when they were deemed worthy of preservation. The text of the first folio alone having the stamp of authenticity, some better reason than the editor's mere opinion or his preference has been deemed necessary to justify any essential deviation from that text in favor of the readings of editions of either an earlier or a later date. Evident corruption of that text, with at least highly probable restoration of what mere accident destroyed, and the recovery of what had been omitted, for stage purposes, from the copy furnished to the printer, are the only reasons which have been regarded as sufficient for such deviation. The superior antiquity of the quarto texts of some of these plays is not unfrequently brought to the attention of the critical reader of Shakespeare in support of a reading taken from some one of those texts: - as if the age of a surreptitiously printed edition could supply its lack of authenticity! But in many cases, at least, "the oldest authority" seems to rival "the oldest inhabitant" in foisting feeble nonsense upon credulity, and to rival in trustworthiness that much-vaunted oracle. I am, however, no champion of the readings of the first folio, as such. It seems to me plain, indeed, that the circumstances of its publication require us to assume that its text is correct, except where it is manifestly corrupt or imperfect. But in those cases it is to be corrected boldly, and with none of the hesitation produced by that superstitious reverence of mere antiquity which is called conservatism. It is not uncommon to hear true lovers of Shakespeare, men of intelligence and no little acquaintance with literature, remark with gravity that it is dangerous to disturb the text. The text! what text? That of the folio, which, in scores of passages, is absolutely unintelligible, and in others deficient? That of the quartos, of which the same is true, though in a greater degree, of all those plays which first appeared in that form? The text of the Variorum of 1821, and read, for instance, as people read for twenty-five years, "So much uncurable her garboils," instead of, "So much uncurbable her garboils"? Every reader will reply, that, of course, he wishes the corrupted passages of the folio and the quartos, and such as that just quoted from Malone's Variorum, to be restored; and it will be found that when men talk apprehensively about disturbing the text, and of their veneration for the old text, they mean merely the text of the edition which they have been accustomed to use, the peculiar oldness of which may not reach to half a century, or the care in its printing equal that taken in the office of a country newspaper. I have seen an intelligent man, unacquainted with any other text of Shakespeare than that of a London trade impression bearing the names of Johnson and Steevens on its title-page, which he as con possessed in a miserable reprint with smudgy, careless press-work upon spongy, whity-brown paper, servative about that text as if the proof-sheets of his copy had been read by Shakespeare himself; the reason of his solicitude being an attachment to that text, the consequence merely of his familiarity with it and his lack of acquaintance with any other, and also his utter ignorance of the earliest form of the text and its subsequent vicissitudes. It does not take many years to root error in minds inclined to this kind of conservatism. The old priest of whom Camden tells us, who read Mumpsimus, Domine, rejected the proposal to read Sumpsimus, &c., because he "had used Mumpsimus thirty years, and would not leave his old Mumpsimus for their new Sumpsimus." Most of the texts which some people are anxious to conserve venerable, or worthier of veneration. are not more The truth is, that in deciding upon the purity of the texts of the old copies, and in the restoration of their corrupted and defective passages, there is occasion for all the knowledge, the judgment, the taste, the imagination, and the sympathetic appreciation of the author that can be brought to this task by the most gifted and accomplished editor. Constant vigilance, also, on the part of competent scholars, repeated collation with the text of the old copies, and examination of the reasons assigned by modern editors for the changes which they have made in that text, are necessary to the preservation of Shakespeare's writings in a state nearly approaching that in which they came from his hand. The mere accidents of the best printingoffices to say nothing of the oversights of editors are such that no edition is worthy of confidence, or, indeed, to be called an edition, the text of which has not been compared, word by word, with that of the folio of 1623 and the precedent quarto copies. It was very smart in Steevens to sneer at "the Nimrods of ifs and ands;" but we all know that the absence or presence of a particle or a point will change the meaning of a sentence. The thief strikes only three letters out of the eighth commandment. For the reasons above given, a notice of even the slightest deviation from the text of 1623 in this edition has been deemed obligatory; but a like respect has been paid to older or more modern texts only when, in the former case, the deviation is of some importance, or, in the latter, the rejected reading has been approved by some distinguished editor. Very many instances of variation from the text of the folio of 1623 are characterized as almost unworthy of mention in the very notes in which they are brought to the reader's attention. A large proportion of these may be justly regarded, indeed, as quite unworthy of notice, if we consider their actual or their relative importance. But as a guarantee of accuracy the indication of these trifling variations has its value. A merchant notices the discrepancy of one cent in the balance-sheet of an account of millions, not for the value of the sum in error, but for the importance of exactness. If the error of a unit has passed the accountant's eye there is no surety against the oversight of an error of thousands. Careful literal conformity to the old text, except in its corruptions and irregularities, has, however, a greater value than this of being a guarantee of exactness. For instance, in these passages in Hamlet,· 66 yet once methought It lifted up it head, and did address "This doth betoken The corse they follow did with desperate hand "The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, That it had it head bit off by it young," the use of 'it' in the possessive sense is not only a trait of the time, but, even if there were no other evidence, is enough to show that Hamlet and Lear were written before The Winter's Tale, in which we find "it's folly and it's tenderness," and before Henry the Eighth, in the first scene of which we have, “made former wonders its." The last passage affords the earliest instance known, I believe, of the use of the neuter possessive pronoun without the apostrophe. And yet until the appearance of the present edition of Shakespeare's works 'its' was given indiscriminately throughout the text of all editions.* The editors probably thought that in printing its they were merely correcting a typographical error; whereas they were destroying evidence of a change in the language which took place during Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, and which the printers of the folio of 1623, with all their negligence in other respects, carefully preserved. A certain class of merely typographical errors in the old copies must, however, be passed over, of necessity, by even the most punctilious editor; such, for instance, as that in the following line in Julius Caesar, which appears thus in the folio: "Then to answere euery man directly and breefely." Here the unpractised eye will hardly detect breesely, printed for briefly, due to the mistake by the compositor of an old-fashioned long s (f) for an ƒ, or perhaps to the mere accidental mutilation of the latter. When such accidents affect the sense, even in the slightest degree, and thus make a new reading, they have * See the Notes on the passages above cited. |