Excerpt from Shakspere's Plays: The Separate Editions Of, With the Alterations Done by Various Hands Each succeeding year adds to the number of students and readers of the works of the sweet swan of Avon; and this considerable increase in the number of readers of Shakspere's works during the last hundred years has produced one great advantage: for it has caused most of the alterations of his text to fall into oblivion, and at the same time it has also enforced a greater necessity on the part of theatrical managers to adhere more closely to the original text when seeking to represent the poet's works. But three of the alterations may now be said to keep the stage: Richard III. By Colley Cibber, King Lear by Nahum Tate, and Katharine and Petruchio by David Garrick; and these three versions are in all probability about the worst that were ever made. The purport of the following pages, is to show the number and the nature of the alterations that have been effected, and also to give the number of editions of the separate Plays that have been printed and published. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.