It is plain that the many dramas previously unpublished could only be recovered from manuscripts of one sort or another, because they existed in no other form.  The Preface takes it for granted that the selected manuscripts contain the plays “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them.”  But the Preface does not commit itself, I repeat, to the statement that all of these many plays are printed from Shakespeare’s own handwriting.  After “as he conceived them,” it goes on, “Who, as he was a most happy imitator of nature, was a most gentle expresser of it.  His mind and hand went together:  and what he thought he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

This may be meant to suggest, but does not affirm, that the actors have “all the rest” of the plays in Shakespeare’s own handwriting.  They may have, or may have had, some of his manuscripts, and believed that other manuscripts accessible to them, and used by them, contain his very words.  Whether from cunning or design, or from the Elizabethan inability to tell a plain tale plainly, the authors or author of the Preface have everywhere left themselves loopholes and ways of evasion and escape.  It is not possible to pin them down to any plain statement of facts concerning the sources for the hitherto unpublished plays, “the rest” of the plays.

These, at least, were from manuscript sources which the actors thought accurate, and some may have been “fair copies” in Shakespeare’s own hand. (Scott, as regards his novels, sent his prima cura, his first writing down, to the press, and his pages are nearly free from blot or erasion.  In one case at least, Shelley’s first draft of a poem is described as like a marsh of reeds in water, with wild ducks, but he made very elegant fair copies for the press.) Let it be supposed that Ben Jonson wrote all this Preface, in accordance with the wishes and instructions of the two actors who sign it.  He took their word for the almost blotless MSS. which they received from Shakespeare.  He remarks, in his posthumously published Discoveries (notes, memories, brief essays), “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line.”  And Ben gives, we shall later see, his habitual reply to this habitual boast.

As to the sources of such plays as had been “maimed and deformed by injurious impostors,” and are now “offered cur’d and perfect of their limbs,” “it can be proved to demonstration,” say the Cambridge Editors, “that several plays in the Folio were printed from earlier quarto editions” (but the players secured a retreat on this point), “and that in other cases the quarto is more correctly printed, or from a better manuscript than the Folio text, and therefore of higher authority.”  Hamlet, in the Folio of 1623, when it differs from the quarto of 1604, “differs for the worse in forty-seven places, while it differs for the better in twenty places.”