From the INTRODUCTION:
THE expression on our title page Text of Shakespeare is at best a vague and often a very misleading one. Who can say truly where or what it is? though the material now-a-days for such a purpose is more accessible than ever. The time may come when the English-speaking populations of the world will have in their hands such a text as will satisfy every reasonable demand, admitting only as curiosities some of the most glaring errors which the original copies present, and leaving to the intelligent reader the choice of pondering over these if he has a mind, or passing them by undisturbed. One expression in the Preface to the first volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare came home to me with a start, for which I was hardly prepared, when I read of the intention of the editors in their work to give the reader in a compact form a complete view of the existing materials out of which the text has been constructed, or may be emended. And truly their labour has not been misapplied.
Some ten years ago in noticing the conclusion of the Cambridge Shakespeare I wrote as follows: - In these nine volumes, with their 55 pages and 55, notes, are the labours of nearly six years embodied, and presenting a complete summary of the variations of all the texts and the conjectural emendations of all the editors and critics of the last hundred and fifty years. If it cannot be said that we have yet got a perfect text we have all the materials from which a more perfect one may be elaborated. These six years labours involved a thorough examination of 276 distinct publications from Holinsheds Chronicles in 1577 to Mr. Gerald Masseys elaborate work on the Sonnets published in 1866. In taking leave of their work the learned editors after alluding to the textual imperfections and uncertainties which still exist, and to a conviction that passages not generally suspected of corruption have not been printed as they were first written, go on to say that these blemishes cannot be entirely removed even by the most brilliant conjectural criticism, because the materials are wanting. This last statement has rather a disheartening tendency, but we suspect that it refers more to the second class, passages not generally suspected of corruption and this view of the case is sufficient warrant in still endeavouring to do something in the removal of acknowledged imperfections.