The fate of all Bookes depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses.  Well!  It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priviledges, wee know:  to read, and censure.[27] Do so, but buy it first.  That doth best commend a Booke the Stationer sales.  Then, how odde soever your braines be, or your wisdomes, make your license the same and spare not....  But whatever you do, Buy.  Censure will not drive a Trade, nor make the Jacke go.

[Footnote 26:  “Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, being a reproduction in facsimile of the First Folio Edition of 1623, from the Chatsworth copy in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, K.G., with introduction and censure of copies by Sidney Lee”.  Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1902, XXXV 908 pp.  Edition limited to 1000 numbered and signed copies.]

[Footnote 27:  Judge.]

The chief credit for bringing together the materials for the First Folio, in 1623, is believed to be due to William Jaggard.  Some ten years earlier he had acquired the printing-privileges of certain of the quartos.  Edward Blount, whose name appears as publisher on the title page with that of Isaac Jaggard, was merely a stationer, so that the actual printing was solely under the charge of the latter, who seems, at this time, to have been entrusted with this department of the business.  However, Blount’s services may have been valuable since he had better literary taste than the Jaggards possessed.

In spite of certain evident faults of proportion, the portrait of Shakespeare engraved by Martin Droeshout for the title page of the 1623 Folio bears internal evidence of being a fairly good likeness, for the face possesses a marked individuality.  There is a belief that it was taken from the so-called “Flower” portrait, now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-upon-Avon, and which is conjectured to have been painted in 1609, at least during Shakespeare’s lifetime, possibly by another Martin Droeshout, a Fleming, uncle of the engraver of the same name.  This portrait was discovered, painted on a panel at Peckham Rye, bearing the inscription “Will Shakespeare^n, 1609”.  That it should be the original from which the Droeshout engraving was taken has been doubted, since it appears rather to resemble later states of the plate than earlier ones.  While Ben Jonson, who had seen Shakespeare so often, may have been partly moved to bestow undue praise upon the Folio portrait, in the lines he furnished the publishers to be placed immediately facing it, by his wish to say a good word for their publication, he would scarcely have made use of such superlative terms had he not considered it to be at least a fairly good likeness.  Jonson’s lines have been so often printed that few are unacquainted with them, but as illustrating the above remarks they can be repeated here, in the old spelling and form of the First Folio: 

TO THE READER.