IV. iv. 491, Quarto : 66 64. "I, I, thou would'st be gone to join with Richmond." Folio: "I, thou would'st be gone to join with Richmond." I should regard this as a misprint, were it not that the corrector has displayed in similar passages an inveterate dislike of this thoroughly dramatic repetition of a word (a different thing altogether, it will be observed, from the "recurrence of the same word"). With regard to the metre, the line in the Folio, although it will not scan, is yet decasyllabic; which might, in the judgment of the corrector, be sufficient. IV. iv. 497, Quarto: 65. "look your faith be firm, Or else his head's assurance is but frail." Folio: heart instead of faith. Mr Spedding admits that faith is "the properer word." The change was made, I should think, to secure the antithesis of heart and head. V. ii. 11, Quarto : 66. "this foul swine Lies now even in the centre of this isle." Folio: Is for lies, and centry for centre. The latter change is, I suppose, a misprint; with regard to the former, it may be sufficient to quote the remark of Malone :-" For lies, the reading of the Quarto, the editors of the Folio, probably not understanding the term, substituted-Is." So far, the Folio might be taken to be correct; but presently, in both Quarto and Folio, the person thus addressed coems to retire in order to execute the commands of the King, and the latter then calls Ratcliffe by name and is answered by him. The Quarto, therefore, is no doubt right in making the King call' Catesby,' and Rat. is a mere misprint for Cat. Of course, it is impossible to suppose that Shakspere would amend the error of the Quarto as it is amended in the Folio; but there is no difficulty whatever in believing that a corrector other than Shakspere might do so, when we observe that so judicious an editor as Malone adopts without comment the reading of the Folio. I cannot think that the printer of the Folio, not one of the most intelligent of his class (as we know from other evidence), would attempt an emendation of a reading which had passed muster with all the printers of the Quartos. The question whether that part of the 5th Act in which this passage occurs has not undergone revision, as Mr Spedding thinks, will arise subsequently. V. iii. 104, Quarto: 68. "I'll strive with troubled thoughts to take a nap." Folio: "I'll strive with troubled noise to take a nap." The change seems at all events deliberate, and I think it may have been made in consequence of a fancy of the corrector, that something of dramatic contrast was sacrificed by attributing to Richmond 'troubled thoughts,' which were proper only to Richard. This idea would not be inconsistent with that pedantic over-carefulness which is characteristic of him. 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81. V. iii. 125; V. iii. 152; V. iii. 180; V. iii. 196; V. iii. 250; V. iii. 255; V. fii. 293; V. iii. 338; V. iii. 351; V. v. 7. In these ten passages the Folio reproduces printer's errors of the Quartos subsequent to the first. It may be taken as certain then, that the portion of the Folio within which these errors are comprised was printed from one of the later Quartos; and further, as only four of the Quartos--viz. the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th-have all the errors, that one of these must have been the copy actually used. The 7th may be eliminated at once, as its date (1627) is later than that of the first Folio. The following circumstance will serve, I think, to eliminate the 5th and the 6th also:-the line "Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow" occurs (substantially) three times in V. iii., viz. 1. 118, 1. 131, and 1. 139. In 1. 118, however, the 3rd, the 5th, and the 6th all read ' on thy soul,' and that is the reading of the Folio; but in 1. 131, and again in 1. 139, the 5th and 6th read on thy soul,' whilst the 3rd reads 'in thy soul,' and the Folio follows the 3rd in both places. Further, it will be seen by referring to page 91, that examples 36, 37, and 38 pointed to the conclusion that the corrector occasionally had recourse to the 3rd Quarto, and there is yet one more very striking coincidence between this Quarto and the Folio which I may quote here :-in III. v. 108, 109, the first Quarto reads "And to give notice that no manner of person In the 3rd Quarto, no doubt by accident, the preposition of in the 1st line was omitted, and the Folio follows the 3rd Quarto. Of course I am aware that 'manner' was used without the preposition in Shakspere's time; but I do not know that any other example is to be found in Shakspere, and I have very little doubt that the reading of the Folio is merely a reproduction of the accidental misprint of the 3rd Quarto. Taking it as certain then that the Folio from about V. iii. 45 to the end was printed from the 3rd Quarto as 'copy,' I come to consider Mr Spedding's conclusion that this portion of the play was not revised by the corrector. I cannot at all agree with that opinion. I have already shown that examples 67 and 68 must be attributed to the corrector, whilst he is also responsible no doubt for the 82nd. Besides these, I have noted down the following lines in which alterations, obviously deliberate, have been made :— iii. 47, 48, 101, 130, 158, 176, 182, 202, 204, 205, 208, 232, 281, 309, 312, 337, 341: iv. 6: v. 4, 13, 41. Certainly the variations from the Quarto are not so frequent as they are in other parts of the play; but the result is precisely what is required, if it be true, as I have endeavoured to show, that from some cause or other Shakspere's MS. failed the corrector in this place, and he had to rely entirely on one of the Quartos for 'copy.' For, in that case, there would be no opportunity for a class of variations which constitute no inconsiderable number of the whole in other parts of the play,- viz. those which are due to the fact that the Quarto had been blundered over in the printing-office, whilst the MS. gave the true reading, and the corrector did not meddle with it. If, then, the revision was continued to the end of the play, the reviser must have been some one other than Shakspere; for we cannot imagine Shakspere permitting the ten blunders quoted by Mr Spedding to stand. I have now gone through the eighty examples pronounced by Mr Spedding himself to be non-Shaksperian, and I have shown, conclusively I think, that about fifty of them cannot fairly be attributed to any one but the corrector of the play; hence it would follow that the corrector was not Shakspere. I have discussed with so much minuteness the first section of Mr Spedding's paper, that it will be unnecessary for me, and certainly undesirable in the interests of the reader, to bestow equal elaboration upon the other sections. Besides, several of them turn mainly upon questions of taste, which do not admit of argument. I now pass on to the second section : ALTERATIONS MADE TO IMPROVE THE METRE. In this class Mr Spedding cites all the alterations "evidently meant to remove gross and obvious defects of metre" which the Cambridge editors have rejected: his object being to assail the position taken up by those gentlemen, that the metre is amended "by spoiling the sense." I venture to think that the Editors ought rather to have said, by weakening the vigour, and marring the propriety, of the language; but probably they used the word sense in that extended meaning. Mr Spedding, however, takes the word in its narrow significance, and upon those terms perhaps he has upon the whole the best of the argument. Yet I must remind him of one example (No. 18), in which the sense, pure and simple, is distinctly sacrificed :in the Quarto, III. ii. 80, Hastings says to Stanley 'My Lord, I hold my life as dear as you do yours." The line is thus amended in the Folio: "My Lord, I hold my life as dear as yours,” 66 66 a phraseology which undoubtedly means that Hastings estimates both his own life and Stanley's at the same rate, whilst the argument requires that Hastings should mean : my life is as dear to me as your life is to you." As Malone well observes, no critical chymistry can extract such a meaning out of the words found in the Folio copy." Take, again, example 5,-a sacrifice not strictly perhaps of sense, but bordering closely upon it :-in the Quarto, I. iv. 64, we have— "No marvel, my Lord, though it affrighted you." This becomes in the Folio: "No marvel, Lord, though it affrighted you." Is there any other instance in Shakspere of a single person being addressed thus baldly and unnaturally as 'Lord' instead of my Lord?' 2 In the following examples, exclamatory phrases, thoroughly dra matic and appropriate, are sacrificed :—1. (I. ii. 188.) Tush!: 10. (I. iv. 207.) Why, Sirs.: 19. (III. iv. 10.) Who, I, my Lord?: 31. (III. vii. 224.) Well: 41. (IV. ii. 122.) Tut, tut. In examples 17 and 38 (III. ii. 60-62.: IV. ii. 50) the short lines are reduced into lines of regular metre by changing dialogue into monologue, certainly not a dramatic expedient. There are two examples (15 and 48) in which the sacrifice of vigour is so conspicuous that they deserve to be quoted in full :— II. ii. 23-25, Quarto: 15. "And when he told me so, he wept And hugged me in his arm, and kindly kissed my cheek 'The corrector did not see that 'marvel' is a monosyllable pronounced and sometimes printed 'marle.'-W. A. W. 2 Since this was in type, I have discovered two such instances: 1 Henry IV., III. i. 180, and IV. i, 9. There may be a few more, but they are very rare.-E. H. P. Folio: "And when my uncle told me so, he wept, And pitied me, and kindly kissed my cheek; Does not every one feel how miserably weak pitied me is, as a substitute for hugged me in his arm? IV. iv. 485, Quarto: 48. "Cold friends to Richard: what do they in the north, There is a stage-tradition, I believe, that the delivery of these lines was one of the finest points' in Edmund Keen's impersonation of Richard; perhaps, if Mr Spedding had heard him, he might have been careful to omit this passage from the list of his examples. Nothing further, I think, need be said respecting this section; for Mr Spedding himself does not appear to like the changes altogether, and only demands, in conclusion, "whether any one is prepared to maintain, even among those who most think the readings of the Quarto superior, that the superiority is so great, or of such a kind, as to make it certain that the alterations were not due to Shakspere." I for one am prepared to maintain that position; and, further, I would ask Mr Spedding in return whether, if Shakspere thought it worth his while to revise his play with extreme minuteness, as Mr Spedding supposes, we have not a right to expect that the superiority' should be greatly upon the side of the Folio. I pass on to the third class of alterations : ALTERATIONS MADE TO AVOID THE RECURRENCE OF THE SAME word. Upon these examples I do not propose to dwell long, because it is very much a matter of individual taste whether the recurrence of the same word adds to, or detracts from, the force of the passage. My own judgment, however, coincides with that of Mr Spedding, in opposition to the Cambridge editors, with regard to the great majority of the passages which are quoted by him. I may cite one or two cases respecting which I hold a different opinion. 5. I. iii. 325–328. See example 16, page 85. II. i. 33, Quarto : 10. "Whenever Buckingham doth turn his hate |