Whatever he has advanced there tells almost as much in favour of Professor Delius's theory as of his own. I could add to his examples from the Professor's paper, but this would be of little use. I will notice only two points more, which, though small, are significant. I. iii. 332 (Spedding, p. 11): . "whet me To be revenged on Rivers, Dorset, Gray." These are the names most likely to have been used by Shakspere in speaking of the queen's allies'; but a corrector or careless copyist, who knew that Vaughan was executed with Rivers and Gray, might easily have slipped his name in here. IV. i. 76. 66 more miserable by the life of him." Mr Spedding (p. 53) prefers this reading, but thinks it strange that in the corresponding passage, I. ii. 27, "the same correction has not been made." The reason is, I think, obvious. In the fourth Act Anne has become Richard's wife, and knows that she is more miserable by his life than by his death. This appropriate change of expression is more likely to have come from the writer when his imagination was heated in composition, than to have suggested itself to his judgment in the quiet process of correction. F. D. MATTHEW. 'ON THE QUARTO AND THE FOLIO OF RICHARD III. BY EDWARD H. PICKERSGILL, ESQ., B.A., LONDON. ¶ I PROPOSE to investigate the relation between the Quarto and the Folio of Richard III., with reference to Mr Spedding's Paper. I had already made a minute comparison of the two versions of the play, before I was even aware of the position which he maintains; and I had arrived at the following conclusions: first, that there is ample internal evidence to justify the belief of the Cambridge editors that the play, as we have it in the Folio edition, has undergone revision by an unauthorized corrector; secondly, that this corrector took as the basis of his operations a copy of the play as it was once for all written by Shakspere, but that occasionally, when from some cause or other this copy failed him, he had recourse to the third Quarto; and thirdly, that the first Quarto was printed, with a vast number of blunders, from the actors' copy, which omitted the passages found only in the Folio (or at all events the longer of these) for the sake of shortening the play in representation. After traversing the same ground again under the guidance of Mr Spedding's Paper, I find that Mr Pickersgill having, at Mr Aldis Wright's request, expanded the remarks he made at the Discussion, they are put in the form of a separate l'aper.-F. my faith in these conclusions is not at all shaken, but, on the contrary, very much confirmed." Mr Spedding's opinion, however, is undoubtedly entitled to the respectful consideration of all Shaksperian students; and therefore I propose, in the first place, to take up the challenge which he throws down to "those who agree with the Cambridge editors," to produce the evidence upon which they rely for the first of the conclusions stated above; and afterwards, to endeavour to establish the second and third of my conclusions, which, at least in their present precise form, are, I believe, original. It will be observed that by adopting the belief that Shakspere never revised his play at all, I shall escape the force of an objection which Mr Spedding again and again in the course of his Paper urges against the Cambridge editors: namely, that "as all the inserted passages, and a great many of the corrections, are admitted to be Shakspere's own, ... the presumption in all cases (till special reason be shown to the contrary) must be that the altered reading was that which he preferred." For, according to my theory, the inserted passages' are really structural portions of the play as it was originally written, and the so-called 'corrections' which" are admitted to be Shakspere's own," are not corrections subsequently made by Shakspere, but merely corrections of the mistakes and blunders of the Quarto edition. Before I proceed further, let us see what the conception really is which Mr Spedding wishes us to entertain. That Shakspere should go through a completed and successful play, line by line, and word by word, like a pedagogue correcting a school-exercise (the illustration is Mr Spedding's own); that he should make alterations, which, although they may be a little better than the originals, are themselves very lame improvements, as Mr Spedding admits is occasionally, and, as I shall endeavour to show, is frequently the case; that his imagination should brook to be "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined" by the trammels of what was written, and never once cast them disdainfully aside; that he should not re-construct a single scene, or bring out a single character; that he should add only seven passages of more than five lines apiece, and yet-strangest of all--that one of these passages, a very long, not to say tedious, speech of about 50 lines should be actually inserted after representation by Shakspere, consummate master of stage-craft, in a scene which had already run to the unconscionable length of some 500 lines; and that Shakspere should make an occasional excursion to his grammar to discover, inter alia, that 'thou wert' is ungrammatical, and to alter it accordingly to thou wast' such is the theory which we are invited to accept. To my mind, it is a startling theory; it is a theory from which our traditional reverence for Shakspere, and our conception of him, recoil. I do not at all mean to imply that it should on that account be at once rejected: I merely wish to show, inasmuch as Mr Spedding terms the conjecture of the Cambridge editors 'bold' at the outset, that the alternative theory is 'bold' also. Again, Mr Spedding very much over-estimates, I think, the consequences which are involved in the acceptance of that conjecture. No doubt a very large additional element of uncertainty is thus introduced into any conclusions respecting the priority of Shakspere's plays, based upon a comparison of the Quarto and the Folio of Richard III.; but it does not follow that the same uncertainty consequently attaches to the conclusions which are based upon an investigation of the eighteen other plays mentioned by Mr Spedding. Of course, each of these plays must be examined separately, upon its own individual merits; and it is only where we find an irresistible body of evidence similar to that which I hope to be able to adduce in the case of Richard III., that we shall be justified in concluding that the play under consideration has been manipulated by an unauthorized hand. The plan which I propose to adopt in my treatment of the subject, is the following: first, I shall discuss the examples cited by Mr Spedding under each of the six sections of his Paper. It will not be necessary to do more than enumerate those examples, in regard to which I agree with him; but in the other cases I shall state the precise reasons upon which my opinion is grounded. I shall then adduce a very large number of instances, merely selected out of a much larger number still, which were not mentioned expressly by the Cambridge editors in their preface, and consequently are not touched upon in Mr Spedding's Paper: instances, in which something original, striking, or forcible in idea or expression in the Quarto, is diluted into commonplace in the Folio. These were the passages which first convinced me that there is work in the Folio which is not Shakspere's. Fashions of speech no doubt may change; phrases and words may grow obsolete or die out even within the limits of a literary career; modes of thought or expression which were dear to the poet in his youth may grow distasteful to him in his maturity; the points of view from which he regards nature and human life may shift, as the years roll on; but amid all these elements of change, if he should think it worth while to revise his earlier work, we may be certain that he will never turn poetry into very weak and washy, albeit more regular, verse. Thirdly, I shall produce examples to show that the improvements which are essayed are altogether below what we should expect from Shakspere, if we suppose him assuming the character of a reviser of his own work. I shall show, upon the other hand, that these improvements are precisely what we might anticipate from a corrector of moderate capacity, setting himself to the task of 'dressing up' the play according to his lights. Fourthly, I shall show by printing in extenso the (so-called) inserted passages' of the Folio, along with their immediate context, and by a commentary upon them, that these inserted passages' must have been structural portions of the play as it was originally written. In connection with this part of the subject it will be necessary to take into consideration the remark of Mr Spedding, that the metrical character of the 'inserted passages' corresponds with what we suppose to have been the stage of Shakspere's metrical development about 1602. Of course, if this could be made out, it would quash my theory that the Folio (corrector's manipulation apart) represents the play as it was first written. This question will therefore receive the attention which it certainly deserves. Lastly, I shall endeavour to show that the amount of blundering which my theory supposes to have been perpetrated by the printer of the first Quarto is not incredible; and here, at all events, I anticipate the ready sympathy of Mr Spedding, who has attributed such remarkable feats in this direction to the printer of the Folio. I shall now proceed at once to discuss Mr Spedding's examples, beginning with the alterations in the Folio Richard III. which, according to Mr Spedding, "cannot have been intended by Shakspere," but which may be "easily accounted for in almost every instance without supposing anybody besides the printer to have meddled with the text." It will be most convenient, I think, to quote the passages in full, giving first the reading of the first Quarto, and then that of the first Folio. I shall alter the original spelling, unless it should happen in any case to be significant. The references are to the Cambridge edition. ALTERATIONS IN THE FOLIO RICHARD III. WHICH ARE ATTRIBUTED BY MR SPEDDING TO THE PRINTER. I agree with Mr Spedding in regarding as errors of the printer, the examples which are numbered respectively 1, 6, 8, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23a, 24, 28, 29, 32, 34, 42, 43, 44, 50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 63, 71, 74, 78. Of these, therefore, nothing need be said. I. i. 63, Quarto: 2. ""Tis not the King that sends you to the Tower; That tempers him to this extremity." Folio: "Tis not the King that sends you to the Tower; Here Mr Spedding lays only half the alteration to the charge of the transcriber or printer, that is, the conversion of 'tempers' into 'tempts; then the corrector, coming across the short line in the copy which he was revising, eked it out with the epithet harsh.' And Mr Spedding thinks that the corrector may have been Shakspere himself. In the first place, I cannot agree with him in the conjecture that "the mistake may have arisen from the use in the MS. of the contracted form of per." For the first Quarto, which must have been printed from MS., reads 'tempers' quite correctly, the corrupted form 'tempts' being first found in the second Quarto, which was printed, not from MS., but from the previous Quarto. As the error of the second Quarto is reproduced substantially by all the following Quartos, there can be very little doubt, I think, that the copy which the corrector used, at least as far as this passage is concerned, was one of the later Quartos, probably the third. We come then to the heart of the question, can we suppose that the corrector was Shakspere? Can we suppose that Shakspere would adopt the reading 'tempts,' which a mere printer's error had introduced into the copy which he was revising? Mr Spedding says that "there is not much to choose between the two lines." For my own part, I cannot see any propriety in the reading of the Folio. Why should Lady Grey be said to tempt the King, when she is represented throughout Gloucester's speech as having him completely under her control? Only three lines before, Gloucester had cited the committal of Clarence as an illustration of what occurs when "men are ruled by women." Eve tempted Adam, it is true, but Jezebel stirred up (nearly = tempered) Ahab; and the latter is certainly the true analogy. Upon the other hand, if the corrector was not the author, he would of course accept the reading which he found, as it no doubt gives a fair sense. I. i. 71, Quarto: 3. "Car. By heaven, I think there is no man is secured Heard ye not what an humble suppliant Lord Hastings was to her for his delivery?" Folio: "By heaven, I think there is no man secure But the queen's kindred and night-walking heralds Lord Hastings was, for her delivery?" Mr Spedding thinks that the corrector is responsible only for striking out the words 'to her.' But it appears to me that the omission of these words leaves the sense, or at all events the perspicacity, of the passage defective, and that this was evident to the corrector himself, who therefore deliberately altered his delivery' to 'her delivery,' in order to make it clear to whom Lord Hastings addressed his prayers. Mr Spedding holds that the passage, as it stands in the Folio, cannot be Shakspere's; I have given good reason, I think, for supposing that it is the corrector's. |