Upon your Grace substituted for on you or yours in the second line. Surely the force of the passage is weakened by the alteration found in the Folio; besides, something of formality is not inappropriate to Buckingham's solemn protest; and, again, there is a slight change in the phrase you or yours' in the second line, 'you and yours' in the third.

III. ii. 81, Quarto :

15.

"My Lord, I hold my life as dear as you do
And never in my life, I do protest,

Was it more precious to me than 'tis now."
Folio:

in my days substituted for in my life.

yours;

Whether any particular force is attained by the recurrence of the word life in the Quarto, may be doubted; but certainly that recurrence, regarded even as a disadvantage, is preferable to the unusual and inelegant phrase- never in my days.'

IV. iv. 173, Quarto:

24.

"What comfortable hour canst thou name, That ever graced me in thy company ?

K. Faith, none, but Humphrey Hour, that called your grace To breakfast once forth of my company.

If I be so disgracious in your sight,

Let me march on, and not offend your grace."

Folio:

you, madam substituted in the last line for your grace.

In this passage, which I have quoted at length in order that the reader may judge for himself, it seems clear that there is a force in the repetition which the corrector and Mr Spedding have missed. Surely, Richard says your grace twice and disgracious, intentionally and mockingly, playing upon the word graced in the Duchess's speech.

I do not think that it is necessary to make any further observations respecting this class of examples. That Shakspere would not have made the alterations in the four passages to which I have particularly referred, I feel certain: that he might have made the alterations in the other cases, I see no reason to doubt. But, upon the other hand, it certainly did not require a Shakspere to make them; so that, as far as the main question is concerned, they are neutral. I pass on to make a few observations respecting

ALTERATIONS MADE TO AVOID OBSOLETE PHRASES.

As Mr Spedding has devoted a page or two to this class of alterations, it may be well not to pass them over altogether without notice, although I agree with him that they can hardly help us towards a settlement of the question at issue, because we cannot say that Shakspere himself would not have changed words or phrases which had gone out of fashion in the interval between the original writing of the play and the revision of it. The examples cited are: -I(aye) substituted for yea, more or other for moe, and you for thou. With regard to the first, I shall only observe that yea is found several times in Hamlet.

Moe occurs, I believe, three times in the first Quarto: namely, in IV. iv. 199, where, however, more is the reading of all the other Quartos, as well as of the Folio, so that the corrector of the latter may not be responsible for the change; again, in IV. iv. 504, where the Folio has the same reading; and lastly, in IV. v. 13, where the Folio substitutes other.

Thou, it is true, is frequently replaced by you, but whether this substitution can fairly be attributed to a change of fashion, I do not feel competent to decide; the distinction between thou and you is very subtle, and requires a more minute investigation than I can at present bestow upon it.

The reading thou wast is not, as Mr Spedding thinks, invariable in the Folio. In I. iii. 167, and very curiously a line peculiar to the Folio, we have—

"Wert thou not banished on pain of death?"

Now, if, as Mr Spedding suggests, Shakspere at the time of his revising Richard III. tabooed thou wert on the ground of grammatical propriety, we ought not to find it in any of his plays written about the same period. Mr Spedding places the revision in 1602, 'or not long before,' and quite accidentally I have come across thou wert in As You Like It (I. i.) and All's Well (II. iii.), the date of the former being given as 1600 and that of the latter as 1601-2 in Mr Furnivall's 'Trial Table.'

The changes attributed to the poet's efforts to increase the smoothness of his verse remain to be considered. These are that substituted for which, between for betwixt, while or when for whilst. In the first place, with regard to the matter-of-fact, Mr Spedding is very far indeed from the truth when he alleges that "which is almost always changed to that."

As the question appears to be of some significance, I have made a quantitative analysis: the following is the result:

In Act I. which is changed to that in 8 instances.

On the contrary, it is curious enough that in Act V. there are two instances of that in the Quarto being changed to which in the Folio (i. 13 and i. 20). It appears, then, that as a matter-of-fact the change is found conspicuously in the 1st Act only, whilst Mr Spedding's theory requires that it should be found equally throughout the play.

With regard to the other two tabooed words, I have made a comparison with Hamlet, as being a play written (almost certainly) about the date assigned to the revision (1602). Between occurs, I believe, five times in the course of the play (III. i.; III. iv. twice ; IV. v.; V. ii.); betwixt I have not found. Valeat quantum ! Whilst occurs three times (I. ii. ; III. ii.; III. iv.); whiles, twice (I. iii.; II. ii.); and while, twice (IV. iv.; V. ii.). Upon the whole, I do not think that Mr Spedding can make much out of the coincidences, such as they are; and, besides, the reason which he gives for assigning the revision to 1602 or thereabouts seems very inconclusive.

ALTERATIONS MADE TO REMOVE DEFECTS NOT APPARENT TO THE CAMBRIDGE EDITORS.

I am willing to regard the majority of the 19 examples cited under this heading as neutral; that is to say, as alterations which Shakspere might perhaps have made if he had revised the play. I must, however, take exception to three of them :

4.

In I. iii. 320-1, the Folio reads :—

"Madam, his majesty doth call for you;

:

And for your Grace, and yours, my gracious Lord.'

Mr Spedding prefers this reading to the Quarto; but I should like to know if there is any other passage in Shakspere which would bear out this extremely uncouth use (as I think) of yours for your Grace.

Why the change? "Because (says Mr Spedding) no doubt the word had already begun to lose the tragic character which it once had, and to be unfit for such associations."

Mr Spedding must have forgotten for the moment the lines in Hamlet (written certainly in 1602 or thereabouts) :

"A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,

:

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead.
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."

Again, in Antony and Cleopatra (written probably several years later), the word is used precisely as Clarence uses it, namely, to describe a boy's voice :

"I shall see

Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness." (V. ii. 220.1)

IV. iii. 42, Quarto:

14.

"Looks proudly o'er the crown."

Folio:

"Looks proudly on the crown."

Surely, the Folio reading here is a weak dilution: the Quarto, on the other hand, appears to me very forcible, perfectly intelligible, and quite in accordance with Shakspere's modes of elliptical expression. Richmond no doubt looks up to the crown at present, but he looks up to it with the aspiration to place himself over it, to become master of it. I pass on now to the last section:

ALTERATIONS IN THE STAGE-DIRECTIONS.

I heartily concur with Mr Spedding in regarding the stagedirections of the Folio as of much more authority than those of the Quarto. I do not, however, agree with him, that the former are the result of a subsequent revision of the play, but I think that they formed part of the play as it was originally written. I am happy to find very strong confirmation of this view in what Mr Spedding has himself observed; namely, that the stage-directions of the Folio are more consistent with the text of the Quarto than are the stagedirections of the Quarto itself. For instance, take the inconsistency between text and directions respecting the name of Lord Stanley. In the last three Acts of the play, the directions both of Folio and of Quarto are inconsistent with the text of the latter, but the directions of the Folio are less inconsistent; for in two scenes of Act IV., where the directions of the Quarto give the name as Darby, the directions of the Folio read Stanley, thus agreeing with the text of the Quarto as well as with that of the Folio. Again, in I. iv., the stage-directions of the Folio, which make Clarence attended by a keeper, not by Brackenbury, the Lieutenant of the Tower, are more consistent with the line-found in the Quarto as well as in the Folio

"I pray thee, gentle keeper, stay by me."

Another instance of the same thing is to be observed in V. i., where Comp. also squeal in Julius Cæsar, II. ii. 24.-W. A. W.

2 Generally speaking the stage-directions of the Folio are better than those of the Quarto, and this is what we should naturally expect. The Quartos were printed for the use of the audience. The Folio text had been prepared for the use of the players. These form no part of our case.-W. A. W.

Buckingham is led to execution, according to the stage-directions of the Quarto, by Ratcliffe; according to those of the Folio, by the Sheriff. In the text of both versions, however, Buckingham addresses his conductors as 'Fellows,'-a style of address extremely unnatural, if Ratcliffe had been present. Once more, in III. iv., the execution of Hastings is carried out by Catesby according to the direction of the Quarto, by Lovell and Ratcliffe according to that of the Folio. The text of both versions makes Catesby behave towards Hastings, and Hastings towards Catesby, as if they were strangers to each other; whereas we learn from III. ii. that Hastings had regarded Catesby as his confidential friend. In this case, then, the directions of the Folio are consistent, and those of the Quarto are inconsistent, with the text of the latter. I should attribute the difference between the stage-directions of the Folio (which, I believe, were the stage-directions of Shakspere's original MS.) and those of the Quarto to two causes: first, that the Quarto was printed from the stage-copy, in which the directions had been adapted to the exigencies of the company, and sometimes even the text slightly altered to correspond; and secondly, that the Quarto was printed in an exceptionally careless and slovenly manner.

I have now gone carefully through the whole of Mr Spedding's Paper. I shall not stop at present to recapitulate the results of my investigation, but proceed at once, in accordance with the scheme which I laid down at the outset, to quote passages in which “ something original, striking, or forcible in idea or expression, in the Quarto, is diluted into commonplace in the Folio; or, in which a turn of phrase, thoroughly Shaksperian, is modified precisely as a prosaic reviser might be expected to modify it. A very large number of such passages have already been discussed in the preceding inquiry these, therefore, I may exclude from my list of examples, which, limited to forty-five in number, must not be considered as anything like exhaustive, but merely as typical.

PASSAGES WEAKENED IN THE FOLIO.

1.

I. i. 24, Quarto:

"Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity."

The Folio substitutes see for spy.

Spy occurs frequently in Shakspere's plays :

e. g. II. Henry VI., I. i. 242:

And, when I spy advantage, claim the crown."