But an effort was made to reduce their number to the lowest possible limit. The original edition was printed off slowly; the type was kept standing after the first impressions left the office, and small changes were subsequently introduced into the standing type, with the result that the few surviving copies of the first edition show small discrepancies among themselves. One impression is freer from typographical errors than another, or a correction which has been made in one copy, with a view to improving the sense or the grammar, is absent from another copy. The alterations are not always intelligent, and it is unlikely that Shakespeare had any hand in them.
The Bodleian copy, I. Unique readings.
The copy in the Bodleian Library which is reproduced in this volume—one of two in that library—has at least five readings which are met with nowhere else. They were apparently all deemed to be defects, and were afterwards changed.
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