This book is from the Arthur S. Dayton Collection in the Rare Book Room of the West Virginia University Libraries. Every effort has been made to make this online edition correspond to the fragile original. The beautiful illustrations in this rare and delicate book can now be used by scholars and students with access to the web. The images are protected, but please feel free to contact the curator of the collection for information on getting permission to use them. A description on newspaper print glued inside the front cover reads: SHAKESPEARIANA.- BORDELL'S GRAPHIC ILLUSTRATIONS of the DRAMATIC WORKS of SHAKESPEARE; consisting of a Series of One Hundred Elegant Engravings, copied from the Pencils of SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, ROMNEY, OPIE, SMIRKE, NORTHCOTE, FUSELI, HAMILTON, TRESHAM, WESTALL, and other First-rate BRITISH ARTISTS, forming and Elegant and Useful Companion to the various Editions of his Works, with DESCRIPTIVE INDEX, stipple portrait of JOHN BOYDELL by G. STUART, engraved by FACIUS, folio, morocco extra, g.e. [1805]

From a newspaper clipping included inside the front cover:

“The publication of the convenient and compact little “Bedford” edition of SHAKESPEARE appropriately marks the close of a year which sees him, after the desperate assault of Mr. DONELLY and his friends, enthroned more surely than ever in the hearts and affections of Englishmen. A few days ago, Mr. KEGAN PAUL devoted an interesting lecture to the question, “What do we know of SHAKESPEARE?” We almost feel disposed to answer in the word of SOCRATES, applied to something scarcely less wonderful and mysterious, “All that we know is, nothing can be known.” Yet, in sooth, we know quite enough, if to what is properly meant by knowledge we add the far rarer and more valuable quality of understanding. We know when and where he was born, where he went to school, where, after attaining manhood, he chiefly lived and worked, for the most part what poems and plays he wrote, whom he married, how many and what children he had, where he passed the closing years of his comparatively short life, where he died, and where he was buried. As for the rest of history, it is, like VIOLA’S love in Twelfth Night, “a blank, my lord.” Yet it is a blank we can fill up very largely, if we have but the skill and penetration to do so. The silence of SHAKESPEARE respecting himself, and of his contemporaries concerning him, stands, indeed, in striking contrast to the fate of those innumerable “men of the time” of our own epoch whose names are dinned into our ears incessantly, about whose furniture and shirt-collars we are amply informed by industrious interviewers, and who would probably begin to think that their fame was being imperilled if a week passed without their seeing their own names in the public prints. Nevertheless, paradoxical as it will, perhaps, seem to some people, we know far more of SHAKESPEARE than any of our contemporaries. For one thing, we know that his works will always be read, and that his name will never die- which is more than could possibly be predicted of the swarm of geniuses who, we are assured, exist in this age. Moreover, what manner of man SHAKESPEARE was is writ large in his own Plays. He was a man the most impressionable and the most self-controlled that ever walked this earth. He was “of blood and judgment so commingled,” that the proportion between impulse and self-restraint, between passion and reflection, between meditation and action, was equal and perfect. His experience was coextensive with the field of human thoughts, human feelings, human joys, human sorrows, human disappointments, human resignation. He knew everything worth knowing, saw everything worth seeing – we might almost add, said everything worth saying. He was the profoundest of philosophers, without the faintest flaw of obscurity; the most lyrical of poets, without one touch of egotism or conceit; the prince of storytellers, who was never tiresome and never commonplace. Indeed, for SHAKESPEARE, there was no such thing as commonplace, anymore than there is for the sun, that shines on mountain and midden-heap indifferently, glorifying both by the magic of his rays.”