Publication of his Plays.—­It is probable that Shakespeare himself published only two early poems.  Sixteen of his plays appeared in print during his lifetime; but the chances are that they were taken either from notes or from stage copies, more or less imperfect and surreptitiously obtained.  The twentieth century has seen one of these careless reprints of a single play sell for more than three times as much as it cost to build a leading Elizabethan theater.[22] If Shakespeare himself had seen to the publication of his plays, succeeding generations would have been saved much trouble in puzzling over obscurities due to an imperfect text.  We must remember, however, that publishing a play was thought to injure its success on the stage.  One manager offered a printer a sum now equal to $100 not to publish a copy of a play that he had secured.

The First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works was published in 1623, seven years after his death, by two of his friends, John Heming and Henry Condell.  In their dedication of the plays they say:—­

“We have but collected them and done an office to the dead ... 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.”

If Shakespeare had not possessed the art of making friends, we might to-day be without such plays as Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth.  These were printed for the first time in the 1623 Folio.

Amount and Classification of his Work.—­The First Folio edition contained thirty-five plays, containing 100,120 lines.  The Globe edition, one of the best modern texts of Shakespeare, has thirty-seven plays.  Even if we give him no credit for the unknown dramas which he assisted in fashioning, and if we further deduct all doubtful plays from this number, the amount of dramatic work of which he is certainly the author is only less astonishing than its excellence.  His non-dramatic poetry, comprising Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, 154 Sonnets, and some other short pieces, amounts to more than half as many lines as Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Mere genius without wonderful self-control and a well-ordered use of time would not have enabled Shakespeare to leave such a legacy to the world.  The pressure for fresh plays to meet exigencies is sufficient to explain why he did not always do his best work, even if we suppose that his health was never “out of joint.”

The First Folio gives the current contemporary classification of the plays into “Comedies,” “Histories,” and “Tragedies.”  We indicate the following as some of the best in each class:—­

Comedies:  A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.