“Disintegration,” Sir Edmund Chambers has said, “is a constant itch in some minds.” And in order to show how pervasive the disease is, I hope I may be forgiven for using as my example Sir Edmund himself. It is to him, surely, that we owe the most today for our belief and faith that the plays in the 1623 folio are by Shakespeare alone and are, by and large, as they left Shakespeare's pen once and for all. In his British Academy lecture of 1924, “The Disintegration of Shakespeare,” Chambers showed (a) that contemporary records, Henslowe's and Sir Henry Herbert's, showed “very little testimony” for revision of old plays and (b) that the first principles and so-called proofs of the disintegrators could not bear careful investigation. Now what is to me so wonderful about this 1924 lecture is that whereas the author of The Elizabethan Stage (1923) may fairly, I believe, be called a nineteenth-century scholar, the man who wrote William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) not only has learned everything that McKerrow and Greg have to teach but also is more than able to meet Pollard and Wilson on their own ground. In other words, in the space of about seven years, Sir Edmund changed into what I might call a brilliant conservative. In the 1930 volumes, the disintegrators get even shorter shrift than they had received in the 1924 lecture. “Not proved” is the verdict against them again and again.