On the received text of Shakespeare's dramatic writings and its improvement

THE

RECEIVED TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE

Preparing for publication

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

A THIED SEEIES OF LETTERS

PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND

ON

THE RECEIVED TEXT

OF

SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMATIC WRITINGS

AND ITS IMPROVEMENT

SAMUEL BAILEY

•>•*

LONDON
LONGMAN, GEEEN, LONGMAN, AND EGBERTS

18G2

tONBOX

PRINTKn BT BPOTTISWOODK AWD CO.
N-BW-STBTCFT ROUAR-g

AVAILABLE

NO. Q

PEEFACE,

THE Notes on Shakespeare which compose the
present Volume were begun as a diversion from
abstruser studies ; but thfe Author soon found
that to do anything effectual in this way required
nearly as much diligent research and patient
thought as to discuss the Principles of Value,
the Metaphysics of Vision, or the Theory of
Reasoning. The attractiveness of the employ
ment, nevertheless, ^drew him on, till his memo
randa had, in the progress of years, accumulated
to a considerable bulk, from which he now
offers a selection to the Public. Should it turn
out that he has succeeded in throwing light on
any portion of the text of our great dramatist, it
will be no -small addition to the pleasure he
has already enjoyed in making the attempt.

NOUBUEY, near SHEFFIELD.
Nov. 2lst. 1861.

CONTENTS.

PABT PAGE

I. — PRINCIPLES 1

II. — PROPOSED EMENDATIONS 27

Hamlet 27

Macbeth 60

Romeo and Juliet ...... 94

Coriolanus . . . . . . .98

Julius Caesar 103

King Lear 110

Cymbeline 114

The Tempest 122

The Comedy of Errors 131

Love's Labour's Lost 145

A Midsummer Night's Dream . . . . 1 52

The Merchant of Venice ..... 156
As You Like It . • . .160

III.— INDETERMINATE READINGS ..... 162
Coriolanus . . . . . . .164

Timou of Athens 170

Henry IV. ... .... 174

Henry V. ........ 183

Henry VI 187

Henry VIII. ... ... 190

Vlll CONTENTS.

PAliT VAOK

III. — INDETERMINATE READINGS (continued): —

Much Ado About Nothing .... 193

A Midsummer Night's Dream . . . .196

All's Well That Ends Well . . . . 201

Twelfth Night . . . . . .203

Winter's Tale . .209

IV. -VERBAL REPETITIONS 213

V.- CONCLUSION. — OBJECTIONS OBVIATED. . . 232

APPENDIX « . . 243

Article I. A Cursory Comparison of the Corruptions
in Shakespeare's Text which are noted
in the preceding Commentary, with
Modern Errors of the Press . . . 245
II. Note A. supplementary to p. 116 . . 260
III. B. 118 263

ON THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAEE,

PART I.

PRINCIPLES.

IT is too well known to be more than glanced at
here by way of introduction to what follows, that
no great writer in the English language has been
so unfortunate in regard to the imperfect state in
which his productions were given to the world as
Shakespeare.

The defectiveness of the text in the dramatic
works appears, from the scanty evidence we possess,
to have been partly occasioned by the slovenly
manner in which many of them were first taken
down from the lips, or copied from the manuscript
notes of the players, or from the prompters' books ;
and partly by the no less slovenly manner in
which they were printed. But even such sloven-

B

2 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

liness would have had no permanent consequences
had not the author himself, in the latter part of
his life, when he might have set all right, shown an
unaccountable, or at least an extraordinary, dis
regard and carelessness about the printing of his
own works. A genuine text cannot be said indeed
ever to have existed in print. The actual corrup
tion of it even in the best early editions is con
spicuous in the numerous efforts subsequently made
to amend or restore it.

Sometimes the suggestions offered with this view
have been so felicitous that they have been instan
taneously adopted. At other times the proposed
emendations have thrown no light except on the
weakness of the proposers. They have been too
often mere random guesses hastily thrown out,
while surely the importance of a right text should
have commanded the patient and considerate appli
cation of recognised, or at all events systematic,
canons. To some of our best commentators how
ever these derogatory strictures may but occasion
ally apply, and it is readily acknowledged that we
are indebted to their labours for the removal of
many blemishes. Still there is a prevailing want
of explicit methodical procedure. In determining
whether any passage is corrupt, and in devising or
testing any emendations of the received text, we
ought alike to proceed, as every thoughtful critic
will admit, on definite principles. To lay down
such principles is doubtless a task of some diffi-

PRINCIPLES. 3

culty, and we cannot therefore feel surprised that
it has not been hitherto formally attempted ; or at
any rate satisfactorily accomplished ; although they
perhaps might be collected in some measure from
the practice as well as comments of our most
judicious annotators: but without disparagement
to what has been done, there is ample room, I con
ceive, for a further effort in the same direction.

I purpose, therefore, in the present treatise,
first to consider the grounds on which any
passage can be rightly pronounced corrupt, and
secondly to suggest the conditions to be fulfilled in
any emendations brought forward with a view to
restore the reading to its original purity. Con
currently and subsequently I shall adduce nu
merous illustrative instances of the principles
explained and enforced.

It is to be borne in mind that what I have to
say on these points is in special reference to the
works of Shakespeare, and may or may not be
applicable to the productions of other writers of
inferior ability and in a dissimilar position.

The principal circumstances which lead us to
to suspect and justify us in deeming any passage
in his Plays to be corrupt appear to be the fol
lowing: —

1. Rhythmical and grammatical errors. Of the
first may be mentioned a limping in the metre not
disappearing even when the passage is read with
due consideration of all the peculiarities of pro-

n2

4 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

mmciation, accent, and rhythm belonging to the
times, or habitual to the writer.

These circumstances have been so copiously
illustrated by preceding writers of the last age, and
more recently by Mr. Sydney Walker, that I have
no need to do more than refer to their works for
an exposition both of the peculiarities of pro
nunciation, which are to be taken into account, and
of the metrical errors not emanating from the
author which require correction.

The grammatical errors are (chiefly, at least)
such faults of syntax as cannot be accounted for
on similar contemporaneous or personal grounds.

2. Discordance in the sentiments or in the lan
guage with the character of the dramatic speaker —
a circumstance so rarely brought forward as a mark
of corruption in the text that a bare mention of it
is sufficient.

3. Discordance in the sentiments or in the lan
guage with the habitual mode of thinking or with
the habitual phraseology of the author himself.

4. The repetition, without some assignable cause
or purpose, of a word or phrase in such close prox
imity as to be displeasing to ordinary taste. This
is a defect of very frequent occurrence in the re
ceived text, and unless we suppose Shakespeare to
have been destitute of a sensibility in this respect
which is possessed by very common -place people,
we must consider it as a mark of corruption.
Nevertheless as there are repetitions that are per-

PRINCIPLES. 5

fectly genuine, great care is occasionally required
to discriminate the authentic from the spurious, and
on account of the importance of a right discrimina
tion between them I purpose to offer some con
siderations on the subject in a separate chapter.
To do it here would occupy a disproportionate
space.

5. No-meaning or nonsense or absurdity — a
defect obvious at once to everybody. Should it
indeed not be obvious the case will fall under one
or other of the ensuing heads.

6. Irrelevancy, or want of significant appropriate
ness in a sentence or expression. The phrase may
have a clear meaning in itself and be quite Shake
spearian, but seems out of place where it is, alien
to the context, does not help on the dialogue, nor
elucidate the drift of the speaker.

Of this I purpose to point out an example in
Hamlet's soliloquy, when that celebrated passage is
under review and one in the "Tempest," not to
mention instances in other plays.

7. Incoherence, or want of congruity or consis
tency in the thoughts, or of consecutiveness in the
reasoning, except when these defects are purposely
introduced as characteristic of the speaker ; as in
the case, for example, of Mistress Quickly or neigh
bour Dogberry. Such faults are, it appears to me,
of unappreciated value in the determination of
spuriousness. The circumstances set forth under
the six preceding heads, although of very unequal

D3

(i THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAEE.

importance, may all in their turn form serviceable
criteria of corruption in the received text ; but it
is to defects coming under the present head that I
am more expressly desirous of calling attention as
constituting a criterion the application of which is
likely to be fruitful in happy results, if conducted
with caution and patience. The defects in question
may for brevity's sake be summed up in the ina
dequate phrase incoherence of thought, and a few
words may not be wasted in explaining and eluci
dating on what grounds and in what manner it is
intended to be employed as an index of spuriousness.

The writings of a first-rate author exhibit
amongst their conspicuous characteristics definite-
ness of aim, not only in the whole compass of what
he is about but in each separate part ; firmness and
consistency of thought, and consecutiveness of
reasoning : characteristics which, when manifested
in verbal expression, always imply precision of
language and cannot well be dissociated from it.
A master of composition expresses himself in ex
act terms, sets clearly before us the positions he
takes up; gives us metaphors which are neither
mixed nor misapplied ; similes which are not unlike ;
antitheses clearly brought out ; general propositions
which are not confused, incongruous, or wavering ;
trains of reasoning carried out to their proper con
clusions without being diverted from their course
by irrelevant topics.

The inferior writer, on the other hand, shows

PRINCIPLES. 7

indeterminateness of purpose ; is full of incoherent
thoughts and inconsistent figures ; comparisons
not obvious and contrasts that miscarry ; he starts
in a certain direction and loses himself by the way ;
sets himself to illustrate one proposition, and ends
by holding up his feeble and nickering light to
another.

Such not being the characteristics of a remark
ably strong-minded writer like Shakespeare, it is
plain that when we find any of them intruding
into his composition, under the admitted circum
stances that it has been irregularly taken down,
has not had the benefit of his personal supervision,
and is in consequence full of acknowledged in
accuracies, we may not only reasonably suspect,
but feel a confident assurance that we have not
the genuine reading before us.

At the same time such criteria as these require
to be applied with reference to the peculiarities
visible in Shakespeare as in all great writers. While
his works exhibit a sagacious and vigorous mind,
so that we expect from him nothing confused or
incongruous, or weak, or wavering, they also
manifest a proneness to condensation, an impatience
of diffuseness that seems as if it would crush
meaning into the smallest possible compass, and
a consequent and corresponding brevity of lan
guage ; qualities which are generally attended
with admirable effects, but which, as they are apt
to lead to harsh and constrained expressions, oc-

• 4

THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

casionally darken his composition except to a
closely attentive reader, and now and then even
to the ablest and most patient of his admirers.*

The obscurity in question is enhanced by an
occasional tinge of what may be called pedantry,
whether personal or belonging to the age ; a use
of terms in an etymological and hence somewhat
strained acceptation. An appropriate meaning is
perhaps fully expressed on such occasions, but it is
far from being obvious to a reader fresh to the un
common application of the words, and not com
petent to trace the derivation.

As nevertheless an apt and even forcible sense
exempt from intrinsic incongruity may generally
be discovered, we have to be careful not to con
found the impediments so arising to an immediate
apprehension of his drift, with the obscurity, inco
herence,' and confusion fathered upon him by the
blunders of reporters, copyists, and printers — a
discrimination doubtless at times exceedingly dif
ficult.

Another characteristic tending to disturb our
conclusions from internal evidence as to what is
and what is not genuine in the received text, is
our author's besetting propensity, in season and out
of season, to play upon words. Occasionally this
leads him into ill- timed puerilities, far-fetched con-

* Even Mr. Hallam, accustomed as he was to all kinds of
style complains of " the extreme obscurity of Shakespeare's
diction." — Literature of Europe, vol. iii. p. 92.

PRINCIPLES. 9

ceits, and jests not of unquestionable " prosperity, "
which, if we set out from any postulate of his un-
deviating good taste, uniform strong sense, and
complete mastery of his art, — in a word, his unfal
tering excellence — we should be compelled to
condemn as spurious ; but which are saved from
that fate by the way in which the manifestations
of the propensity are interwoven with some of the
best parts of his composition.

It must also be allowed, along with the preced
ing defects, that our great dramatic poet sometimes
swells out into bombast, and, while still maintaining
his clearness and vigour, even approaches to rant.

On account of such unfavourable characteristics
it is abundantly obvious that we cannot take all
deviations from perfection as indicative of corrup
tion in the text ; and it may be well for me to
guard expressly against the supposition that I
design to do so.

No- meaning, irrelevancy of propositions, and
incoherence of thought, as I have explained them,
are the substantial faults (apart from others of a
more formal nature) which I conceive Shakespeare
could not commit ; which I consider, consequently,
as indications of spuriousness in his received text ;
and which (especially the last) I have set myself
to apply in that character.

Whether the tests I have proposed are adequate
or not, one thing is clear, that before we proceed
to exercise our ingenuity in improving the received

10 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

text, we ought to have established on satisfactory
grounds, or it ought to be unmistakeably manifest
without the necessity of proof, that the passage we
seek to restore is spurious. We are then at the
proper starting-place for a quest after the right
reading. One would suppose that this pre
paratory step must be a matter of course and
could scarcely be neglected ; but it is in truth
often carelessly attended to, and sometimes al
together omitted. The eagerness consequent on
having a new reading to propose leaps over the
inquiry whether there is really any call for it.

An apposite illustration of the light way in
which such an essential preliminary is passed over
may be found in the Perkins folio. The fol
lowing lines occur in "Measure for Measure :"

" How would you be,

If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are ? "

Act ii. sc. 2.

Here where we find complete sense and nothing
but Shakespearian language*, there is not the slight-

* The same phrase, top of judgment, occurs in Hamlet,
act ii. scene 2, and the word top is so often employed by
Shakespeare both as a noun and a verb, to express height,
climax, or pre-eminence, as to form an almost characteristic
phrase. Thus, Salisbury, in " King John," on seeing the dead
body of Arthur, exclaims, —

" This is the very top,

The height, the crest, or crest unto the crest,
Of murder's arms."

Act iv. sc. 3.

PRINCIPLES. 11

est call for alteration, even if the passage could be
altered for the better. Yet the old corrector sub
stitutes God for top, not only needlessly, but, as it
happens, to the injury of the sense.

While the first process, which is thus often
lightly attended to by the commentator, as if he
were in haste to get to the next, is both necessary
and important, we must bear in mind that it only
clears the way for the second without advancing it.
Suppose that, in the last example, the expression
top of judgment instead of being arbitrarily assumed
to be corrupt had been proved to be so, the esta
blishment of its spuriousness would not have had
the slightest tendency to support the proposed
substitution of God of judgment in its place. The
two processes are distinct and require independent
attention.

Hence we may completely establish the existence
of an error, or it may be so evident as not to
require proof, and yet we may be totally unable
to supply the correction of it — a position in

Again, in "Antony and Cleopatra," Caesar, after learning the
suicide of the former, apostrophises him as

" my brother, my competitor
In top of all design, my mate in empire."

Act v. sc. ] .

In other places we have, "the spire and top of praises;" "Ed
ward the base shall top the legitimate; " " top of honour;" and
a number of similar phrases.

12 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

which the critic of Shakespeare is in fact continually
liable to be placed.

How the rectification of a faulty passage is in
any case to be set about seems hardly an affair of
rule or direct prescription. Nevertheless, the con
siderations which will be hereafter brought for
ward in support of some of the emendations 1
have to suggest, will probably afford a few hints
and examples not unserviceable to that end. Mean
while certain conditions may be laid down as
indispensably requisite (except under peculiar
circumstances) in any emendations proposed to
remedy proved or admitted defects. Such, I con
ceive, are those which I shall immediately proceed
to state and explain.

1. The proposed emendation must correct the
harshness, incoherence, incongruity, want of mean
ing, or other defect in the received text, on ac
count of which it is proposed. This condition is
self-evidently indispensable, but amongst several
emendations which fulfil it, some may do it more
completely and more happily than others.

2. It should not be lower in tone of thought or
force of expression than the context into which it
is to be introduced ; nor be in any other way in
consistent with it. This condition is also grada-
tional, or admits of being more or less happily
fulfilled.

3. The language of the emendation should be
such as Shakespeare can be shown to have habitually

PRINCIPLES. 1 3

or at least occasionally employed. If this, although
highly desirable, cannot be laid down as absolutely
imperative in all cases, yet where it is departed
from, special reasons should be assigned ; and the
lowest requirement must exact that the phraseo
logy shall be that of the age in which he wrote, or
of books then in current use. While, therefore, a
proposed emendation with this lowest qualification
would not be necessarily excluded, another emen
dation expressed in phraseology used elsewhere
even sparingly by him would ceteris paribus have
higher claims to be received ; and a third clothed
in his habitual language would have higher still.

This condition, therefore, is also gradational, or
one the fulfilment of which admits of degrees.

It may be contended, perhaps, in contradiction
to one part of this condition that no word ought
to be admitted into an emendation which is not
found elsewhere in his writings ; but this on trial
would be seen to be too rigorous.

An example in point is furnished by the correc
tion of Aristotle's checks to Aristotle's Ethics, which
cannot be rejected, notwithstanding the fact that
the term ethics is not to be found in any other
place in the whole range of Shakespeare's dramas.
The instance may be considered perhaps as scarcely
relevant, since the words may be looked upon as
forming the title of a book : but other examples
will present themselves as we proceed.* At the

* I may cite the word counterwait which I have suggested
in " Comedy of Errors."

14 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

same time it may be allowed that the introduction
of a notable term, nowhere used by him, would be
prima facie suspicious, and even exceptionable in
an emendation, or in settling a disputed reading.

For example, the word tone does not occur once
in his dramatic writings, and its total absence
would constitute a presumptive ground of objection
to any amendment in which it had a place, — an
objection, however, which might be overcome by
special circumstances, since that word may be
found in Bacon and other contemporary writers.
On the whole, the great condition to be exacted is
that the language of an emendation shall be the
language of Shakespeare in other places ; and every
deviation from it must be justified by particular
considerations.

4. It is not enough, however, that the three
preceding conditions should be fulfilled by a pro
posed emendation, since they may be so without
producing a positive conviction that it is the right
one, and they may be satisfied by several rival
suggestions. They are all indispensable, but they
are not together necessarily suificient.

An emendation, it is obvious, may completely
remedy the defect in view, may be of the proper
tone and force, and be couched in Shakespearian
language, not only without completely convincing
us that it is the exact reading, but without being
exclusively successful in those points. Half a
dozen other emendations may also fulfil the re-

PRINCIPLES. 15

quirements, and thus so far the right reading will
be indeterminate. From such a difficulty, not
often occurring perhaps in so extreme a form, there
seems to be no escape, unless some further circum
stance can be found which is conclusively satis
factory, and which, in the case of rival amendments,
gives to one a superiority over the rest.

A fourth condition then must be laid down to
the effect that an emendation in order to be
received must farther possess or be attended by
some attribute or circumstance of this decisive or
crucial character, forming a positive title to ad
mission.

A brief glance at the various ways in which
wrong readings or spurious passages are occa
sioned, may show what are the crucial circum
stances to look out for, and how far we have the
means of complying with the requirements of this
fourth condition.

The chief errors of transcribers, writers from
dictation or from recitation, short-hand writers,
decypherers of short-hand, and compositors, are
mistakes of one word or phrase for another in
consequence of either similarity of sound, or, when
the sight is concerned, of similarity in the forms
of the words or of the letters, often incalculably
increased by bad handwriting which confounds all
forms.*

* The evils flowing from bad handwriting have never been
sufficiently appreciated, but few apparently trivial circum-

16 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Other circumstances, nevertheless, besides simi
larity of sound or of literal shape, occur to vitiate
the text.

Some of these are incident to the compositor,
such as an accidental mixture of type in his case,
or his taking a letter from the wrong compartment,
or his eye catching a word in the manuscript from
the line above or the line below, or some other
part of it, when there is no affinity of any kind
between the right word and the supposititious one.
He is apt also occasionally to compose a line from
his mental conception rather than his sight, which
may betray him into a blunder. Sometimes too a
word lingers in his eye or his mind after he ought
to have done with it, and settles down in a wrong
place to the utter discomfiture of the legitimate
occupant and its neighbours — an incident likely
enough to give rise to that disagreeable repetition

stances have occasioned more mistakes, not only of the press,
but in the general affairs of the world, and greater waste of
time, than a practice which is so easily avoided by those per
sons who chiefly fall into it. Physicians' prescriptions are a
notorious case in point. At one time (I hope the absurdity
has passed away) it was regarded as low to write legibly; a
prejudice which Hamlet mentions in his account to Horatio of
forging certain instructions from the King : —

"I sat me down,

Devised a new commission; wrote it fair.
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning." Act v. sc. 2.

PRINCIPLES. 1 7

of a word in a line or in two proximate lines,
which has already been adverted to.

There are errors also incident to dictation and
to writing from dictation and to copying from an
original draught. Not only is the copyist liable
to certain mistakes in common with the compositor,
but he sometimes vitiates the text in ways peculiar
to himself — ways so subtile and various as to
elude description. There is one mode, however, in
which the text is apt to be corrupted by him pal
pable enough to be pointed out, and which has
been much more prevalent and influential, I ap
prehend, than is usually suspected. It occurs
when successive copyists or revisers, or the same at
successive times, are engaged upon the same text.
In this case after an error has once found its way
into a manuscript and the manuscript is recopied
or revised by a different person or by the same
person on different occasions, the second operator
discerning that an error exists and being desirous
to rectify it makes the attempt not by restoring
the original reading, of which he may in fact know
nothing, but by altering other neighbouring words
to make them tally in scope with the spurious one.
Since the word which has been put into the text
by mistake obstinately refuses to coalesce with
those around it, the re-copyist or reviser, in order
to get rid of the palpable discord between them,
resorts to the expulsion not of the intruding voca
ble but of the legitimate words whose harmonious

c

18 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

relations to the context have been disturbed. He
then follows it up by introducing into their places
other words more congenial with the intruder.

In this way blunders have propagated blunders,
resulting in a thorough depravation of the text.
Several examples of mistakes so engendered will
be pointed out in the sequel.

When we take a survey of all these sources of
error, the most important feature in the view for
our present purpose is that the blunders arising
from some of the circumstances enumerated retain
some relics of the right reading, and thus assist in
their own correction, while others do not. Mis
takes founded on resemblance of sounds or simi
larity of visible appearance supply some clue to the
genuine text. If soil has been inadvertently sub
stituted for foil, the defect in sense shows that we
have the wrong word before us, and the resem
blance borne to the interloper by a word which
removes the defect indicates a high probability
that it is the right one. Thus that similarity
which was the cause of the error not only aids us
in rectifying it, but becomes evidence that the ori
ginal text has been recovered.

It is when such mistakes have been pointed out
and have been so rectified that the proposed emen
dations have at once commended themselves to
universal adoption.

A few apposite examples may serve to corrobo
rate these remarks.

PRINCIPLES. 19

One may be found in the expression of FalstafFs,
"so both the degrees prevent my curses," rectified
by the substitution of diseases for degrees : a second,
in the correction of the line

"Rights by rights fouler, strengths by strengths do fail,"
into

Rights by rights founder :

a third example is furnished by the passage, " That
daughter there of Spain, the lady Blanch, is near
to England" altered to niece to England : and
a fourth happy emendation of the same kind
presents itself in replacing knit by kin in the
line

"The Earl of Armagnac, near knit to Charles."

In every one of these cases we readily discern
how the error may have arisen from the resem
blance between the original word and that substi
tuted for it ; and since the several emendations fit
into the text with happy exactness, and are al
together conformable to the conditions prescribed,
the conviction produced by the union of these cir
cumstances that we have got hold of the right
words is complete.

Thus a main circumstance, not only to guide
us in our search, but to determine whether we have
found the genuine reading, is the resemblance of a
proposed emendation to the received text so marked
as to show the way in which the latter supplanted

c 2

20 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

the original. This similarity coming upon the
fulfilment of the preceding conditions is usually
decisive.

It is different with errors arising from the eye
of the compositor or writer catching a wrong
word from another line, and from the other in
auspicious incidents in copying and printing al
ready described. As such for the most part
contain no relics of the original text, they supply
no clue to their own rectification, and no means of
proving that the genuine phraseology has been
found. For example, there can be no doubt that
the repetition of help in the second of the follow
ing lines is spurious, inasmuch as it not merely of
fends the taste, but is nearly unmeaning. There is
scarcely a signification, even faintly, appropriate,
to be affixed to the line as it stands :

" Therefore, merchant, I'll limit thee this day,
To seek thy help by beneficial help"

Comedy of Errors, act i. sc. 1.

We feel quite sure that Shakespeare never wrote
this : one of the helps must be spurious; but here, as
in perhaps most such cases of repetition, we have
no reason to suppose the mistake to have ori
ginated in similarity, and consequently we have no
guide to the right reading in the sound or the
visible form of the words.

Hence, with regard to this large class of errors
in which resemblance has had no part, we try in

PRINCIPLES. 21

vain to find the right reading in similar words.
We are at a loss how to proceed both to discover
the genuine text and to prove it such when found.
There is in these cases no decisive circumstance
extrinsic to the sense of the passage to render a
proposed emendation quite satisfactory in itself or
to single it out as the best amongst rival sugges
tions. When they equally fulfil the three conditions
laid down, namely, remove the defect, maintain the
tone of the composition, and speak in Shakespearian
language, we can do no more than pronounce the
reading indeterminate.

It fortunately happens, however, that very fre
quently a single suggestion, or some one of the
suggestions, when there are several, so completely
remedies the fault in the text, and so obviously
excels the rest if there are rivals, that every reader
unites in receiving it. It is this marked felicity in
filling up the vacant place, in such cases, which
constitutes our only assurance of having got hold
of the original words.

Thus there are two different modes of satisfying
the fourth condition requiring in an emendation
some crucial or decisive circumstance or attribute.
It may be satisfied by (1) similarity in the pro
posed emendation to the received reading : (2)
felicity or completeness in fulfilling the three
antecedent conditions, when resemblance is not in
question.

These circumstances themselves admit of degrees,

c 3

kJ2 THE TEXT OF SHAKES -E ARE

and both may be concerned in the final determi
nation.

Of two emendations equal in point of similarity
to the received text, one may be superior in
felicity ; and conversely of two which are equal in
felicity, one may be superior in similarity, in
which cases (not very likely to occur) the superi
ority in whichever point it may be will determine
the reading.

In general it will be found, as I have already
observed, that there is a marked superiority in
some one or other of the proposed corrections ; but
when it happens that the palm cannot be adjudged
to any one of the competitors, we are under no
obligation to make the award. They must take
their places, for the present at least, under the head
of uncertain or doubtful.

In the sequel, I shall "bring forward a number of
instances to show that with our present lights,
equality of claims is not an imaginary case, but of
frequent occurrence, leaving the text in many pas
sages wholly indeterminate. Such passages, it is
to be hoped, may be gradually reduced in number
by the combined efforts of future commentators,
and in the meantime it is useful to register them
for what they are.

The principles which I have here explained as
proper, if not necessary, to guide us in determining
whether a passage is corrupt, and in the admission
of proposed emendations in the received text of

PRINCIPLES. 23

Shakespeare, are applicable in their whole extent
to that great body of corrections for which we
are indebted to the celebrated Perkins folio.

It ought to be clearly understood at the outset,
and consistently borne in mind in any attempt to
appreciate their individual value, that they have no
authority properly so-called to back them. They
have nothing to stand upon but their own merits.
Ignorant as we are of the corrector's name, charac
ter, position, and opportunities, and of the motives
under which he undertook his laborious task, we
cannot ascribe to his alterations in the received
text the weight which a knowledge of such per
sonal circumstances might possibly, but by no
means necessarily, have conferred. The only
weight they can have is that which may be due to
their intrinsic qualities, and no course is open to us
but to test every one of them by the same criteria
which we should apply to any emendations proposed
by a living commentator of the year 1861.

On this view and this plan of proceeding, the
question whether or not they are a modern fabri
cation becomes of no critical importance ; the only
points to be established in each case are, whether
any fault exists in the received text, and if a fault
is shown to exist, whether the proposed emendation
fulfils the conditions required in all emendations.
If it does, the date of it sinks into a matter of
indifference.

It is doubtless always important to the com-

c 4

24 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

munity that any false pretence should be exposed ;
but beyond a common interest in good morals, the
lover of Shakespeare is not in the present case
really concerned in the inquiry at what time or
with whom the manuscript corrections originated.
In the absence of all credentials the corrections in
question rank in value just the same, whether they
are due to the seventeenth century or to our own
age. New or old, forged or genuine, they are
what they are, and must stand or fall by their own
intrinsic deserts, without any support from the
shadow of authority which has been vainly flung
over them, and which can only prejudice what it
cannot corroborate.

Nor will it do to adopt a middle course : we
must either receive the whole on authority, or
apply to all of them the same tests which are
applied to professedly modern suggestions — there
is no medium : for if you select only a part of them
for adoption, you will have to show on what
grounds you admit some and reject others. Should
you allege that you are for admitting such as you
consider good and rejecting such as you consider
bad, you will be manifestly abandoning authority
altogether. You will be wholly relying on your
own judgment, and very wisely too, just as you
will do in accepting or refusing to accept the
emendations proposed in the present treatise. In
order to make a proper use of the Perkins folio,
it is essential to begin by divesting the mind of all

PRINCIPLES. 25

impressions that there is or can be any deference
due to it.

It is in the spirit here described that in the
following pages I have dealt with these noted
manuscript corrections. As a body of hints and
suggestions they are exceedingly serviceable, and
there are so many corrupt passages in the plays
that can scarcely be discussed without referring to
the volume that I shall find frequent occasion to
advert to it.

It is bare justice to add my impression that, as
far as Mr. Collier is concerned, the question of
fabrication has been satisfactorily disposed of. I
never for my own part could see the slightest ground
for such an imputation on him, and always felt in
reading his statements that I had to do with a
writer of good faith and honourable feeling. It
seemed to me certain that any errors he might
fall into would be such mistakes in judgment as
we are all liable to commit without any moral
imputation, not deviations from integrity. These
impressions have been amply confirmed by the
external evidence which he has been enabled to
adduce; but independently of all other considera
tions, the immense number of manuscript cor
rections, small and great, renders it wholly
incredible that they should have been the work of
any one bent on deceit and fraudulence. There
could be no adequate purpose in the view of an
unprincipled writer to induce him to undertake

26 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

the enormous labour of such a fabrication. No
honour and no emolument could be procured
by it; or if any of either could be expected, the
talent and diligence required for the invention of
such a body of corrections (good, bad, and indif
ferent as they are) would have achieved far
higher fame, and obtained far greater remuneration
by producing them as professed original emen
dations, than by any possible mode of smuggling
them into notice. The very circumstance of the
corrector's bag having been so indiscriminately
emptied before the public (with no infrequent
flourish of trumpets as the several articles emerged
from it) may prove the sanguine character, but
assuredly does not indicate the bad faith of the
exhibitor.

27

PART II.

PROPOSED EMENDATIONS.

HAMLET.

IN order to elucidate the principles here pro
pounded and their application, I will adduce a
number of passages which have struck me as most
likely for that purpose. My chief aim will be to
show by examples how incoherence of thought and
other allied defects, as already explained, may prove
the spuriousness of the text, and at the same time
how requisite it is that, in attempting to restore the
genuine reading, the conditions already laid down
should be observed.

I begin purposely with a passage which is difficult
to prove corrupt as well as difficult to amend,
and which is familiar to every Englishman; so
familiar, indeed, that to disturb it is to dissever
some strong associations, and consequently to
raise up a spirit of opposition to any emendation
which may be suggested.

28 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

On this account, as well as to exhibit in some
detail the method I pursue, I think it will be expe
dient both in the present instance and a few other
cases, to enter more formally and at greater length
into the proofs of corruption and into the grounds
for the emendations proposed than it will be needful
to do in general. At the same time, I would remark
that when I may, according to this last intimation,
point out any fault and suggest a correction of it
without showing in a full and formal manner that
every condition is observed, I am not desirous that
the proceeding should be otherwise than rigidly
tested by the principles laid down.

The passage in question is the opening of the
celebrated soliloquy of Hamlet :

" To be, or not to be; that is the question : —
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ;
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them?"

Act iii. sc. 1.

Here I am struck at once by a glaring corruption
in the text. Not only is there a most incongruous
metaphor, from which good sense and good taste
have long recoiled, but what is worse, the expres
sions employed do not contain a consistent mean
ing. They exhibit, on the contrary, incoherence
of thought : what was manifestly in the mind of
the author is not brought out: the train of re
flection does not takes its natural or logical course :

HAMLET. 29

it begins with proposing one thing and ends with
substituting another. The fourth and fifth lines at
once fail in proper purpose, and are such in them
selves as no clear-headed thinker could have writ
ten. How could anyone entitled to be heard have
possibly said or sung,

" Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them?"

Let us analyse the passage to show this.

Hamlet, oppressed by the cruel position in which
he is placed, begins his soliloquy by proposing to
himself the question whether he shall continue to
live or put an end to his life : — indisputably the
plain meaning of " to be, or not to be."

He then proceeds to expand the question ; very
forcibly amplifying the first branch of the proposed
alternative, namely to be, into the words " whether
'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and ar
rows of outrageous fortune;" and we naturally
expect him to amplify similarly the second branch
or not to be, into some corresponding sentence or
clause, such as, "or whether 'tis nobler to escape
from this multitude of troubles by putting an end to
life and them together." In brief, whether 'tis nobler
to live or to die by one's own hand. But when, in.
stead of the matter being so presented, the sentence
dissolves into something else, a sort of perplexity
comes over the reader. He finds the second
branch of the alternative converted into " or

30 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

whether 'tis nobler to take arms against the nu
merous troubles that beset me and put them
down : " which is abruptly starting off from the
natural and logical course of the speaker's reflec
tions; — an extraordinary and glaring instance
of that inconsequence of thought which a su
perior writer can hardly fall into.

In short, he first asks " shall I live on or commit
suicide?" and then, when he ought to state the
same alternative more circumstantially, he proposes
a quite different one, namely, "shall I live on,
quietly suffering the evils of my lot, or, multi
tudinous as they are, shall I oppose and vanquish
them?"

We may safely conclude that Shakespeare never
committed a blunder of so gross a character, espe
cially in a case where it was so easy, I may say
indeed so much easier, to be coherent and correct.

That he could not have proposed the last-men
tioned alternative is further proved by the sequel.

The subsequent lines all turn on the question
whether it is better to live under evil, or die by
one's own hand and so escape from it, not whether
the evil should be endured or be resisted and over
come. He shows why it is that we submit to the
various grievances of life, when it is at any time
in our power to rid ourselves of them " with a bare
bodkin : " we " rather bear those ills we have, than
fly to others that we know not of." Here is not
a word about bearing evils in contradistinction to

HAMLET. 31

opposing them, but a good deal about bearing
known evils in preference to encountering unknown
and perhaps greater ones by committing suicide.

The observations which I have now presented to
the reader, will be allowed, I think, to establish the
conclusion, that the fifth and sixth lines are corrupt ;
in other words, they are not the lines which Shake
speare wrote.

But it is much easier to establish a strong pro
bability that the text is not genuine, than to suggest
with plausibility what the reading ought to be.

After much consideration, trying all sorts of
substitutions, and framing numerous hypotheses
under the conditions before laid down, I am
strongly inclined to regard the following emen
dation as a near approach at least to the genuine
text, if not a complete restoration of it. Let not
the reader start off at once at the magnitude of
the alteration, but patiently consider the reasons
assigned in its favour.

To be, or not to be — that is the question ;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against the seat of troubles,
And by a poniard end them ?

Trying this emendation by my own canons, I
find that in the first place it corrects the gross in
consistency in the train of thought; it maintains
the alternative with which the soliloquy began : in
the second place it disembarrasses the passage from

32 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

the monstrous metaphor which is acknowledged by
all to be an incoherent deformity. Nor is the
emendation at all inferior in tone of thought or
force of expression to what it displaces, or to the
context in which it is inserted. It does not relax
the tension of the soliloquy, notwithstanding its
taking aAvay what may be dear to the ears of many
a devoted admirer — the sounding phrase a sea of
troubles.

In the next place, the phraseology introduced
resembles expressions employed by Shakespeare in
other places. With regard to the word seat in the
proposed phrase seat of troubles, which so used
would of course denote the heart or breast, I find in
" Twelfth Night " the heart styled " the seat where
love is throned." In " Hamlet " the clause occurs
" while memory holds a seat in this distracted
globe," referring in this case to the head ; and we
have a similar reference in " Coriolanus " — " the
seat of the brain."

Other instances might be adduced to show the
familiar use of the term in a manner analogous to
that in which it is employed in the proposed emen
dation. Seat is a very frequent word in our
author's pages, and is applied in several ways which
I shall have hereafter to notice. But the passage
which appears to me to lend the greatest support
to my emendation, although it does not contain
the particular term in question, occurs in " Cymi-
beline " iii. 4, where Imogen is trying to prevail on

HAMLET. 33

Pisariio to follow the orders of her husband Post-
humus to take away her life :

" Come, fellow, be thou honest ;

Do thou thy master's bidding. When thou seest him,
A little witness my obedience : look!
I draw the sword myself: take it; and hit
The innocent mansion of my love, my heart.
Fear not; 'tis empty of all things but grief:
Thy master is not there, who was, indeed,
The riches of it. Do his bidding; strike!"

I have next to consider the word poniard, which
it is sufficient for form's sake to show was em
ployed by Shakespeare on more occasions than
one.

By the help of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's very valu
able " Concordance," I find that he uses this word
five times ; enough to justify the introduction of
it into any proposed emendation, as far as mere
phraseology is concerned.

The probability of its having been employed as
suggested, rests partly on its accordance with the
equivalent phrase bare bodkin, which follows a few
lines after in the same soliloquy, and clearly indi
cates the mode of committing suicide predominant
in the thoughts of Hamlet, namely, stabbing him
self to the heart, not poisoning or drowning himself.

It may be added that the expression bare bodkin
seems somewhat harsh and abrupt, if it is taken as
the first intimation of the particular method of
escape from his misery which he was contemplating.

The alteration in the meaning of the passage by

D

34 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

the proposed emendation is doubtless great, as it
unavoidably must be, for no small alteration in
that respect could redress the incoherence of the
thoughts, banish the barbarous metaphor and rectify
the want of consecutiveness throughout.

But the verbal alteration by which these defects
are removed, and appropriate sense and connexion
restored to the soliloquy is in reality small. In
the fourth line " the seat " replaces " a sea " : in
the fifth line " a poniard " replaces " opposing." '
Such and no more is the whole extent of the verbal
change.

In point of sound the amended lines are so near
the received ones, that the substitution of one for
the other amidst the various liabilities to mistake
prevailing at the time when the plays were first
printed, could not have been difficult. An author

* In the progress of the error a poynard (so spelt in ed. 1604)
might have been originally changed into opponing, and after
wards opponing have been replaced by opposing as the more
common form of the verb. That the form oppone was occa
sionally used in that age may be shown by an instance which
occurs in Ben Jonson's "Alchemist," Act iii. sc. 2. With
these old forms the transition from the text (as I propose to
make it) to the received reading would be still easier. Let
us put the two lines together.

And by a poynard end them.
And by opponing end them.

How readily the one would be transmuted into the other is
plain. The only difference worth notice is that between ard
and ing, in itself not very formidable.

HAMLET. 35

in the present day, would scarcely be surprised to
find such errors in a proof from his printer.

In the course of my ruminations on the passage,
I soon became satisfied that I had hit upon the
right correction of the fourth line ; none that I was
able to think of could compete with it in claims
to be adopted.

I did not however feel at first equally confident
about that of the fifth line. Should the emendation
of the fourth be admitted, the subsequent line, it
occurred to me, might perhaps be considered allow
able as it stood. On reflection, nevertheless, I
could not help observing that the line in question
would lose something of the little force it possesses,
through my emendation of the preceding one, for
it would be exceedingly weak to talk of ending
the troubles by opposition when what the speaker
meant has just been so strongly indicated to be
suicide. Beside, in the received reading of the
passage, taking arms against, which implies attack
ing, must be considered at the best as but poorly
followed up by opposing.

Another reading, effected by a very trifling
alteration, suggested itself, — the substitution of
" deposing," for " opposing."

Or to take arms against the seat of troubles,
And by deposing end them.

One of the commonest significations of the word
"seat" in Shakespeare's writings is "throne," as

D2

36 THE TEXT OF S1I AKF.SPEARE.

seen in such expressions as " seat of majesty,"
"heir to England's royal seat," "the crown and
seat of France," "the supreme seat, the throne
majesties!."

In the proposed emendation, then, the seat of
troubles might be taken figuratively as "the
throne of troubles," and consistently with that
metaphor the poet might proceed to speak of
deposing them from their throne, the heart, and
thus putting an end to their existence. A passage
in " King John," might be adduced to countenance
this language, where one of the citizens of Angiers
speaks of being

" King'd of our fear, until our fears resolved
Be by some certain king purged and deposed."

Act ii. sc. 1.

. There would be something in this reading
accordant enough with the tendency manifested
by Shakespeare and all men of great wit to push
their metaphors beyond the first stage of analogy,
and it would also be quite consonant with the
prevailing humour of Hamlet; but the prolonga
tion of the figure would imply too light a play of
fancy for the mental pressure under which the
soliloquy was uttered, and would consequently
lower the strength of the passage.*

* Besides the argument in the text, it deserves to be noticed
that the last suggested reading, as will be manifest on reflec
tion, would scarcely lapse into the received text more easily

IIAMLET. 37

On the whole the reading now proposed, " and
by a poniard end them," appears to me decidedly
preferable to either of the others, and this conclu
sion is strengthened by some further considerations.

The force of the preceding part of the soliloquy
requires that in the fifth line the second branch
of the alternative should be stated in plain and
direct terms. And this is also equally necessary
for the sequel. In the common reading no men
tion has, up to this point, been made of death,
except as it is implied in the phrase not to be, and
yet the sentence before us is immediately followed
by the utterance of the words to die, intended
evidently to take up the concluding idea of the
antecedent clause. Hence that clause ought to
speak of death.

In the received text this is not done, as every
reader will at once see :

" Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die — to sleep —
No more "

than the first ; particularly if we compare the several readings
when put into the old forms before mentioned.

And by opponing end them.
And by deposing end them.
And by a poynard end them.

And this remark would hold good even if we were to alter
deposing into deponing, although not so conspicuously ; ard
into ing is not a greater change than de into opp.

i> 3

38 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Here, then, is no proper transition from the con
clusion of one sentence to the beginning of the
other. The latter does not take up what the
former lays down. " To die " has no connection
with opposing, and to find any kindred expression
you are thrown back to the commencement not to be.

In the proposed emendation, this defect is wholly
removed; the connection is close, the transition
natural and direct :

Or to take arms against the seat of troubles,

And by a poniard end them. To die — to sleep —

No more

In a word, the expression to die so placed re
quires to be introduced by the mention of the act
of suicide immediately before it, and this condition
is fulfilled by the suggested alteration, and not by
any other of the readings which have had our
attention.

In reference to the incongruous metaphor "to
take arms against a sea of troubles," it may be
observed that it has been defended or palliated by
bringing instances in which phrases analogous to
" a sea of troubles," have been employed.

Thus, Theobald quotes from ^Eschylus the ex
pressions " xaxwv Qdhacra-a," and " xaxo>v Tp/xu/*,/a."

Shakespeare himself, I may add, has similar

phrases :

" Thus hulling in

The wild sea of my conscience, I did steer
Towards this remedy."

Henry VIII. act ii. sc. 4.

HAMLET. 39

" Put me to present pain
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness."

Pericles, act v. sc. 1.

We find besides, " seas of tears," and " to weep
seas," which are rather exaggerations than tropes.

If, however, a thousand examples of such lan
guage could be adduced, they would not amount
to the slightest justification of the condemned
metaphor. The objection is not to the metaphor
ical designation a sea of troubles, but to the figura
tive absurdity implied in " taking up arms against
a sea of troubles," or indeed against any other sea,
literal or imaginary. I question whether any
instance is to be found of such a fight in the whole
compass of English literature, previous to Mrs.
Partington's celebrated contention with the At
lantic. The character of her weapon, the only
appropriate one that could be wielded in such a
contest, is decisive that neither Shakespeare nor
Hamlet had in his head a battle with 4;he ocean.

But were the metaphor unexceptionable, the
principal proof of the corruption of the passage
would, I repeat, remain; namely, that the lines as
they stand do not sustain the alternative which in
consistency they ought to have carried out, and
which it was in fact the purpose of the soliloquy
to expatiate upon.

I would further remark that in the passage cited

D 4

40 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

from " Pericles," Shakespeare shows a consistency
in the management of the metaphor there intro
duced, which in itself, were it needful to urge such
a plea in his behalf, would constitute a presump
tion that he could not have so grossly mismanaged
the analogous one in Hamlet's soliloquy. He
carries on the figure through three lines without
the slightest vacillation or flaw in the imagery—
at least till he comes to the very last word, the
incongruity of which with the rest strongly indi
cates a corruption of the text. Drown with sweet
ness is an expression more applicable to a " butt
of malmsey," * than to " the great salt sea."

Hence it may be suspected that the poet wrote
something very different. It is the greatness, the
rushing, the violence, which Pericles fears will
overwhelm him, not the deliciousness of the joy.
Our author may possibly have written, nay, I will
even venture to say, probably wrote, surges, where
now we find sweetness.

And drown me with their surges.
or better still —

And drown me with its surges.

What strengthens the probability is that Peri
cles had before made use of the same word :

" Thou God of this great vast, rebuke these surges
Which wash both heaven and hell."

Act iii. sc. 1.

» "Richard III."

HAMLET. 41

It is singular that Dr. Johnson, in his note to
Hamlet's soliloquy, totally misses the drift of the
commencement, about which I have been occupied.
He construes it as follows : —

"Before I can form any rational scheme of action
under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to
decide whether after our present state we are to
be or not to be. That is the question which, as it
shall be answered, will determine whether 'tis no
bler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to
suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take
arms against them, or by opposing end them,
though perhaps with the loss of life."

On this comment, Malone very justly remarks : —

"Dr. Johnson's explication of the first five lines
of this passage is surely wrong. Hamlet is not
deliberating whether after our present state we are
to exist or not, but whether he should continue to
live or put an end to his life ; as is pointed out by
the second and the three following lines, which are
manifestly a paraphrase on the first."*

The learned Doctor evidently misapprehends the
whole matter : he overlooks the question of suicide
altogether, and even supposes possible death from a
hostile encounter to have been in Hamlet's con
templation — an oversight and a misconception
which, in such a quarter, would suffice alone to in
dicate some kind of obscurity or confusion not

* Malone's " Shakespeare," vol. ix. p. 286, Boswell's ed.

42 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespearian in the lines that could furnish occa
sion for them, were such indirect evidence required.
The second passage to which I have to draw the
reader's attention is in the same soliloquy, and is
indeed in immediate succession to the lines already
considered :

"To die — to sleep —
No more ; — and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished."

Here it will be seen as soon as it is pointed out
that the phrase "to say" expresses a circumstance
quite foreign to the train of thought.

As the sentence stands the construction is "to
sleep and to say we end by a sleep the heart-ache,
and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir
to, is a consummation devoutly to be wished ; " when
surely it is not the saying but the ending which is
to be desired. Even if we admit the latter part
of the sentence, "'tis a consummation," &c. to
be an abrupt change in construction, the objection
remains : to say has nothing to do where it is
placed. By simply expunging say we every one
will be sensible how greatly the passage is improved,
and that the introduction of saying is a sheer
impertinence which could not have proceeded from
the clear head of our great dramatist.

The elimination of the two words, nevertheless,
although it would be quite sufficient to rid the

HAMLET. 43

sentence of an unsightly patch loosely put on by
accident or mistake, would leave the metre de
fective.

Hence there can be no doubt that the couple of
little monosyllables in question have usurped the
place of a more appropriate verbal combination, to
which they must in all likelihood have borne some
resemblance in sound or in written character in
order to be allowed to appear there.

We have then to look for a word or expression
which will strengthen, or at least not weaken the
sense, complete the metre, be so far similar in
sound or form as to have possibly suggested the
erroneous reading we find, and be consonant with
Shakespeare's phraseology on other occasions.

Such a word we have, I think, in the adverb
straightway r, inserted in the place of "say we," as
follows : —

To die — to sleep —

No more ; and by a sleep to straightway end
The heart-ache, &c. &c.

To end instantaneously is more impressive in
such a connexion than simply to end, and the word
straightway not only expresses this but fills up the
metre, while it has the further requisite of being
frequent in our author's pages.

The similarity in sound between say we and
straightway is certainly not remarkable, but there
is sufficient for the foundation of a mistake; and
on the supposition that the soliloquy was written

44 THE TEXT OF SIIAKESPEAKK.

out from short-hand notes the word straightway
might have been abbreviated into -s w, by any
writer who thought he could trust his memory,
and afterwards the two letters might have been
erroneously taken to stand for say we. This ex
planation cannot of course pretend to accuracy of
detail, but is, I believe, substantially correct.

The reasons assigned taken together suffice to
raise a reasonable presumption in favour of the
proposed alteration in the received reading.

Let us now try the united effect of the suggested
emendations in the opening of the soliloquy :

To be or not to be : that is question ; —
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and ari'ows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against the seat of troubles
And by a poniard end them? To die — to sleep —
No more ; and by a sleep to straightway end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished."

Here a plain meaning is plainly arid fully and
strongly expressed. All obscurity and incoherence
have vanished.

In looking through this admirable tragedy, I
find two other passages both of which will serve
to illustrate the principles laid down, and perhaps
all the better that they agree in the circumstance
of being given differently in the original quartos
and in the folios. One of them also (to enliven

HAMLET, 45

the discussion) is treated with a third reading in
the Perkins folio. The first I quote as it appears
in the old quartos, premising that Horatio is
describing to Hamlet the ghost of his father as
seen by Bernardo and Marcellus :

"thrice he walk'd

By their oppress'd and fear-surprised eyes,
Within his truncheon's length ; whilst they, distilFd
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb, and speak not to him."

Hamlet, act i. sc. 2.

The folios all read bestilVd instead of distilVd.

The old corrector of the Perkins volume substi
tutes bechiWd.

We have then to decide on the merits of three
readings, and I do not feel much hesitation in
rejecting all of them, on grounds which I proceed
to assign.

Distilled is inadmissible, for the reason that jelly
is not made by distillation, and consequently there
is incongruity of thought in employing the term
in the place where it stands. The physical effect
attributed to fear is described as accomplished
through a process which never produces it.*

* That Shakespeare was acquainted with the various do
mestic operations of which distillation is one, and therefore
not likely to blunder in applying the term, may be gathered
from a passage in " Cymbeline:"

" Hast thou not learn'd me how
To make perfumes ? distil? preserve?" Act i. sc. 6.

4G THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The other two words are neither of them strictly
English, and are not to be found anywhere in
Shakespeare.

The first of them — bestill'd — is harsh and clumsy,
as well as unauthorised by good writers; and I
can find no meaning in it consistent with the con
text. Instead of being bestill'd the frightened
spectators are set a trembling.

The second phrase — bechiWd — is also unau
thorised although not unmeaning, and is never used
by our great dramatist. Even the word chill (in
cluding its paronymes) occurs only three times
in his pages, and then as an adjective or present
participle.

Let us, nevertheless, examine the grounds on
which the correction is maintained by the dis
coverer of the old folio.

After quoting the passage given above, Mr.
Collier proceeds in the following strain of confident
assertion :

"All the folios, 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685,
have bestiWd for distill' d; and it is against both
these absurd misrepresentations of Shakespeare's
language that the old corrector of the folio 1632
protests. He gives the lines thus, as I am confi
dent they must have stood in Shakespeare's manu
script :

" Whilst they, bechill'd
Almost to jelly with the act of fear
Stand dumb, and speak not to him."

HAMLET. 47

"Surely" (continues Mr. Collier) "no reading
can be more natural and proper ; jelly is always be-
chiWd or it is not jelly : Bernardo and Marcellus
were * bechilVd almost to jelly ' by their apprehen

sion."*

Now I might possibly have concurred with
Mr. Collier in his argument had Bernardo and
Marcellus been in a liquid state previous to the
apparition of the ghost, but as I am obliged to
regard them both as being at that time men of
undoubted solidity, I must take the liberty of
expressing my dissent from his confident conclu
sion. Solids cannot obviously be chilled into
gelatine : they can be reduced to such a consistence
only by the opposite process of first loosening the
coherence of their particles by heat. It is the
exclusive privilege of liquids (and liquids only of
a certain description) to be cooled down into that
tremulous substance. Hence the true reading seems

to stare us in the face :

Whilst they, dissolved
Almost to jelly with the act of fear
Stand dumb, and speak not to him.

The intention evidently was to describe, not the
cold, but the trepidation, the tremulousness, pro
duced by fright. If this reading required support
or elucidation by analogous language we should
not have far to search for it. It may be found in

* Preface to " Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton,"
Ixxviii.

48 THE TEXT OF HHAKKSPEAUE.

an immediately preceding passage of the same

scene :

" O! that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew."*

I scarcely need add that the substitution of
distiird for dissolved was an error of easy occur
rence in itself, and quite as easy as substituting it
for bechiWd.

It may deserve mentioning that when the chilling
effects of any passion are chiefly in view, it is the
blood which is usually described by Shakespeare
as the seat of the refrigeration.

Thus in the "Taming of the Shrew" (sc. 2,
Ind.) we find :

" For so your doctors hold it very meet,
Seeing too much sadness hath congeal'd your blood."

And in " Hamlet" (act i. sc. 5) :

" I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood "

Again in " Romeo and Juliet" (act iv. sc. 3), we
have—

"T have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins
That almost freezes up the heat of life."

* Further examples may be found :

"Look up; behold;
That you in pity may dissolve to dew."

Richard II. act v. sc. 1 .
And in Lear:

" I am almost ready to dissolve
Hearing of this." Act v. sc. 3.

HAMLET. 49

This last extract suggests, that if it were needful
(which it plainly is not) to find a word ending in
iWd as a substitute for distilled or bestilVd, a better
one might be found in thrilled, or, to coin one after
the same fashion, bethrilVd, than in bechilVd; for
it is observable that Shakespeare in several other
places describes the operation of passion, especially
of fear, by that verb.

Thus in " King John," act v. sc. 2, where the
Bastard is boasting to the French that the English
king had made them

" to thrill and shake

Even at the crowing of your nation's cock*,
Thinking his voice an armed Englishman."

And in " Henry IV." Part I. act ii. sc. 4 :

" Art thou not horribly afraid, doth not thy blood thrill at
it?"

"With the support of these passages, a plausible
reading might be made out ; although it would be
exposed to some of the objections brought against
its competitors :

While they, both thrilUd
Almost to jelly by the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him.

Or, if the prefix be should be preferred, we
might read, " while they bethriWd" which, if not
good, would be no worse English than " while they

* The substitution of crowing for cryiny, and cock for crow,
in this line, is a capital correction of the Perkins folio.

E

50 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

beckilPd." It will be generally thought, however,
if I mistake not, that dissolved is the genuine
reading.

The other passage in the same tragedy also, as
I have before stated, calls upon us to arbitrate
between two conflicting readings which appear in
the old copies. It is a line in which the word
tenable has been adopted from the old quarto,
instead of treble, which is the reading of the folio.
On the grounds that tenable does not carry out the
manifest intention of the poet, and not only departs
from consistency of thought but is unsupported
as an expression by any antecedent or subsequent
passage of his dramatic writings, I shall endeavour
to show that it ought to be rejected and the rival
phrase reinstated in the text.

The passage occurs in Hamlet's injunction to
Horatio and his comrades, after they had divulged
to him the awful intelligence that they had seen
the ghost of his father, and he had announced to
them his intention to join them in the watch :

" I will watch to-night.
Perchance 'twill walk again."

Horatio having replied, " I warrant you it will,"
the prince addresses his friendly informants as
follows : —

" If it assume my noble father's person,
I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape,
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all,
If you have hitherto vonceaVd this sight,

HAMLET. 51

Let it be treble in your silence stilt ;
And whatsoever else shall hap to-night,
Give it an understanding but no tongue."

Act i. sc. 2.

This is the text of the folio 1623. The old
quarto of 1603 has tenible instead of treble, and
that of 1604 has the same with a different spelling,
tenable :

Let it be tenable in your silence still.

Whatever uncertainty may hang over the text,
the intention of the passage which I have put in
italics cannot be doubted. Hamlet obviously meant
simply to say, " If you have all hitherto kept the
matter secret, be all of you silent about it still; "
and the question to be decided is, which of the
readings fulfils the requisite conditions better than
the other.

Although tenable has been generally adopted by
editors and annotators, and amongst the rest by
the corrector of the Perkins folio, I cannot help
regarding it as thoroughly objectionable, and as
having nothing in its favour but priority of appear
ance in the earliest editions of the tragedy. My
objections to it I will proceed to explain.

First, the phrase tenable in silence is scarcely
English, from the mere fact that it is never used ;
and its never being used is evidently the conse
quence of the further fact, that no ordinary com
bination of circumstances requires it. It would

£ 2

52 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

need some ingenuity to devise a case in which it
could be employed with propriety.

Secondly, whether English or not, it does not
here express the meaning intended. The injunction
which Hamlet designs to convey is that the matter1
he held in silence, not holdable in silence, the latter
being a common condition of all intelligence, not
dependent on any mandate, and which no one in
his senses would think of enjoining. The absurdity
of such an injunction would be shown by varying
the expression. Suppose Hamlet, instead of saying,
"Let all of you hold it in silence," had said, "Let
all of you be capable of holding it in silence," we
should at once see the inanity of the speech.

Thirdly, the word tenable is nowhere to be
found in Shakespeare's dramatic writings, although
intenible occurs once; and singularly enough it is
employed in an active sense, — incapable of holding,
not incapable of being held* — a use of passive
adjectives not uncommon in Shakespeare, and not
confined to him.

But, further, the word is exceptionable in this
particular passage, not only for the reasons assigned,
but also on the ground, not hitherto remarked by
any critic, as far as I can learn, that by excluding
the right term it would destroy the point of the
line. A slight consideration of the position of the

* For this remark as to intenible I am indebted to Sidney
Walker's " Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare,"
vol. i. p. 186.

HAMLET. 53

speaker and of his auditors will suffice to prove
the truth of the last assertion, and lead to the con
clusion that treble is the right word, and peculiarly
appropriate in its application. Hamlet is con
versing with three companions, Horatio, Bernardo,
and Marcellus; and, after hearing their joint
account of the ghost which was seen by all three
of them, he lays upon all three a solemn injunc
tion:

" I pray you all

If you have hitherto conceal'd this sight

Let it be treble in your silence still."

i. e. let all three of you continue to preserve silence
respecting it.

But undoubtedly the word treble so placed,
although charged with a peculiarly appropriate
meaning, sounds somewhat harsh; and hence I
am led to suspect that it has been transposed.
Shakespeare probably wrote, —

Let it be in your treble silence still.

Let it still continue in the silence of all three of
you.

It is easy to see that, when once treble had been
converted into tenable, a transposition would be
required; and on the restoration of the genuine
text a re-adjustment necessarily follows.*

* And yet tenable would be more unobjectionable before
silence than before in, for reasons I have not room to state.

• a

54 THE TEXT OF SIIAKESPEAEE.

The following strikes me as a singularly ana
logous expression. Cymbeline (in the play of that
name) is pouring forth a torrent of questions to
Imogen, as well as to his two newly recovered
sons, and their putative father : —

" Where ? how liv'd you ?

And when came you to serve our Roman captive?
How parted with your brothers? how first met them?
Why fled you from the court? and whither? These
And your three motives to the battle, with
I know not how much more, should be demanded."

Act v. sc. 5.

That is to say, the motives of you three, not your
motives three in number.

The passage in the same tragedy which I have
next to endeavour to rectify, will evince, like some
of the others, how necessary it is to study the
course of thought of which it is meant to express a
part. It will also exemplify the singular mistakes
to which a text printed under the circumstances
already described is liable, and elucidate the mar
vellous ingenuity which, when once such a mistake
has been made, is brought to maintain that it is
the genuine reading.

The lines in question occur in act v. sc. 2, where
the prince is recounting how he frustrated the
design of the king against his life.

" Hamlet. Wilt thou know

The effect of what I wrote ?
Horatio. Ay, good my lord.

HAMLET. 55

Hamlet. An earnest conjuration from the king, —
As England was his faithful tributary ;
As love between them like the palm might flourish ;
As peace should still her wheaten garland wear ;
And stand a comma 'tween their amities ;
And many such like as's of great charge, —
That on the view and know of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving time allow'd."

The phrase, a comma, in the fifth line of the last
speech, I should have thought self-evidently corrupt
had it not been defended.

It is admitted by all, as far as I know, to be
an unprecedented expression. In the only other
passage in which the word comma is used by Shake
speare, it signifies part of a sentence, a clause, as
period is employed to denote a whole sentence. In
the line now under consideration it can designate
literally or figuratively nothing of the kind, nor
yet denote a grammatical stop; and to my ap
prehension it has no meaning whatever. That
Peace wearing a garland should stand as a punctu
ation-mark between persons or abstractions of any
kind, is surely as pure nonsense as ever flowed
from penman or printer.

The emendation which I have to suggest is,

As peace should still her wheaten garland wear,
And hold her olive 'tween their amities.

The poet had before given us the palm and the

• 4

56 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

wheaten garland ; and in the same strain of figura
tive expression, it is natural that he should com
plete the flourish by presenting us with the olive,
the universal symbol of peace. Thus the proposed
emendation corresponds in thought and tone with
the context. I scarcely need to quote more than
a single passage in support of the mere phrase
ology of my suggestion. Take the following from
"Henry IV." Part II. act iv. sc. 1 :—

" There is not now a rebel's sword unsheath'd ;
But peace puts forth her olive everywhere."

Act i. sc. 5.

Or, better still, a passage in "Twelfth Night,"
act i. sc. 5, where Viola says :

" I bring no overture of war, no taxation of homage : I hold
the olive in my hand : my words are as full of peace as
matter."

But now comes the task of accounting for the
transformation of holds her olive into stands a
comma. How could one be possibly changed into
the other?

By a very simple blunder. It is clearly (in my
apprehension) a case of the incorporation of a mar
ginal direction into the text. The compositor had
before him the genuine line, and put it accurately
into type, except that he omitted to place the mark
of elision (') before tween, and the reviser of the
proof-sheet, in order to have the defect supplied,

HAMLET. 57

directed in the margin that it should be inserted
before the truncated preposition, thus :

A comma. And hold her olive tween their amities.

A

The compositor, mistaking the marginal direction,
instead of putting the mark of elision, inserted a
comma in words before tween, under the mis
conception that those two words were to be sub
stituted for her olive, which might have been
accidentally blotted or crossed with the pen.

The line would then assume the form, —

And hold a comma 'tween their amities.

But hold a comma would be so strikingly absurd
that he or the reviser of the proof-sheet would be
forced to adopt some other verb : be might possibly
do ; but then be could hardly have been changed
into hold, and he must find a verb that at least ends
in d. Under these difficulties stand presents itself,
is accepted, and the received text emerges into
day,

And stand a comma 'tween their amities.

In this hypothetical account of the rise and
progress of the blunder, I do not of course pretend
to accuracy in detail. The error might have been
committed, not in the compositor's room but in the
copyist's office, and in several different ways easy
to be imagined ; but that the whimsical substitution
of the alien phrase was substantially brought about
in the way described, — that it was the incorporation

58 THE TEXT OF SHAKESrEAEE.

of a marginal note into the text, I have little doubt,
or rather none.

In the 4to edition of "Hamlet," A.D. 1604, the first
extant in which the passage appears (for it does
not occur in the edition of 1603), there is no elision-
mark before tween, which is just what my theory
requires; for, supposing the error to have been
originally made in the first-mentioned edition, it is
obvious that the words a comma would be intro
duced into the text instead of the elision-mark, and
consequently that mark ought not to be found there.
But no reason for its absence existing after the
blunder had once gained a footing, we find the
elision duly noted by its usual symbol in the folio
of 1623.

Should the reader, adopting my theory of the
mistake, turn to the various remarks of the com
mentators on the disputed expression, he cannot
fail to be greatly amused. Dr. Johnson justifies
and explains the received text with so much in
genuity that we regret the waste of intellectual
breath while we smile at the bubble which it was
expended in blowing. Warburton suggests a corn-
mere^ Hanmer a cement, Jackson a column, and
some one else commercing.

Mr. Singer, who enumerates these several fail
ures, adds (after another writer), " I would rather it
should be ' stand an elephant ' than la comma1" : and
then he tries his own skill with the success (if I
may use an antithesis suggested by this colossal

HAMLET. 59

object of preference) of the mountain in labour.
The ridiculus mus in this case is co-mere as the equi
valent of common boundary, or joint land-mark :

And stand a co-mere 'tween their amities,—

an emendation which is disposed of by two con
siderations : first, the word is a compound manu
factured for the occasion, and not to be discovered
in Shakespeare or elsewhere ; secondly, it is difficult
to conceive in what sense "peace " could be said to
stand as a land-mark at all, especially with a
garland on her head ; while we may be quite sure
that in such a simple passage as this, containing
designedly the mere commonplaces of rhetoric, the
meaning would not have been left to be hammered
out with difficulty, or even to raise a doubt. The
genuine reading of this line must correspond in
obviousness and lucidity with the rest of the
"conjuration."

GO THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

MACBETH.

THE tragedy of " Macbeth " is disfigured by im
portant corruptions, some of them occurring in the
finest parts of the dialogue. The first which I
purpose to lay before the reader contains a phrase
often quoted : I rnay say, indeed, habitually quoted
when it is wished to express the particular notion
conveyed by it. If, then, there is anything wrong
about it, the call upon the critic to do his best to
set it right is more urgent than usual.

Macbeth himself is soliloquising in reference to
the contemplated murder of Duncan.

" I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself
And falls on th' other — — "

Here enters Lady Macbeth, and, leaving his sen
tence unfinished, he addresses her :

" How now ? What news ? "

The commentators agree, for the most part, that
had he finished the sentence thus abruptly broken

MACBETH. 6 1

off, he must have added the word side. Making
the whole line —

And falls on th' other side. How now ? what news ?

Strictly construed, the passage would signify, " I
have no spur except ambition ; " which, with what
follows, would be making ambition first into a spur
and then into a horseman : but such a construction,
I think, was not for a moment in the intention of
the author. He meant, in all probability, the lines
to be interpreted as follows : " I have no spur to
prick the sides of my intent, but I have vaulting
ambition alone which is apt to leap too far and
come to the ground."

The term spur evidently refers to external in
citement, while ambition indicates the aspirations
of his own spirit. The expression of all this is
undoubtedly defective, and shows what I have
before pointed out — the occasional imperfect
development of his meaning from his propensity to
condensation.

On a careful examination of the structure of the
passage so interpreted, it will be seen that it con
sists, not, as at first sight might be supposed, of a
prolonged and not altogether congruous metaphor,
but, as remarked by Malone, of two metaphors, in
both of which the imagery is drawn from the inci
dents of horsemanship. Macbeth at the outset
describes his intent as a horse, and complains that
he has no spur to prick its sides. This figurative

G2 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

reference to a horse and spurs naturally shapes the
subsequent sentiment, leading him on, not indeed
to push the metaphor farther, but to express him
self in a second allied metaphor, in which ambition
replaces Macbeth as the horseman, and is repre
sented as vaulting, or attempting to vault, upon
his steed, but from too much eagerness leaping
over it and falling on the other side.

Such being the obvious import of the passage, I
shall endeavour to show that the phrase, overleap
ing itself, does not carry out the author's intention ;
that it is an expression inconsistent both with the
sense of the context and with common usage ; and
I am consequently warranted in concluding it not
to have proceeded from the pen of Shakespeare.

To substantiate this conclusion, it may be neces
sary to enter into some grammatical details.

There are two ways in which the word over is
used in composition with other words as well as by
itself, namely, as an adverb, and as a preposition.

When it is used as an adverb it signifies too
much or in excess, as in the phrases "he over
exerts himself," " he is overestimated," " the horse
is overloaded," " the man's temper is over hasty."

When it is used as a preposition in compound
words, it has the same meaning as when it stands
by itself ; or, to express the fact differently, it has
the same meaning whether it is prefixed to a verb
so as to form one word, or is placed as a separate
preposition after the verb.

MACBETH. 63

Thus, to overarch is the same as to arch over, to
overflow the same as to flow over, to overleap the
same as to leap over. There are, doubtless, some
idiomatic irregularities, as I shall hereafter notice,
which it might be difficult to bring under this ex
planation ; but, whatever they may be, one point is
clear, that, in order to justify their being retained
or adopted in a disputed text, they must be shown
to have been in common use when the text was
written. These grammatical observations being
premised, let us proceed to apply them to the pas
sage before us.

The prefix over in the word overleap in Macbeth's
soliloquy must of necessity be taken either as an
adverb or as a preposition; the consideration of
idioms apart, there is no tertium quid.

If taken as an adverb, the construction of the
sentence would be "vaulting ambition leaps itself
too much," which is not sense. Leaps itself is not
English.

If, on the other hand, over be taken as a preposition
the construction would be "vaulting ambition leaps
over itself;" which is equally destitute of meaning.
It would be talking of an impossible achievement,
such as Lord Castlereagh, some forty or fifty years
ago, is said to have slanderously imputed to a
brother politician, when he charged the delinquent
with turning his back upon himself.

For these reasons I conclude that Shakespeare
never wrote, and never could write, overleaps itself.

64 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

It may be added that in other places he makes
use of the same word overleap in the sense of leap
over, and never in the sense of leaping too much,
which is in truth a sense found nowhere, as far as
I have been able to investigate, in the English
language.

Not going beyond the same tragedy, we find the
phrase in question occurring in one of the previous
communings of Macbeth with his own dark spirit.
After the King Duncan had announced that thence
forth his eldest son should bear the title of the
Prince of Cumberland, Macbeth exclaims :

" The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step
On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap;
For in my way it lies."

This instance is in itself conclusive ; for I am not
aware that there is any example in the English
language of the same verb having the prefix over
joined to it sometimes as an adverb, and sometimes
as a preposition.

I have alluded to idiomatic irregularities; and
there is certainly one word compounded of over and
a verb, the employment of which by Shakespeare
in the reflected form may appear on a first glance
to countenance the common reading which I am
endeavouring to set aside. In "Julius Cajsar," An
thony having designedly mentioned the bequest in
Caesar's will in favour of the citizens, artfully checks
himself, saying,

MACBETH. 65

" I have o'ershot myself to tell you of it : "

and this employment of the phrase may be found
in Sir Thomas More, Hooker, Spenser, and others.

The expression will not bear the test to which I
have subjected overleap any better than the latter
word. It cannot be construed, " I have shot myself
too much," nor yet, "I have shot over myself." It
must of necessity be taken to mean what it fails to
express, "I have shot beyond the mark" — let out
more than I intended. It is obviously a very
irregular idiom, arising doubtless from the inad
vertent transference of a form of speech from legi
timate cases to other apparently analogous cases
where it violates all rule.

Such irregularities may prevail for a while, and
be even adopted by good writers; but they are
dropped as language becomes more accurate and
precise. Instead of saying a man overshoots him
self, we now say that he overshoots the mark.

The occurrence of an irregular idiom in Shake
speare is sufficiently justified if it is sanctioned by
custom, and forms no ground for disturbing the
received text; but the use of one irregular idio
matic expression is no authority for employing a
grammatically analogous phrase in a similar abnor
mal manner, without any precedent ; and when
such a one occurs it justly excites suspicion.
Now, not finding any example in the English
language of overleap being used to signify any-

66 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

thing else, even idiomatically, than simply leap
over, I am obliged to conclude, that Shakespeare
did not employ it otherwise in the instance before
us. Besides, even supposing precedents could be
found similar to the one for " overshoot myself "
in " Julius Caesar," the subsequent expression," and
falls on the other side," clearly shows that any
idiom of the kind must be expelled from Macbeth's
soliloquy, and that the text must contain the men
tion of something on the other side of which there
is a possibility of coming to the ground.

The considerations which have been here adduced,
appear to me adequate to prove the spuriousness
of the text on the two grounds of inconsistent
thought and of unprecedented language. And
now for the second part of the business. The
difficulty of finding a suitable substitute for a
condemned phrase, often so formidable, seems in
the present instance to vanish, and the path to
become easy.

The emendation I have to suggest is a very
obvious one, and curiously enough it turns on the
same monosyllable which bore so important a part
in my proposed alteration of Hamlet's soliloquy.
It is merely the change of two letters — the sub
stitution of seat for self, which entirely removes
the solecism in the received text.

Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps its seat,
And falls on th' other side.

This suggestion is supported, too, by the Ian-

MACBETH. 67

guage of other passages. In " Henry IV." occurs a
strikingly favourable line : —

" I saw young Harry, with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feather'd Mercury;
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus
And witch the world with noble horsemanship."

Part I. act iv. sc. 1.

In " Othello " lago says :

" I do suspect the lusty Moor
Has leap'd into my seat." Act ii. sc. 1.

In " Measure for Measure " we have, —

" Or whether that the body public be
A horse whereon the governor doth ride,
Who, newly in the seat, that it may know
He can command, lets it straight feel the spur."

Act i. sc. 3.

Some former annotator, I forget at the mo
ment who, seeing the inadmissibility of overleaping
itself, proposed the substitution of selle, the French
for saddle; and it is so plausible an emendation
that I at one time accepted it as the genuine read
ing.

Several passages may be adduced to show that,
in Elizabeth's time, selle * was in occasional use for

* I adopt this spelling for the sake of distinctness although
the final e was often omitted.

I- 2

6S THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

saddle, as the following from Spenser's " Faerie
Queen : " —

" And turning to that place in which whileare
He left his lofty steed with golden selle
And goodly gorgeous barbes, him found not there."

It is easy, moreover, to conceive how the word
self might have been substituted for selle. Sel is
even at this day currently used in the North for
self, and we know that it was also the case in
Shakespeare's days. It is found, for example, in
Ben Jonson :

" They turn round like grindlestones,
Which they dig out fro' the dells,
For their bairns' bread, wife, and sells."

The substitution, therefore, of sell for selle, and
then of self for sell, would have formed a natural
sequence of lapses from the original text.

But an insurmountable objection to selle for
saddle, is that Shakespeare never uses the word;
whereas seat, while it fulfils every other required
condition, is nearly as often applied by him to that
part of the furniture of a horse as saddle itself.
Little doubt will therefore probably remain as to
the reading which ought to be preferred.

I have hitherto been proceeding on the assump
tion adopted by the generality of the critics that
Macbeth' s soliloquy on this occasion was inter
rupted and left incomplete owing to the entrance
of his wife. But the passage has been viewed in a

MACBETH. G9

different light by Steevens, who, after mentioning
that Sir J. Hanmer proposed to read " and falls on
the other side" goes on to say, " yet they who
plead for the admission of this supplement, should
consider that the plural of it [sides] but two lines
before, had occurred. I, also, who once attempted
to justify the omission of this word, ought to have
understood that Shakespeare could never mean to
describe the agitation of Macbeth's mind by the
assistance of a halting verse." He completes the
line by reading " And falls upon the other," for
his strange explanation of which I must refer to
his own note.*

Although Steevens's emendation is altogether
inadmissible, both his objections are worth con
sideration. The first is, I think, particularly
weighty; and, in turning it over in my mind, a
reading occurred to me which would not only
obviate both, but rather strengthen than weaken
the sense, while the perversion of it into the re
ceived words by scribe or compositor presents no
difficulty. Instead of "th' other" I propose to
read itt earth. Let us place the two readings in
juxtaposition : —

" I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps its seat
And falls on th' other side. How now? what news?"

* Boswell's " Malone," vol. xi. p. 80.
F 3

70 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

For the last line I propose to substitute —

And falls on tK earth. How now ? what news ?

in considering which emendation it should be borne
in mind that side is not in the received text, so
that we have to account only for the lapse of th*
earth into thj other. An obvious objection to the
proposal is that the line has only eight syllables,
and such lines are pronounced by Mr. Walker not
to be Shakespearian. In deference to this verdict
we might have recourse to Mr. Steevens's expedient
of filling up the metre by changing on to upon,
were it not that it would perhaps rather weaken
the force of the expression —

And falls upon the earth. How now ? what news ?

On the whole, nevertheless, I think the last emen
dation is the freest from objection. So amended,
I cannot help regarding the line as far more sig
nificant, and therefore more Shakespearian, than the
one which it would displace. Falling to the earth is
more expressive for the purpose in view than falling
on the other side of the seat coveted by ambition,
to which little definite meaning can be attached.

It may- seem at first sight that I have be
stowed unnecessary labour upon the preceding
passage of " Macbeth," when merely to suggest the
emendations would have sufficed; and I should
have thought so myself, had I not found an in
veterate fondness (such as often seems to settle

MACBETH. 71

in preference on anomalous expressions,) existing
for the phrase overleaps itself , and had I not also
met with the following note upon it by Mr. Charles
Knight : " It has been proposed," he says, " to read
instead of l itself ' ' its sell ' — its saddle. How
ever clever may be the notion, we can scarcely
admit the necessity for the change of the original.
A person (and vaulting ambition is personified)
might be said to overleap himself, as well as to
overbalance himself, or overcharge himself, or over
labour himself, or overreach himself. The word
* over ' in all these cases is used in the sense of
too much."

My preceding explanations are sufficient to show
that Mr. Knight is singularly wrong. Of the five
words cited by him composed of over and a verb,
there are only two in which over is an adverb,
meaning too much; in the rest it is a preposition
signifying the same as it does when detached and
placed after the verb. To overleap is to leap over,
to overbalance is to balance over, to overreach is to
reach over. The only strong ground on which
overleaps itself can be maintained is that it is an
idiom ; and this can be substantiated in no other
way than adducing precedents — for which my
own earnest search has been vain.

I now come to the celebrated dialogue between
Macbeth and his wife, in which she taunts him
with his irresolution, and stimulates him to the
meditated assassination of Duncan.

F 4

72 THE TEXT OF SHAKE SPE ABE.

It occurs immediately after the soliloquy we have
been engaged upon. Macbeth says to his wife,
who has just entered :

" We will proceed no further in this business :
He hath honour'd me of late ; and I have bought
Golden opinions from all sorts of people,
Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,
Not cast aside so soon.

Lady Macbeth. Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you dress d yourself? Hath it slept since ?
And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely? From this time,
Such I account thy love. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,

As thou art in desire?

*****

Macbeth. Prythee, peace :
I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more, is none.

Lady Macbeth. What beast was't then,
That made you break this enterprise to me ?
When you durst do it, then you were a man."

Act i. sc. 7.

In the vigorous lines here quoted there are, it
appears to me, four spurious words materially
weakening or perverting the sense. I have put
them in italics.

The first of these, dress* d, is so palpably inappro
priate that I wonder it has passed without challenge.
Surely it is on the confines, at least, of absurdity
to speak of dressing yourself in what may become
intoxicated. A simple alteration, a substitution of
two letters, restores, I apprehend, the genuine

MACBETH. 73

text. Read bless 'd for dress' d, and all is plain and
apposite : —

Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you bless' d yourself ?

The expression is quite Shakespearian.

The second word, did, seems also inappropriate
where it is placed, since with the context it repre
sents hope as looking pale at what had gone by.
This would be a new function for hope — a retro
spect, instead of a contemplation of the future. To
avoid so marked an incongruity, instead of did I
propose reading eyed : —

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale
At what it eyed so freely? —

at what it had before contemplated without re
straint or scruple. It is scarcely necessary to pro
duce proof of the use of this verb by our author.
In "Troilus and Cressida," act i. sc. 3, we have —

" Modest as morning when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phrebus."

Eyed would probably be first corrupted to dyed;
which would be easily transmuted into did.

The third term put in italics, love, is a whimsical
mistake, although easily made. It is clear that
Lady Macbeth is not talking at all about conjugal
affection, but about her husband's courage. Love
is here quite out of place — a complete interrup
tion of the train of thought. Moreover, there is no

74 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

propriety in her telling Macbeth that hencefor
ward she will account his love green and pale.

The emendation I have to suggest is almost sure
to startle the reader, but I entertain no doubt that
on reflection he will become reconciled to it : —

From this time
Such I account thy liver.

From love to liver is no doubt a formidable de
scent ; but let us look at the matter soberly.

The liver in Shakespeare's days was generally
considered to be the organ of courage (not entirely
to the exclusion of the heart), or rather, perhaps,
of cowardice; and a white or pale liver was the
synonyme of a craven spirit. Falstaff, who ought
to know, tells us that the blood on a certain oc
casion,

" left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusil
lanimity and cowardice."

Henry IV. Part II. act iv. sc. 3.

Pale-livered, white-livered, lily-livered, are familiar
epithets with our author. For Lady Macbeth to
say to her husband, " Henceforth I shall account
thy liver green and pale," was much the same
thing as it would be for a modern lady to tell her
lord that she should in future look upon him as
having a faint heart, or (if he had a mane or a
mustache), as being,

" In face a lion, but in heart a deer."

MACBETH. 75

We have changed the organ to which we refer
poltroonery — that is all.

The last word italicised, beast, has given rise to
much controversy. That it is corrupt will be
manifest, I think, on a rigorous examination.

The phrase, What beast was it then ? makes a false
transition from what Macbeth had just said. He
had declared that it did not become a man to do
the contemplated deed, that any one who should
do it, would be degraded from the rank of a human
being.

Lady Macbeth might with propriety have taken
this up in one of two ways ; she might have re
plied, " What beast were you then (seeing by your
own declaration that you were not a man) when you
broke the enterprise to me ? " Or she might have
said, " Since you say such a deed would sink a man
below humanity, what degradation of your nature
was it that made you divulge your project to your
wife ?" In the first mode of reply the term beast
would be preserved, but the construction of the
sentence would be changed : in the second, that
term would be replaced by another signifying
degradation, but the structure of the sentence
would remain unaltered. The received reading is
a hybrid between the two. It does not ask Mac
beth whether he was then a beast or what vileness
it was that actuated him, but what beast prompted
his disclosure — which is incoherent and beside
the mark, since there is no question of external

76 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

influence, but one of internal conflict and mu
tation.

Inasmuch as the first method here described
would alter the structure of the sentence, and
thereby involve the necessity of several verbal sub
stitutions not easily accounted for, we are driven
to the adoption of the second method, which is
simpler and requires only such a synonyme for
degradation as would be readily transmuted into
beast. Unless I am greatly mistaken, we may find
what we want in the word baseness, —

What baseness was't then,
That made you break the enterprise to me ?

By this reading, it will be observed, the metre
does not suffer, only was't becomes a long or
accented syllable, instead of being a short one as it
is when the line terminates in the phrase, " What
beast was't then ?" — in other words, the last foot
becomes an amphibrach instead of an iambus.

I will add, for form's sake, that in point of phrase
ology baseness is quite Shakespearian, and it might
obviously slide into beast without much difficulty.

The Perkins folio, with what it is scarcely harsh
to call characteristic infelicity in cases of impor
tance, proposes to read boast instead of beast.
11 What boast was't then?"

But this emendation has no congruity at all with
the context. There is no question of boasting,
which is alien both to the character of Macbeth

MACBETH. 77

and to the occasion. The question is of daring
and manhood. Besides, to speak of a boast making
a man divulge an enterprise, carries with it so
little meaning that it could not be the language
of a clear-headed writer. To make sense would
require the phrase to be enlarged into ua boast
ful spirit."

After this discussion, affecting a dialogue the
power of which ought not to be diminished by any
error which it is possible to remove, I -will bring
the passage again before the reader with the sug
gested emendations :

Lady Macbeth. Was the hope drunk,
Wherein you bless'd yourself ? Hath it slept since ?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it eyed so freely ? From this time,
Such I account thy liver. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire ?

Macbeth. Prythee, peace :
I dare do all that may become a man ;
Who dares do more, is none.

Lady Macbeth. What baseness was't then,
That made you break this enterprise to me ?
When you durst do it, then you were a man.

These slight and simple corrections of blunders
easily accounted for, seem to myself to remove four
material blemishes that greatly impair the original
clearness, precision, force, and beauty of the
masterly dialogue in which they have been hitherto
permitted to stand.

78 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAEE.

I will next take a remarkable passage in the
same tragedy, which, powerful as it is even in its
present state, has been evidently much corrupted,
and requires in consequence all the patience and
deliberation that can be brought to bear upon it.

It is the celebrated apostrophe of Macbeth to
Banco's ghost when the awful apparition had seated
itself in his chair :

" What man dare, I dare ;
Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear,
The arm'd rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger ;
Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble : or, be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword ;
If trembling I inhabit then, protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow !
Unreal mockery, hence ! "

Act iii. sc. 4.

The words italicised strike me as spurious upon
the grounds which I proceed to assign.

The participle trembling, in the seventh line, is
presumably wrong, because the verb tremble has been
employed just before, namely, in the fifth line ; and
the repetition of so notable a word at so short an
interval amidst an abundant choice of equivalent
phrases, would argue a poverty in the author's
vocabulary not belonging to it, and weaken the
whole speech.

The next expression / inhabit (as well as the
variety inhibit thee) is absolutely devoid of signifi
cance where it is placed. Some critics have tried

MACBETH. 79

hard to extract a meaning from it, neglecting the
consideration that a clear-headed writer like Shake
speare, with a command of the choicest and most
forcible terms in the language, could not, in a
passionate apostrophe calling for the utmost di
rectness and vigour of diction, have employed
phraseology requiring the strained efforts of com
mentators to give it a feeble and doubtful interpre
tation. We may conclude with great confidence
that he never put those words into that line.

The phrase the baby of a girl, equivalent (although
this has been disputed) to a girl's baby, I hold also
to be spurious for analogous reasons. (1.) Why
must it be the baby of a girl, i.e. of a young
woman? What has the age of the mother to do
here? (2.) The doubtfulness of the meaning when
perfect obviousness of signification is required and
is easy to find, proclaims it to be spurious. (3.)
Construe it as we will, it cannot express what was
evidently in Macbeth' s mind. He is asseverating
that if he were challenged to mortal fight by a
living Banco, and shrank from it with terror as he
now quailed before the unearthly spectre in his
chair, he would consent to be branded as the most
pusillanimous of human beings. Now, with no
propriety can either courage or cowardice be attri
buted to a baby. We speak of its helplessness,
imbecility, and want of intelligence, and stigmatise
an adult as a baby in understanding; but we do
not refer to the little nursling in connexion with

80 THE TEXT OF SHAKE SPEAEE.

qualities not yet developed : we do not call a man
a baby in courage. What the text requires is the
designation of a class of human beings remarkable
for fear, — a type of timidity ; and general opinion
would doubtless point to young women themselves,
not to their infants.

Shakespeare with his own hand has clearly drawn
the same distinction in the following passage :

" The Greeks are strong, and skilful to their strength,
Fierce to their skill, and to their fierceness valiant ;
But I am weaker than a woman's tear,
Tamer than sleep, fonder than ignorance,
Less valiant than the virgin in the night,
And shitless as unpractised infancy."

Troilus and Cressida, act i. sc. 1.

These observations, proceeding on the suppo
sition that the phrase in question means literally a
girl's baby, apply with tenfold force to that curious
interpretation of it, which represents it as designa
ting a doll.* Surely a doll was never adduced by
any writer of reputation as a type of cowardice of
heart or tremulousness of nerves. The difficulty

* Sidney Walker's comment upon it is remarkable : " The
baby of a girl ; i.e. a little girVs doll ; call me a mere puppet, a
thing of wood. For baby in the sense of doll, see Jonson's
' Bartholomew Fair,' passim" After citing other authorities
he adds, "Babe was used only in the sense of infant: baby
might mean either infant or doll" " Critical Examination of
the Text of Shakespeare," vol. iii. p. 256. Mr. Walker seems
not to have had any perception of the incongruity to which
this interpretation necessarily leads. If I tremble protest me
to be a doll, a thing of wood !

MACBETH. 81

of replacing the phrases objected to is doubtless
great, but that has no tendency to remove the
objections to their genuineness. The first of them,
if trembling I inhabit, might be superseded by if
blenching I evade it, which comes tolerably near in
sound, and makes complete and appropriate sense
without any falling off in vigour. Dr. Johnson
is said (I do not recollect at the moment where*) to
have suggested evade it, but without any alteration
of the antecedent participle. The word blenching is
used by Shakespeare on other analogous occasions,
and harmonises in signification with the phrase
which follows. It does not certainly much resemble
trembling; but, as I have before explained, where a
word is too closely repeated, and is thence inferred
to be spurious, the repetition is frequently the re
sult of other causes than resemblance, and conse
quently the attempt to rectify the mistake does not
or needs not proceed on that ground.

Happily for the credit of my emendation, Shake
speare employs the two suggested words elsewhere
in a similar connexion.

It is in " Troilus and Cressida," act ii. sc. 2 :

" How may I avoid,

Although my will distaste what it elected,
The wife I chose ? There can be no evasion
To blench from this"

* The suggestion, I find, is quoted as Dr. Johnson's in
Beckett's " Shakespeare's Himself again," p. 1 14. I do not
observe it in Bos well's Variorum edition.

G

82 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

As to " blench " alone, we have in " Hamlet,"

act ii. sc. 2, —

" I'll tent him to the quick ; if he but blench,
I know my course."

And in the " Winter's Tale," act i. sc. 2,—

"Would I do this?
Could man BO blench ? "

Dr. Johnson defines blench to shrink, to start
back ; and adds, " not used." The word has evi
dently a close family connexion with blanch. It is
now replaced by flinch.

The greatest difficulty, however, remains to be
surmounted in finding out the genuine text which
has been displaced by the phrase the baby of a girl.
And although several readings have occurred to
me, they are not supported by reasons strong
enough to induce me to venture on the proposal of
any of them.

Making the suggested alterations in the seventh
line, and leaving the baby undisturbed in the arms
of its girlish mother, I will bring the latter part
of the passage again before the reader :

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves
Shall never tremble ; or be alive again,
And dare me to the desert with thy sword,
If blenching I evade it, then protest me
The baby of a girl. Hence, horrible shadow !
Unreal mockery, hence 1

MACBETH. 83

The Perkins folio brings forward an emendation
of the fourth line here quoted which even Mr.
Collier pronounces to be too prosaic :

" If trembling I exhibit, then protest me."

It is indeed so prosaic, so flat, so spiritless,
where the utmost force of expression is demanded,
and would, we may be sure, have been wielded by
the author, that it almost suffices of itself to shake
all confidence in the old corrector's judgment, and
certainly does not tend to confirm the authority
claimed for him.

Another celebrated passage in the same tragedy
presents us with a further instance of that erroneous
repetition of a word in disagreeable proximity to
which I have occasion so often to advert. In such
cases, since we are usually deprived by the origin of
the error of all clue to the right reading afforded
by resemblance, we have no resource (I venture
to repeat) but studying the relations of things and
of ideas, in connexion with the author's habitual
modes of thought and expression. Macbeth is here
addressing the physician of his wife :

" Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased ;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain ;
And with some sweet, oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the stuff 'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart ?"

That one of the words italicised in the fifth line

G 2

84 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

is wrong, would be sufficiently manifest from the
exceeding distastefulness of such a repetition (how
it mars the beauty of an incomparable passage !),
were it not proved by the same reasons which
show the first of them to be spurious.

The meaning of the word stuff'd is incongruous
with that of the context.

" Cleanse a stuiFd bosom " does not express a
natural sequence of thought. We speak of empty
ing or relieving of its contents a stuffed receptacle,
not of cleansing it qud stuffed.

If we look at the lines immediately preceding
the one under present criticism, we shall be struck
with the force, terseness, and precision of their
language : we shall find every word not only full
of vigour, but expressive of some thought perfectly
congruous with the meaning of the context. The
natural connexion of things and of the ideas which
represent them is preserved. Thus a rooted sorrow
is to be plucked from the memory, not effaced:
written troubles are to be razed out, not eradicated ;
or to put the statement in a reverse order, what is
to be plucked is spoken of as rooted ; what is to be
razed out as written, and we may be sure that what
was to be cleansed must have been originally spoken
of by Shakespeare as dirty or polluted.

On these grounds I come to the conclusion that
the word " stuff 'd " is spurious ; and the task re
mains to find out the term which it has displaced.
. It is a quest in which we shall probably fail if
we are bent on discovering some word, either in

MACBETH, 85

sound or in form, similar to the spurious one ; but
if we look at the natural course of thought and the
usage of our great dramatist, the path is plain,
and we shall probably succeed. In fact, the thing
has already been done to our hands, but unaccount
ably passed over.

There are, I think, several considerations to show
that the right reading is what Steevens long ago
unsuccessfully suggested :

" Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart."

The first and foremost reason, is that the al
teration, besides doing away with the sin against
good taste, entirely removes the objection of incon
gruity and want of precision which lies against
the old designation. I do not think that the
English language affords a happier epithet for the
place than the one introduced ; and while the
term is certainly not lower in tone than the con
text, it may be literally said to abound in the
productions on which we are engaged.

In one place it is used in a way which corre
sponds so closely with the proposed emendation as
to amount to little less than proof in itself. The
lines were quoted by Steevens in that view :

"Give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patieutly receive my medicine."

As You Like It, act ii. sc. 7.
o 3

86 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

It is further deserving of remark that these are
the only two places in which the poet employs the
precise word cleanse, and that there are only two
passages in which he employs other forms of the
same verb. I may as well quote the most apposite

of them:

" I have trusted thee, Camillo,
With all the nearest things to my heart, as well
My chamber councils : wherein priest-like thou
Hast cleaned my bosom : I from thee departed.
Thy penitent reform'd."

Pointer's Tale, act i. sc. 2.

Here, again, it is the pollution of guilt from
which the bosom is purged. The other passage
("Richard II." act v. sc. 5) is certainly less ap
posite, if not at first sight somewhat adverse ; but,
since it speaks of cleansing the eyes from tears,
and so speaks (it may be presumed) from their
dimming the sight, it is not really discordant with
the tenor of my remarks.

I have next to inquire how the proposed emen
dation conforms to the last of the conditions
before laid down, namely, that it should have
some affinity in point of sound or literal form
to the rejected language (a matter which I have
already noticed), or that it should be rendered
probable by some other special circumstance.
To affinity of the required kind my, or rather
Steevens's, proposed amendment cannot of course
pretend. There is no similarity in sound or form
between stuff'd and foul (except perhaps the

MACBETH. 87

phonic predominance of the letter /) ; but the two
special circumstances in the emendation already
adverted to weigh greatly and even decisively in
its favour, namely, the exactness with which it fits
into the vacated place, and the striking conformity
of the amended language to that of other plays
from the same pen.

My conclusion will, I think, be corroborated by
an examination, for which the reader will now be
prepared, of the emendation furnished in the Per
kins folio. The old corrector allows stuff 'd to re
main unaltered, and changes stuff into grief :

" Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous grief"

The substitution is unfortunate. Grief is certainly
one of the last words that I should be inclined to
adopt, even if I thought stuff'd should be retained
and stuff abandoned.

Cleanse the bosom of grief (often a perfectly pure
passion) is an unusual without being a happy
phrase, and, coming after the precise and vigorous
language of the preceding lines, must be felt as
weak and tame. The chief objection, however, is
that the topic of riddance from grief has already
been disposed of in the graphic description of pluck
ing from the memory a rooted sorrow ; so that, to
introduce it again here, would have all the feeble
ness of a bare and aimless repetition.

The word stuff, on the other hand, is vigorous
and expressive in connexion with cleanse, com-

G 4

88 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

prehending in the generality of its signification
all that presses so heavily on the doctor's patient,
but more particularly shadowing out the remorse
to which Macbeth had not before adverted. Those
evils about the cure of which he had previously
questioned the physician, are mental conditions
that might be experienced by an innocent sufferer,
namely, disease of the mind, rooted sorrow, troubles
of the brain; but, in the fifth line, it is manifest
that by the phrase cleansing the bosom he darkly
hints at what he dares not openly express, the
foulness of guilt, the festering load upon the con
science; and this allusion, so necessary to the
climax of his interrogatories, would be entirely
destroyed by the old corrector's feeble substi
tution.

I need scarcely mention that the substantive
stuff is one of those familiar and favourite terms of
Shakespeare's, which he is in the habit of setting
to perform multifarious duties : thus we find such
expressions as "the stuff of conscience" (quite
analogous to the phrase at present under discus
sion); the heart "made of penetrable stuff;" "my
household stuff;" "what stuff is this?" referring
to what had been said (something in the way of
Mr. BurchelTs " fudge " *) ; and numerous other
applications of the term.

Another instance of incongruity in an earlier

* In the "Vicar of Wakefield."

MACBETH. 89

part of the same tragedy will not require so long
a comment. It occurs in act i. sc. 3. The new-
made Thane of Cawdor, absorbed in the dazzling
prospects opened to his view by his recent eleva
tion, ends his reverie by exclaiming (according to
the received text), —

" Come what come may,
Time and the hour runs through the roughest day;"

which has been defended by numerous examples of
similar tautology in various writers, for which I
must refer the reader who is desirous of seeing
them to Boswell's edition of " Malone," vol. xi.
p. 50.

The passage, however, is not merely tautological,
but marked by real incongruity of thought. Time
running through a day may be allowable; but the
hour running through a day, if it has any meaning,
must be regarded as harsh ; and both abreast taking
part in the race is altogether incoherent. Time
and one of its divisions are represented as running
through another of its divisions. What Macbeth
intended to express was, " Come what may come,
time unceasingly goes on through the roughest
day, so as to bring it to an end."

We may be sure that Shakespeare would be at
no loss to clothe in words so common a sentiment,
without affording room for doubt or criticism.

The emendation I have to suggest will probably
at the first glance meet with little countenance.

90 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

I propose to read :

Come what come may,
Time's sandy hour runs through the roughest day.

It will be allowed, I think, that this alteration
fully remedies the tautology and the incongruity of
ideas in the received text, and it will not be
difficult to show that it is Shakespearian both in
cast of thought and in style of expression.

In " Henry VI." Part I. act iv. sc. 3, we have -

" For ere the glass that now begins to run
Finish the process of his sandy hour"

And in the " Merchant of Venice," act i. sc. 1, —

" I should not see the sandy hour-glass run
But I should think of shallows and of flats."

The emendation has also in its favour the
facility with which the received reading would
have been substituted for it. Mark the similarity

between

Time's sandy hour

and

Time and y* * hour.

Who can wonder at one being transmuted into
the other?

* The form ye for the is very old, and has lasted to our own
times. Without being able at the moment to assign its date,
I may mention as sufficing here that I find it as early as the
16th century in a passage cited by Richardson in his " Diction
ary," and I have personally known gentlemen in the present
century who habitually employed it.

MACBETH. 91

Being engaged on the text of " Macbeth," I may
appropriately mention that I was struck, in turn
ing over the volume of manuscript corrections, with
another instance of misplaced commendation, by
Mr. Collier, of an attempted amendment in the
same tragedy.* He writes : " A very acceptable
alteration is made on the same evidence in Lady
Macbeth's speech invoking night, just before the
entrance of her husband: it is in a word which
has occasioned much speculation.

" Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, ' Hold, hold !'"

After referring to former commentators, Mr.
Collier proceeds : " What solution of the difficulty
does the old corrector offer ? As it seems to
us, the substitution he recommends cannot be
doubted : —

" Nor Heaven peep through the blankness of the dark
To cry, 'Hold, hold!'"

" The scribe misheard the termination of blank-
ness, and absurdly wrote ' blanket.' '

The line here in question is, I agree with the
critic, evidently corrupt. Heaven peeping through
a blanket conveys so incongruous an image as to
be almost if not altogether ludicrous ; and nothing

* " Notes and Emendations," p. 419, 2nd edition.

92 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

but long familiarity could reconcile the reader to
it, or save the hearer of it from a smile.

But the substitution of blankness, although not
tending to provoke a smile, scarcely effects a
serious amendment. Not to insist on the etymo
logical difficulty that blankness is derived from a
root meaning whiteness, rendering it, on a first
glance at least, an incompatible term to couple with
" the dark," on account of the conflicting associa
tions likely to be awakened, — it is quite at va
riance with usage to speak of the blankness of a
dark night, and equally so to speak of looking
through blankness, although we hear of persons
looking blank. No one, I suspect, ever dreamed
before of putting these words together.

Shakespeare, besides, never uses " blank " in its
abstract form. " Blankness " is not to be found in
his pages.

It is curious that the old corrector, having dis
carded the long-worn blanket, and substituted for
the last syllable of that noun the abstract termina
tion ness, making the word blankness, did not
proceed a step farther, and change the n of the
first syllable into c, in order to meet more fully
the requirements of the case. Blackness is in
every way preferable to blankness ; and we must
bear in mind that the dark here is a synonyme for
the night:

Nor Heaven peep through the blackness of the dark
To cry, "Hold, hold!"

MACBETH. 93

This reading is supported by a passage in
" Antony and Cleopatra," act i. sc. 4 :

" His faults in him seem as the spots of heaven,
More fiery by night's blackness."

And it may also derive an indirect corroboration
from a remarkable expression in the epistle of St.
Jude, verse xiii. : " Wandering stars to whom is
reserved the blackness of darkness for ever:" in
Greek, aa-rsps^ TrAaj/TJra*, olg b %o$>o$ TOO crxo'rou£ slg

94 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

EOMEO AND JULIET.

AT the commencement of the fifth act of "Romeo
and Juliet," Romeo is introduced communing with
himself in an unusual joyous mood: —

" If I may trust the flattering eye of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand :
My bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne ;
And all this day, an unaccustom'd spirit
Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts."

Act v. sc. 1.

The word in italics is in the earliest edition of the
play : the folio reads, " the flattering truth of sleep."
We may, by straining, make something like sense
out of each of these readings; but they are not
happy. Malone supports the first by a quotation
from " Richard III.," where the Duke of Clarence is
addressing one of the assassins sent to murder him :

"My friend, I spy some pity in thy looks ;
O ! if thine eye be not a flatterer,
Come thou on my side, and entreat for me."

Act. i. sc. 4.

But mark what would be required to make the

ROMEO AND JULIET. 95

quotation applicable. We should have to personify
sleep, and make Romeo talk of looking into his
(Sleep's) eyes and espying there some flattering
intelligence, which would be a violent figure ;
whereas the intention of any one who wrote the
line, or adopted the word, must have been to re
present Romeo as saying that he himself saw when
asleep (or with the eye of sleep) what was grateful
to his hopes. It was certainly meant that Romeo
looked with the eye of sleep, not into it. Malone's
quotation is consequently beside the mark, and
lends the reading favoured by him no support.

The second reading scarcely requires discussing,
as it is extremely like a contradiction in terms, and
at all events has no special appropriateness.

The Perkins folio abetted by Mr. Collier gives
us a third :

" If I may trust the flattering death of sleep,"

an emendation in which there is certainly no life
requiring a critical stab to end it.

Mr. Singer, in language exhibiting the triumph
of irritability over grammar, says of it : "A more
unhappy and absurd conjecture than this of 'the
flattering death of sleep ' is scarcely to be paralleled
even by some of the other doings of the corrector's.
I read: —

" ' If I may trust the flattering soother sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.'

The similarity of sound," he proceeds, "in re-

96 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

citation, of the words truth of and soother, may
have led to the error; and the poetical beauty of
the passage is much heightened by the personifica
tion of sleep."*

I should have been half inclined to acquiesce in
Mr. Singer's amendment but for two reasons: (1.)
It is deficient in special significance. Romeo in
the first line does not intend to speak of sleep in
its soothing, but in its inciting and prophetic or
premonitory office, and thus to connect the clause
with what follows, while the word proposed by
Mr. Singer has no particular bearing on the subse
quent matter. (2.) His amendment sets out from
the supposition that the right word must resemble
truth, whereas, since there are two rival readings in
the old copies, we may start with equal chance of
success from the other, namely, eye. Let us try,
then, if we cannot find a term expressive of omens
or prognostications, and at the same time readily
pervertible into the concise noun which has super
seded it.

Such a word, which must of course be a mono
syllable, we have in signs : —

If I may trust the flattering signs of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand.

I need not enter into any lengthened citations to
show that the term here introduced is employed in
the sense of omen or prognostication by Shake-

* " The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated," p. 234.

ROMEO AND JULIET. 97

speare, as it is by other English as well as by Latin
authors. The following lines will suffice for the
purpose :

" The bay trees in our country are all wither'd,
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change ;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war :
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings."

Richard II. act ii. sc. 4.

It is worthy of remark also that sign is the only
monosyllable in the English language (unless I am
greatly deceived) which denotes portent or prog
nostication ; so that if we desire to endue the line
in question with this particular meaning, we are
compelled to adopt this particular word.

The transition from signs to eye is certainly not
very easy to trace. Probably the first step of error
was transforming signs into sigh, which, taken by
any subsequent reviser or corrector in connexion
with the context, would be so manifestly wrong as
to warrant the substitution of another word ; and
eye being nearest in sound of any monosyllables
capable of making sense, it might be caught at,
and deemed, on consideration, to be sufficiently
appropriate.

98 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

CORIOLANUS.

IN the tragedy of " Coriolanus " a very simple
correction of an admitted fault effects a great
improvement :

" O, good, but most unwise patricians ! why,
You grave but reckless senators, have you thus
Given Hydra here to choose an officer,
That with his peremptory ' shall,' being but
The horn and noise of the monsters, wants not spirit
To say, he'll turn your current in a ditch,
And make your channel his ? If he have pow'r,
Then vail your ignorance ; if none, awake
Your dangerous lenity."

Act iii. sc. 1.

It is unnecessary to discuss the emendations of
the Perkins folio, since they have been so effectually
set aside by Mr. Singer, who, however, seems to
favour the substitution of revoke for awake in the
last line but one. A simpler alteration, it appears
to me, will rectify the obvious error with better

effect upon the sense :

If he have power,

Then vail your ignorance ; if none, awake from
Your dangerous lenity.

CORIOLANUS. ' 99

Lenity is a word characterising the tenour of
the policy pursued by the patricians, or their
habitual benevolent supineness, from which Corio-
lanus might very properly call upon them to awake ;
but, if he had intended to exhort them to any re
vocation of what they had done, it would have been
more appropriate to speak of acts of lenity. The
sense seems clearly to be, " if this officer has not
really the power he assumes, then rouse yourselves
from the dangerous remissness which has allowed
him to usurp it ; " and this sense is brought out by
the simple insertion of from, without prejudice to
the metre.

An attention to the natural course of thought
will assist us, if I mistake not, to determine the
genuine text of another corrupt line in the same
tragedy, which has been the subject of much con
troversy; and it is deserving, perhaps, of passing
remark, that the correct reading (as I think it)
turns in this case, as it does in a passage of " Julius
Caesar " to be hereafter cited, on a child's toy.

Aufidius, the leader of the Volscians, is speaking
in reference to the Roman general :

" So our virtues

Lie in the interpretation of the times ;
And pow'r, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair,
To extol what it has done."

Act iv. sc. 7.

The last line but one of this extract appears

H 2

100 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAKE.

to me undiluted nonsense. All the misdirected
efforts of the critics have not been able to extract
from it a consistent meaning, while the very diffi
culty of doing it proves the text to be corrupt. If
we consider attentively what the speaker intended
to say, we shall find it to this effect, that power,
when its acts are intrinsically praiseworthy, does
not meet with the slightest token of applause from
the men of the time for what it has done ; and to
illustrate his sentiment he gives us, or designs to
give us, an instance of something which notoriously
makes a very faint demonstration in that way.
As neither a tomb nor a chair can be considered as
designating an instrument or medium for the con
temporary laudation of meritorious acts of power,
our task is to find two words which will denote
what those words ought to denote with clearness but
do not, and at the same time so far resemble the
actual reading as to render probable the substitu
tion of the latter in the place of the former.

The only suggestion with this view, which I
have happened to meet with, at all entitled to
serious discussion, is the following, which is partly
at least due to the Perkins folio :

" Hath not a tone so evident as a cheer?

There are several strong objections to a reading
which at the first glance appears so plausible.

1. A cheer cannot with any propriety be called
a tone. It may have a tone — e.g. it may be

CORIOLANUS. 101

ironical, as the House of Commons knows ; but it
is not a tone itself.

2. A cheer, which must be here construed as a
general term meaning the same as cheers, is a loud
demonstration of applause, whereas the strain of
the passage requires a feeble one to constitute the
requisite antithesis between what is merited and
what is the least that could be given.

3. Tone is a word never used by Shakespeare,
and cheer is never used by him in the modern sense
of shout of approbation.

The reading which I have to propose is as fol
lows : —

And pow'r, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a trump so evident as a child's
To extol what it has done.

With our modern associations the word trump,
which is here the same in signification as trumpet,
may not at first be consonant with our feelings : the
immediate idea presenting itself may be that of the
trump of the card-table, with its figurative and
slang applications, rather than the trump of fame.*
In Shakespeare's pages the term is used solely as
the equivalent of trumpet.

My proposed reading, after the first shock has
been overcome, will probably be allowed to con
vert the line into good sense with that antithetical

* " When fame shall in our islands sound her trump."

Troilus and Cressida, act iii. sc. 3.

u 3

102 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

point and that spice of sarcasm, which are requisite
for the force of the passage. The degeneration of
trump into tomb and child 's into chair in the hands
of copyists and compositors is easily conceivable;
while it exemplifies that insensibility to the mean
ing of the document before them into which both
those classes of imitative manipulators have a per
petual tendency to fall.

There is a verbal error requiring correction in
the lines immediately following those last quoted,
which, since it has provoked much discussion, I
must not pass over without a brief notice. The
received reading is universally admitted to be
wrong :

" One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail,
Rights by rights fouler, strengths by strengths do fail."

The Perkins folio turns fouler into suffer, which,
while tame and rather distant in resemblance, im
proves the sense. It cannot, however, stand a
moment against a forcible reading insisted upon
by Malone, which requires a much slighter change
and is more appropriate in significance :

" Rights by rights founder, strengths by strengths do fail."

Why this emendation has not been universally
adopted it is difficult to say.

103

JULIUS CJESAE.

SOME of the examples of corruption in the text
and its correction already adduced can scarcely
have failed to suggest to the reader what a com
plete transformation of the sense of a whole pas
sage may be effected by the alteration of a word or
of a few letters. At the touch of the emendator
the old scene melts away like a dissolving view,
and is replaced by another which bears little or no
relation to its predecessor. Of such a transition
perhaps the strongest instance I have yet brought
forward is in Hamlet's soliloquy, where the sense of
two lines is wholly revolutionised by a few slight
verbal changes. As a further illustration of the
same point, I may present a simple case where the
miscopying or misprinting extends only to a single
letter. It occurs in " Julius Caesar," in the first
scene of the third act.

Caesar himself is speaking to Metellus Cimber :

" I must prevent thee, Cimber ;
These couchings and these lowly courtesies
ii 4

104 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Might fire the blood of ordinary men,
And turn preordinance and first* decree

Into the lane of children."

Act iii. sc. 1.

Here a reader of lively imagination might possi
bly picture to himself a lane formed of boys and
girls, into which " preordinance and first decree,"
like two pompous officers of the law, are turned,
doubtless to march through it. If our supposed
vivacious friend should so exercise his fancy, the
emendation about to be proposed, simple as it is,
would speedily " dissolve the view."

I must premise that the corruption in the last
line of the quotation is not (I believe) disputed
by any one. There is manifestly no sense in the
phrase as it stands. Dr. Johnson conjectured that
lane had been substituted for law, and that we
ought to read,

" Into the law of children."

An emendation which appears to have been gene
rally acquiesced in.

Nevertheless it is without force or point, or pecu
liar appropriateness, — I may say indeed it is even
awkward ; and on these grounds conclusively not
Shakespearian.

If we attend to the sequence of thought natural

* Mr. Craik, in his able volume entitled " The English of
Shakespeare," proposes to read fix'd instead ofjirst; and I
think the emendation so happy that I have adopted it.

JULIUS C.&SAR. 105

to the occasion, we shall come to a result altogether
different from that so generally adopted.

The speaker evidently intends to say that " pre-
ordinance and fix'd decree," or in other words
deliberate decision, might, in the common run of
men, be changed by such servility as was now
exhibited into something notoriously mutable or
proverbially unstable — which the law of children
(if such a thing can be said to exist, or to be ever
thought of) is not.

If he had said, " these servile obeisances might
turn the fixed determination of ordinary men into
a weathercock, the train of thought would have
been felt to take its natural course. Let us
try, then, if this cannot be expressed in language
conforming to the conditions within which every
corrector must move.

The name weathercock, although right in import,
is plainly too long a word for the metre, and could
not by any conceivable possibility have been con
verted into lane, whether by copyist or compositor.
It was not, therefore, the original reading; but it
has a synonyme which would have served the pur
pose of the speaker equally well, and which sug
gests itself for a trial. Let us suppose the poet to
have written —

Into the vane of children,

and we obtain a reading which chimes in with the
context, while it is obviously capable, in the hands

106 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

of a writer, or compositor, of lapsing with the ut
most ease into lane*

For the rest, the proposed word is used by Shake
speare in other places with an air of complete fami
liarity, and as often as its synonyme weathercock.

This, it may be said, is all very well, as far as
vane is concerned ; but who ever heard of the vane
of children ? Most people, I apprehend, have seen
the thing, although they may not recollect it by
that appellation. There is a well-known toy hawked
about the streets of most English towns, pre
cisely answering to the designation. In the days
of my own childhood it was, I remember, dignified
by the title of windmill, although it was no mill at
all, but only an humble imitation of the sails of that
Quixotic giant, easily set in motion by carrying it
in the hand against the air. It was doubtless this
plaything that Shakespeare had in his mind when
he wanted a type of inconstancy implying some
what of contempt ; and the name of vane which he
here bestows upon it is more appropriate than any
other, inasmuch as its sole function is to turn in
the wind.

With Mr. Craik's emendation, already noticed, as
well as my own, the passage will read thus :

I must prevent thee, Cimber;
These couchings and these lowly courtesies

* The substitution of I for v may have had a mere mechanical
origin, from the circumstance that, in the printer's lower case,
the compartment containing the former letter adjoins that
containing the latter one.

JULIUS (LESAR. 107

Might fire the blood of ordinary men,
And turn preordinance and^/fo't? decree
Into the vane of children.

There arises certainly a slight incongruity from this
emendation, which I am bound in fairness to notice
and to admit. If it is adopted, Caesar is made to
speak of an ordinance being transformed into a vane,
whereas it would properly be the man, the power,
the will, whence the ordinance had proceeded, that
would be identified with that symbol of instability.
Thus in "A Winter's Tale," act ii. sc.. 3, Leontes
says " I am a feather for each wind that blows."
In this, and other instances, the very condensation
of meaning which is so remarkable a characteristic
of Shakespeare's composition, leads him into in
accuracies which are brought into view when the
language is literally construed.

Of this there is a striking instance in the well-
known lines, —

" The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies."

Measure for Measure, act iii. sc. 1.

Where the literal construction is that when the
poor beetle is trodden upon he finds a pang as
great as he experiences when a giant dies ; and to
avoid this incongruity it would be necessary to
expand the last line into —

As a giant finds when he diea,

108 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

to the utter ruin both of the rhythm and of the
force of the language. Precisely in the same way
arises the discrepancy in the passage immediately
before us : the lines —

And turn preordinance and fix'd decree
Into the vane of children.

would require for the removal of the defect to be
expanded into —

And turn the ruler who has issued his preordinance

and fix'd decree
Into the vane of children,

with the same bad effect on the metre and the
strength of expression.

There is another not unplausible mode of cor
recting the received reading, which suggested itself
amongst several others while I was thinking about
it, and which is far preferable to " the law of
children," viz., —

Into the play of children.

That is to say, the lowly courtesies in question
might, in some men, turn their deliberate resolu
tions into child's play. Play might have been as
easily at least as law perverted into lane. Taking,
however, into view, the superior expressiveness
of vane with the slighter alteration required for
the substitution of the received reading, I feel
little doubt that it was the original word. Besides,

JULIUS CAESAR. 109

child's play is usually employed to designate what
is trifling or easy of accomplishment, not what is
variable.

I will just add, relative to the lines quoted from
"Measure for Measure" on the feelings of the lower
animals, that the defect in construction might be
corrected by a simple expedient, well known, I dare
avouch, to adepts in composition, and occasionally
resorted to by them, namely, throwing the general
names which are there singular into the plural
number, at some sacrifice, perhaps, of vividness in
the effect :

And the poor beetles that we tread upon
In corporal sufferance find a pang as great
As giants when they die.

But on such a ground no one would be justified in
tampering with the text, the legitimate aim, as all
admit, being to restore, not to improve, the genuine
reading.

110 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

KING LEAR

A CORRUPT passage occurs in this tragedy, which
has occasioned a good deal of controversy and a
number of interpretations in its support as well as
of rival suggestions to correct it, none of them
marked by any peculiar appropriateness, and con
sequently leaving the field open to fresh com
petitors. The lines in question are to be found in
" King Lear," act iv. sc. 6. Edgar, after reading
Goneril's letter to her paramour, urging upon him
the assassination of her husband, exclaims, accord
ing to the received text :

" O, undistinguislitd space of woman's will !
A plot upon her virtuous husband's life ;
And the exchange my brother!"

Malone and Steevens have both unsuccessfully
tried to explain the expression in italics. The
latter affirms that it plainly signifies undistinguish-
ing licentiousness: the former, reasonably enough,
demurs to this and adopts Warburton's interpreta
tion, who says it means that the variations of

KING LEAR. Ill

woman's will are so sudden that there is no dis
tinguishable space between them. I cannot con
scientiously saddle Shakespeare with either of these
lame significations. The old annotator of the Per
kins folio makes the matter worse; he seriously
proposes, and Mr. Collier as seriously abets,

" O unextinguish 'd blaze of woman's will ! "

which, but for Mr. Collier's grave verdict, I should
have thought could have been received with no
thing but that manifestation of merriment to which
this long epithet in its potential form is sometimes
applied.

We have only, it appears to me, to reflect on
what a man in Edgar's position would be likely to
say in order to arrive at the right reading. He
would naturally fall into the old sarcasm against
the unaccountable caprices of the sex: and he
would of course touch either on the mutability of
women (as Scott did in his celebrated lines*) or

* " O woman, in our hours of ease
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,
And variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made ;
When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!" Marmion.

Perhaps some readers will prefer the Latin original of these
lines, cited wholly or in part by a sapient critic to prove Scott
a plagiarist :

" Femina, quae molles si quando carpimus horas,
Tristis es, et dubia concilianda vice ;

112 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

on the difficulty of following their motives and
movements. The latter was the topic of Edgar's
exclamation, into which he appears to have been
goaded by the sudden view of the untraceable
labyrinth of the female mind, opened by Goneril's
letter. A small change in the received text would
bring it into accordance with such a sentiment :

O undistinguish'd maze of woman's will !

Maze is a word several times employed by our
author. The instance which follows I quote be
cause the passage contains not only that term but
the epithet (in a different form) which my emen
dation would connect with it.

It is in "Midsummer Night's Dream," act ii,
sc. 2 ; Titania loquitur :

" And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable."

Although Shakespeare was more likely when he
wrote the lines in "Lear" to have in view the maze
at Hampton Court than the quaint figures on a vil
lage green, and the undistinguishableness referred
to is of a different kind in each of the two cases, yet
the speech of Titania may be admitted to show at

Quae levior zephyro, tremulaque incertior umbra,
Quam facit alternis populus alba comis —

Cum dolor atque supercilio gravis imminet angor,
Fungeris angelico sola ministerio."

Arundines Cami, p. 55.

KING LEAR.

least an association in the poet's mind of a maze
with the quality of not being readily traceable — a
consideration which adds some probability, however
small, to my proposed emendation.

I scarcely need to point out that it would not be
difficult to pervert maze into space, in the common
course of copying or printing. In discussing this
passage I have not thought it needful to take
into consideration either the reading of the old
quartos, namely, wit for will, nor the suggestions
of Mr. Singer in his " Vindication of the Text of
Shakespeare." The former has been generally aban
doned, and the latter have never been received.

114 THE TEXT OP SHAKESPEAEE.

CYMBELINE,

AMONGST other passages in the interesting play
of " Cymbeline," the following has given rise to
much comment :

"What! are men mad? Hath nature giv'n them eyes
To see this vaulted arch and the rich crop
Of sea and land, — which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above, and the twinn'd stones,
Upon the numbered beach." Act i. sc. 7.

Crop has been thought corrupt, and Warburton
proposed cope ; but this, as Steevens has remarked,
would be mere tautology, since cope and vaulted
arch would here mean the same thing. It would
show strange poverty in a singularly rich mind.

Although it is possible to affix a meaning to crop^
yet it would be a strained and inapposite one, and
consequently not to be attributed to our author.
I would therefore propose to substitute prop: we
should thus have in natural sequence or connexion
the arch and the support to it.

CYMBELINE. 115

There is nothing awkward or unusual in this
language, as is shown by a line of Pope's :

"Till the bright mountains prop the incumbent sky,"

although I can find nothing in Shakespeare to
support it, and accordingly my emendation must
rest on its intrinsic propriety, coupled with the
facility of substituting crop for prop.

There has also been some discussion about
the second word italicised, number 'd. It appears
to me so abundantly obvious that numbered must
be wrong (inasmuch as it asserts what is no
toriously false) while the negative epithet un-
number'd has a peculiar appropriateness, that I
will not weary the reader by discussing it fur
ther, but refer him to the Variorum edition of
Boswell, vol. xiii. p. 46, with the remark that
Dr. Johnson strangely professes his inability to
understand twinrid, as applied to stones. I am
not able to find any other single word which
would be so forcible and apposite. The speaker is
dwelling on the power of men's discrimination
between things apparently alike, such as the stars
among themselves and the pebbles on the sea
shore, many of which are as little distinguishable
from each other as human twins are.

The corrected passage will stand as follows :

What! are men mad? Hath nature giv'en them eyes
To see this vaulted arch and the rich prop
i 2

1 1 0 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Of sea and land; which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above and the twinn'd stones
Upon tli unnumbered beach.

Some of the commentators seem to have con
sidered the distinguishing to be between the stars
and the pebbles ; whereas it is clearly in my appre
hension between the several stars and the several
pebbles amongst themselves.

In the same play, a rather remarkable compound
term is used in the tender and beautiful apostrophe
of Arviragus, to the supposed exanimate Fidele :

" the ruddock would

With charitable bill (O bill, sore-shaming
Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!) bring thee all this ;
Yea and furr'd moss besides, when flow'rs are none, —
To winter-ground thy corse." Act iv. sc. 2.

To winter-ground a corse is to me clearly desti
tute of meaning, notwithstanding some attempted
explanations. The sense intended was evidently
" to defend or guard the corse from winter."

The Perkins folio proposes winter- guard, which
is good; but the suggestion I have to offer is, I
think, still better, namely, winter-fend, which would
be as easily convertible into the received text, and
seems to me more forcible and beautiful, and more
akin in melody to the preceding terms.

It has, too, an analogous compound in another
place to support it. In u The Tempest," Ariel says

CYMBELINE. 117

to Prospero, in reply to the question " How fares
the King and his followers ? " —

" Just as you left them, sir, all prisoners
In the lime-grove which weather-fends your cell."

Act v. sc. 1.

Coleridge seems to have been struck with the
beauty or the expressiveness of the latter term;
for he has adopted it in his celebrated character of
Pitt:

" The influencer of his country and his species
was a young man, the creature of another's prede
termination, sheltered and weather-fended from all
the elements of experience."

The compound verb which I now propose is
quite as forcible and beautiful as the one adopted
by Coleridge, and its appropriateness to the place
assigned to it cannot be surpassed :

Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flow'rs are none,
To winter-fend thy corse.

The interesting play before us contains another
misreading, which has been, as far as I can find,
unnoticed by former commentators. In the last
scene of the last act, lachimo describes the circum
stances which led to his base conduct to Posthumus
and Imogen. " Upon a time," he says, " the good
Posthumus" was

"sitting sadly

Hearing us praise our loves ot% Italy
For beauty that made barren the swell'd boast
i 3

118 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Of him that best could speak ; for feature laming
The shrine of Venus or straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature."

Here the phrase in italics wants congruity with
the rest of the clause. The poet was clearly
intending to contrast the attitude of Venus Avith
the attitude of Minerva, the posture of one statue
being well known throughout the civilized world
to be bending, that of the other to be upright.
The introduction of shrine, which has no possible
business where it is, upsets this intention at once,
and ruins both the contrast and the poetry. In
what sense, too, can a shrine be called a posture, and
spoken of as one of the postures, or having one of
the postures which excel natural attitudes ? The
alteration of three letters, and the addition of a
fourth, effect the restoration both of the proper
meaning and of the intended contrast :

for feature*, laming

The shrinking Venus or straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature.

My proposed emendation will lose nothing should
it recall those lines of Thompson which, according
to Mr. Hobhouse (since Lord Broughton), the view
of the Venus of Medicis instantly suggests. " The
comparison of the object with the description,"
he adds, " proves the correctness of the portrait."

* There are reasons for changing feature into figure, for
which see Appendix.

CYMBELINE. 119

The poet (it is almost needless to say) is speaking
of Musidora :

" With wild surprise
As if to marble struck, devoid of sense,
A stupid moment motionless she stood.
So stands the statue that enchants the world,
So bending tries to veil the matchless boast,
The mingled beauties of exulting Greece."

The Seasons. (Summer).

There is an epithet used in " Cymbeline" which,
although explained and justified by Dr. Johnson
and other critics, I cannot help thinking out of
place.

Cymbeline, after hearing the disclosures from
which he learns the existence of his two sons and
daughter, exclaims :

"O rare instinct!

When shall I hear all through? This farce abridgment
Hath to it circumstantial branches, which
Distinction should be rich in."

A fierce abridgment is not appropriate to the
occasion. Dr. Johnson explains it to signify vehe
ment, rapid: whereas the disclosures made by
Belarius, immediately before Cymbeline's exclama
tion, are deliberate, and accompanied by tears of
tenderness at the prospect of losing

" Two of the sweet'st companions in the world."
The quotations brought to support the employ-

i 4

120 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

merit of the epithet here, strike me as singularly
inappropriate. One is from " Timon of Athens:"

" 0 the fierce wretchedness that glory brings."
The other is from " Love's Labour Lost : "
"With all the fierce endeavour of your wit."

But surely the very proper expressions of fierce
wretchedness and fierce endeavour, cannot prove the
propriety of the expression fierce abridgment : they
can prove, at the most, that the epithet itself is
Shakespearian, not that it is suitably applied here.

What, in fact, is the drift of Cymbeline's speech ?
It is that the account he has heard of the won
derful events that have befallen his children is
too short ; it has, of necessity, " circumstantial
branches : " and he proceeds to mention a number
of details which he longs to know, but for Avhich
time and place will not serve.

In consonance with the whole tenour of the
context, I propose to read brief abridgment, and
I do not know that if we had to choose unshackled
we could find a better designation. But we are
not quite unshackled, since the word wanted must
be a monosyllable, be supported, if possible, by
similar usage, and be convertible without much
difficulty into the corrupt reading. It fortunately
happens that Shakespeare has employed the pro-

CYMBELINE. 121

posed epithet as a prefix to the same noun in " The
Rape of Lucrece:"

" This brief abridgment of my will I make :"*

which satisfies two of the conditions. With regard
to the third; brief e (as it would be originally
written) and fierce, might with ease be visually
mistaken for each other, although not auricularly.
Without resembling in sound, they are composed
of the same letters, with the exception of one con
sonant.

From all the preceding considerations, I venture
to conclude that the genuine reading is brief
abridgment.

* Boswell's " Malone," vol. xx. p. 174.

122 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

THE TEMPEST.

IN the beautiful play of " The Tempest " there are
several spurious readings, which materially dis
figure the passages in which they occur.

The first I have to notice is in act i. sc. 2.
Prospero says, according to the received text :

" there is no soul —
No not so much perdition as an hair —
Betid to any creature in the vessel."

The plain meaning of which, if literally con
strued, is "no soul has happened to any creature
in the vessel," an expression certainly not to be
vindicated from the imputation of nonsense.

The common way of averting the imputation is
to assume a sudden change in grammatical con
struction : but there is nothing to call for such a
change, no end answered by it. The speech con
tains plain information, and is not one of those
bursts of feeling, or starts of imagination, or mani
fest turns of policy, or other extraordinary utter
ances, which alone can justify an abrupt break.

THE TEMPEST. 123

The defect, however, admits of being easily reme
died.

Instead of soul read evil, and all is set right;
" There is no evil betid to any creature," coincides
with our author's language elsewhere. In " Richard
III." act i. sc. 2, I find the line:

" More direful Lap betide that hated wretch."

Evil would be written euill, admitting of an
easy perversion into soule, as it was then spelt.

Another misreading of a single monosyllable,
not unimportant however to the significance and
propriety of the language, is to be found in act ii.
sc. 2 of the same drama. Trinculo says :

" I will here shroud till the dregs of the storm be past."

Whoever heard of the dregs of a storm ? If it
meant anything at all, it would imply the mere
dribblings of the tempest when its force was fast
waning, the opposite of what Trinculo intended to
say. He evidently meant that he would take
shelter till the fury of the storm had subsided.

Instead of dregs, I would suggest rage, which it
would not be difficult to transmute into the actual
reading :

I will here shroud till the rage of the storm be past.

The Perkins folio alters dregs to drench, which
is descending from bad to worse. A drenching may

124 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

be got in a storm certainly enough, but to speak of
the drench of a storm passing, is not either English
or Shakespearian. Drench, too, as a noun, is not
used by our great dramatist in any other way
than to denote (according to Dr. Johnson's defini
tion) " physic for a brute."

A third disputed passage in the same play
appears to me to admit of a like simple rectifica
tion.

In act iii. sc. 1, Ferdinand, while employed in
carrying logs for his hard task-master, says of
Miranda, according to the usual reading :

" My sweet mistress

Weeps when she sees me work, and savs such baseness
Had ne'er like executor, \forget:
But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours,
Most busy-less when I do it."

Here "I forget" seems to have nothing to do;
and not only is the last line unmeaning, but busy-
less is an anomalous compound, not found in
Shakespeare or elsewhere.

No one, as far as I know, has attempted to sup
ply the idle phrase first mentioned with employ
ment; but several suggestions have been offered in
explanation or correction of busy-less. One anno-
tator proposes busy-least, another busiest, and the
Perkins folio busy-blest. None of these emenda
tions has, I believe, been pronounced satisfactory —
except perhaps by the proposers.

In venturing on an additional attempt, I am

THE TEMPEST. 125

bold enough to suggest four alterations, but they
are separately small. I would append all to I forget ;
substitute that for do in the next line ; put labours
in the same line, into the singular number; and
change busy -less, in the fifth line, into busily.

The tenour of the passage would then be, " I
forget all but these sweet thoughts that even
refresh my labour when I most busily do it ; or, in
other words, when I work the hardest."

So altered, the lines would stand, —

My sweet mistress

Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness
Had ne'er like executor. I forgot all
But these sweet thoughts that ev'n refresh my labour
Most busily when I do it.

The alterations here made, it will be observed,
bind together the parts of a passage before held
in rather loose coherence. Forget, which in the
received text is an idle loiterer, totally isolated
and destitute of occupation, is endowed with a
comprehensive function by having all assigned for
its subject. All in its turn imparts appropriate
significance to but, which the commentators, not
knowing how to dispose of it, would convert into
and or for. That imperilled conjunction is thus
saved from metamorphosis, while even connects
itself (greatly to the social invigoration of both
adverbs) with the subsequent when, " even when
I do it : " and all these revivified expressions unite
in expelling busiless and reinstating busily in its
proper place.

126 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAEE.

It is scarcely needful to prolong this explanation
by adverting to the facility with which the several
errors might have been committed, as a mere
glance is sufficient to settle that point. I will
remark only that the do, in the fourth line, was
probably caught by the compositor's eye from the
same monosyllable in the fifth.

A somewhat prolix controversy has arisen re
specting an expression used by Prospero in another
scene of u The Tempest." He is addressing Ferdi
nand, on the occasion of bestowing his daughter on
his young friend :

" If I have too austerely punish'd you,
Your compensation makes amends; for I
Have given you here a thread of my own life,
Or that for which I live."

As the third line looks very much like nonsense,
some of the commentators have zealously laboured
to endow it with a reasonable meaning, and support
it by quotations : while others of them maintain that
the correct reading is, "a third of my own life."

It would be tedious to enter into this con
troversy, and I must content myself with giving
the references below.* It would also be needless ;
for I think the true text may be determined by
considerations to which none of those critics have
adverted. If the reader will look attentively at

* Boswell's " Malone," vol. xv. p. 132; and "A Few Words
in reply to Mr. Dyce," by Joseph Hunter, p. 4.

THE TEMPEST. 127

the fourth line, he will perceive that the precise
import of the preceding expression is there pur
posely explained; or, what is the same thing, an
equivalent expression is furnished for it. Prospero
twice describes what he gives : first, as something
(say an unknown quantity #) "of his own life,"
and secondly, as "that for which he lives ;" and
we have therefore to find a phrase (#) for the third
line which will be synonymous with the one in
, the fourth. In this there is no difiiculty. That
for which a man lives, must be the end, aim, or
object of his life. Let us try the first of these
three nouns :

for I

•

Have given you here the end of my own life,
Or that for which I live.

The last line is apparently added by the poet or
the speaker, under the apprehension that the end
of life (a phrase sometimes applied in another
manner) might be ambiguous.

The way in which the blunder arose, or may
have arisen, becomes at once obvious by merely
placing the two readings in juxtaposition :

a thread
the end

After the end had been corrupted into thread, the
article a would be requisite to make sense, as well
as to fill up the metre, and it seems to have accord
ingly forced itself into the text.

128 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The emendation now proposed, it will be ad
mitted, raises the passage into precise good sense;
and perhaps after this discussion the reader will be
more sensible to the absence of that quality in both
the received readings. I will first advert to a third.
What rational interpretation can be put upon a
man's saying that in his daughter he gives the
third of his own life ? and when he follows it up
by declaring that by the third of his own life he
means that for which he lives, we are tempted to
ask, what and where are the other two thirds ? and
why are they not worth living for also ?

On turning to the other reading, we obtain
somewhat better sense* by construing "a thread of
his own life " to mean simply one of his offspring ;
but the language is not Shakespearian, and the only
quotation brought forward from an old author
that can be considered as lending it support, speaks
not of a thread of a man's life, but of a thread of
his body, which is not altogether the same thing.
Mark, too, the platitude and weakness in which this
reading would land us ; it would make Prospero
utter the tame and not very coherent speech, " I
have given you here a child of mine, or that for
which I live." Shakespeare doubtless employs oc
casionally the expression thread of life, but always
with the definite article, expressed or implied, and
always in the common metaphorical sense in which
it cannot form, and cannot be spoken of as forming,
a gift from one person to another.

THE TEMPEST. 129

JP urtner on in " The Tempest " there is another
wrong reading which appears to have escaped the
critics in the variorum edition of Boswell, but not
the annotator of the Perkins folio. Prospero
disclosing himself to the King of Naples, says :

" Behold, sir King,

The wronged Duke of Milan, Prospero."

*****

Alonso answers :

" Whe'r thou beest he, or no,
Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,
As late I have been, I not know."

The word trifle can have no proper business here.
It has only one meaning in Shakespeare or else
where, i.e. " a thing of no moment," and Alonso in
the first blush of recognition would hardly stigma
tise his old enemy to his face as of no importance.
What in truth does he design to say? Clearly,
" whether thou art in reality Prospero or only a
magical apparition of him I do not know."

Several words immediately present themselves,
all of them much more adapted to the situation
than the actual occupant ; but not any one of them
comes so near in sound as rival :

Or some enchanted rival to abuse me ;

i. e. the phantom of my old rival raised up by some
device of magic.

We must bear in mind that the King of Naples
was Prospero's "inveterate enemy" and had con-

K

130 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

federated with the treacherous Antonio to expel
the rightful duke from Milan. Alonso may there
fore with great propriety call Prospero his rival
or enemy. We have the two words together in
" Midsummer Night's Dream ;" Theseus, address
ing Demetrius and Lysander, says :

" I know you are two rival enemies."

Act iv. sc. 1.

That the king did not consider Prospero as a person
of no moment, but as a competitor whom he had
injured and whose injuries he was bound to redress,
is shown in an after part of his speech :

" Thy dukedom I resign ; and do entreat
Thou pardon me my wrongs."

The emendation, already alluded to, proposed in
the Perkins folio is :

" Or some enchanted devil to abuse me ; "

which has so little to recommend it that it may be
passed over or left to the tender mercies of Mr.
Singer.* If I did not think rival the true reading,
I should suggest model.

I will close this subject by adding that the word
rival might with great ease be perverted into trifle
from mere similarity of sound.

* " The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated," p. 3. " Think,"
says Mr. Singer, " of an enchanted devil ! This is surely to
indulge the pruritus emendandi without bounds or considera
tion for the poet."

131

THE COMEDY OF EEEOES,

THE next corrupt passage which I shall endea
vour to correct, by the light of the same prin
ciples, contains a complication of mistakes not
easy to deal with. It occurs in the " Comedy of
Errors," and is both imperfect and adulterated
beyond the necessity of formal proof.

The corrector in the Perkins folio endeavours to
amend it by the introduction of a whole line, as well
as by the substitution of single words.

In the first part of this attempt he, according to
my judgment, completely breaks down.

Adriana, having inquired of Dromio of Syracuse :

" Where is my master, Dromio ? is he well ? "

Dromio replies :

" No, he's in Tartar limbo worse than hell :"
A devil in an everlasting garment hath him,
One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel ;
A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough;
A wolf, nay worse, a fellow all in buff;
A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands
The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands;

K. 2

132 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well,
One that before the judgment carries poor souls to hell."

Act iv. so. 2.

The Perkins folio corrects the passage as fol
lows, introducing, as will be perceived, a whole
line after the third :

" Adriana. Where is thy master, Dromio? is he well?
DromioS.No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell;

A devil in an everlasting garment hath him /<?//,
One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel;
Who knows no touch of mercy, cannot feel;
A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough;
A wolf, nay worse, a fellow all in buff;
A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that counter
mands
The passages and alleys, creeks, and narrow lands."

Here several of the emendations are good ;
namely, thy master for my master *, a fury for a
fairy (which was proposed by Theobald), and
the passages and alleys instead of the passages of
alleys.

On the other hand, fell added to the third line, if
construed with the verb, is not English. To have
a person fell is unprecedented, and the epithet is
too distant from devil to find its home there.

The additional line is not needed, being not only

* This substitution of thy for my is, nevertheless, not neces
sary; the wife even now in the North of England frequently
speaks of her husband as "my master," and we must recollect
that Shakespeare carried the manners and customs and phrases
of his own land into foreign countries.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 133

in itself tautological but a weak dilution of hard
heart in the preceding verse and of pitiless in the
subsequent one. We may, I think, safely conclude
that Shakespeare never wrote it.

Adopting the four emendations already com
mended, I would suggest the following reading,
which I hope every one under whose eye it comes
will patiently consider, with the reasons adduced to
justify it, before he either condemns or approves :

Adriana. Where is thy master, Dromio? is he well?
Dromio S. No, he's in Tartar limbo worse than hell :

A devil in everlasting torment laid him by the heels;

One whose hard heart is battened upon seals ;

A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough;

A wolf, nay worse, a fellow all in buff ;

A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that counter-
waits

The passages and alleys, creeks, and narrow gates.

The reasons on which my alterations are
founded, I will state with as much brevity as the
full explanation of them allows.,

Torment is more usually coupled with the epithet
everlasting than garment * is, and at all events, it
connects itself more suitably with Dromio's account

* The buff jerkin appears to have been sometimes called, in
slang language, an everlasting garment (see Boswell, vol. iv.
p. 224), which very circumstance may have led to the substi
tution of garment for torment. As the buff dress is introduced
with emphasis in the third line below, we may conclude it was
not intended to weaken the emphasis and commit tautology by
mentioning it here too.

K 3

134 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

of his master's having been arrested and consigned
to Tartarus, a place proverbial for endless torture,
where Sisyphus is eternally rolling up his reluc
tant stone, and the Danaides are perpetually pour
ing water into vessels that refuse to hold it. A
devil in torment is to be construed as a devil in the
art or practice of tormenting, as in another place
(" Twelfth Night," act iii. sc. 4), a man is said
to be "a devil in private brawl;" and in the same
play (act ii. sc. 5), one of the dramatis persona?
says to another, " To the gates of Tartarus, thou
most excellent devil of wit," meaning an adept in
cunning devices.

Laid is rendered necessary instead of hath by
the adoption of the whole phrase of which it forms
a part, and which is introduced to complete the
sense left imperfect in that line.

Lay him by the heels was at the date of these
plays a common expression for arresting a man.
The late Lord Campbell, in his judicious little
work entitled " Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements
Considered," says (in reference to the phrase
" to punish you by the heels " which occurs in
" Henry IV." Part. II. act i. sc. 2), " To lay by the
heels was the technical expression for committing
to prison ; and I could produce from the Reports
various instances of its being so used by distin
guished judges from the bench."

We need not, however, go beyond Shakespeare
himself to find authority for the expression. In

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 135

"Henry VIIL" act v. sc. 3, the Lord Chamber
lain says :

" As I live,

If the king blame me for 't, I'll lay ye all
By the heels, and suddenly ; and on your heads
Clap round fines for neglect."

Now it was clearly Dromio's design to tell
Adriana that his master had been arrested by a
sheriff's officer, and he could not have selected a
more appropriate phrase than the one suggested,
both to complete the defective line in the required
sense and to rhyme with the next line when pro
perly rectified. It is in accomplishing both these
ends that its special claim to be admitted consists.

The boldest innovation, however, on the received
text is the proposed substitution of batterid upon
seals, in place of button'd up with steel, or, as some
have it, button'd up in steel. In reference to the
last expressions, I have to ask, what possible con
nexion can there be between a hard heart and steel
buttons ? Why should they be mentioned in con
junction ? Shakespeare is in the habit of putting
things together with a meaning, with some point
or purpose, but in the combination before us there
is none. The line is positively puerile. In point
of historical fact, too, it does not appear that the
buff or leathern jerkin had buttons of steel. In
Howe's account of the dresses of that period and
of these appendages to them, steel buttons are not

K 4

136 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

named * ; and in the only place in Shakespeare
where jerkins and buttons are mentioned in con
nexion, the latter are crystal.

By the term seals in my emendation, it is of
course intended to signify writs with seals upon
them, with impressions in fact of the great seal of
England f, forming a conspicuous feature in their
appearance; and considering the way in which the
feelings are hardened and inured to the sight of
misery by any occupation the chief business of
which is to inflict it, there is a peculiar propriety
in describing the heart of the sheriff's officer, whose
duty it is to serve the sealed writs and arrest the
sufferers, as battening upon the legal instruments
by which he lived, and growing hard upon so dry
and sorry a diet.

I cannot, it is true, produce a passage from our
poet in which the writ capias is designated a seal,
but there is a similar synecdoche in " Richard II."

* Howe mentions buttons of silk, thread, hair, gold and
silver twist, crystal, and those made of the same stuff with the
doublets, coats, and jerkins to which they were attached (the
latter as being in constant use by the common people); but 1
can find no mention of steel buttons. See Strutt's " Compleat
View of the Manners, Customs, &c., of the Ancient Inhabitants
of England," vol. iii. p. 91.

f Blackstone, after telling us that the Court of Chancery is
the officina justitite, the shop or mint of justice where all the
king's writs are framed, proceeds, " it [« writ] is a mandatory
letter from the king in parchment, sealed with his great seal
and directed to the sheriff of the county." — Commentaries,
vol. iii. p. 273.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 137

act v. sc. 2. The Duke of York says to his son
Aumerle :

" What seal is that that hangs without thy bosom ? "

referring not to a signet, but to a written docu
ment, a letter, with a seal impressed upon it.

As to the expression battening, it is sufficient to
adduce in the way of authority, Hamlet's pathetic -
reproach to his mother, —

" Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed
And batten on this moor?" Act iii. sc. 4.

The representation of battening upon seals may
be supported by analogous descriptions of meta
phorical aliment in other places; thus we have in
"Julius Caesar:"

" A barren-spirited fellow, one that feeds
On objects, arts, and imitations."

And in the same play " supple knees feed arro
gance."*

To complete my argument, I must notice that
the corrupt reading (as I deem it) buttorfd up
with steel, or in steel, would be easily fashioned by a
careless copyist out of batterid upon seals.

* Probably some of my readers may with myself be re
minded, by these extracts, of those fine stanzas of Lord Byron's
on the death of Sir Peter Parker, of which the following noble
lines form a part :

" Time cannot teach forgetfulness
While grief s full heart is fed by fame"

138 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Whatever objections may be urged against the
emendations just proposed and advocated, I do not
anticipate a single one against the two next sug
gestions, the second of which, indeed, follows
necessarily upon the first. The couplet —

"A back-friend, a shoulder -clapper, one that countermands
The passages and alleys, creeks and narrow lands,"

I would turn into —

A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countenvaits
The passages and alleys, creeks and narrow gates.

Almost every critic has felt that countermand
was not the right word at the end of the first
of these lines, and I am only surprised that the
other term which seems to compel reception by its
singular appositeness, was left for me to suggest.
Counterwait, although now obsolete, is in fact the
only word in the English language that fits the
post here assigned to it. It signifies to watch
against or to watch with a hostile or counteractive
purpose. In the last edition of Nares's " Glossary,"
it is defined to watch against, with a quotation
from WithalPs " Dictionarie," edition 1608, namely,
" He that his wife will counterwait and watch."
It is to be found with the same signification in
Chaucer.* Shakespeare certainly does not employ

* The Greek verb avTityvXatrow seems to have fundamentally
the same meaning. It is denned by Liddell and Scott "to
watch in turn," and in Med. " to be on one's guard against,"

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 139

the word anywhere else, and consequently its
claim to be adopted depends on the singular felicity
with which, while it bears sufficient resemblance to
the rejected term to account for the mistake, it re
stores complete sense to the passage and at the
same time compels the right reading of the sub
sequent line.

It is indeed a strong recommendation of counter-
waits in this place that it rids us of the phrase
narrow lands, which is an evident and unmeaning
corruption, and gives us, in its stead, the good old
English expression narrow gates, equivalent to
narrow ways. I have in my day heard gates used
for ways in the North hundreds of times. More
over Shakespeare himself employs the word in
the same signification, and in one passage, fortu
nately for the credit of my emendation, uses it in
connexion with alleys, as is done in the corrected
reading of the lines before us. The extract is
from "Hamlet:"

" Swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body."

Act i. sc. 5.

The next example, although the corrupt reading
lies in two words contained in a single line, ex
hibits four different points worthy of remark : ( 1 )

but the nouns connected with it are explained in a way more
obviously agreeable to the derivation; avrt^uXac^, "a watching
against," and a»rt(puXa£, "a watch posted to observe," both
corresponding in import with counterwait.

140 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

What may be done by attending to the natural
course of thought and expression; (2) how totally
unconnected in point of resemblance the corrupt
reading may be with the genuine one; (3) how, on
the other hand, the genuine reading may be per
verted by close similarity; (4) how one misreading
readily leads to another. I have already referred
to the passage in the Introductory Chapter: it
occurs, like the last, in the " Comedy of Errors : "

" Therefore merchant, I'll limit thee this day
To seek thy help by beneficial help.
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus;
Beg thou or borrow to make up the sum,
And live : if no, then thou art doomed to die."

Act i. sc. 1.

The commentators have been sorely puzzled
with the second line, which every one admits to be
spurious. Pope proposes to read to seek thy life,
but his emendation is at once put out of court by
the fact that to seek a man's life is to go about to
destroy him.* The Perkins folio suggests to seek
thy hope, which is flat and pointless ; and Mr. Singer,
to seek thy fine, which is no better, but perhaps
more ungainly. Steevens proposes to change the
second help into means, retaining the first — an
alteration successful only in drawing down the
condemnation of Malone. If we look at what was
passing in the mind of the duke, we shall soon

* Steevens on this point aptly cites what Antonio says of
Shylock, " He seeks my life."

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS. 141

discover the signification which the line ought to
bear. ^Egeon having imperilled his life by a breach
of the law, could be redeemed from death by no
other means than paying a fine of a thousand
marks, whereas the whole property of the poor old
man saved from the shipwreck amounted to barely
a hundred marks. The duke, willing to favour him
as far as lies in his power under the inexorable
law, says to the culprit, "As thou hast not sufficient
money of thy own to pay the fine which must be
paid in full to save thee from the extreme penalty of
the law, I will give thee this day that thou mayest
endeavour to make up the deficiency by benevolent as
sistance." Now a line is wanted which shall express
what is here italicised. We must clearly have a
monosyllabic noun in the place of the first help;
but as in trying after an appropriate substitute all
the commentators have failed, may not the verb be
in fault as well as the noun, and have thus thrown
them off the scent? Such, I think, is the case.
Let us then try the new track indicated. By the
simple elimination of the letter s, I propose to turn
seek into eek, equivalent in sound to eke, and read,

To eke thy [own stock of money] by beneficial help.

And as in those days (before American shops
had started up in the world to usurp the name)
such a fund was usually or frequently called a
store, we obtain the line —

To eke thy store by beneficial help.

142 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

which fulfils the requisite conditions and gives us,
I have little doubt, Shakespeare's own words.

The language of my emendation is easily sup
ported by quoting corresponding expressions in
other places. I will take the word store first, and
probably a single parallel employment of it in the
required sense will suffice.

Where money is concerned I cannot cite a
better authority than Shylock. In act i. sc. 3,
the Jew says :

" I am debating of my present store,
And by the near guess of my memory
I cannot instantly raise up the gross
Of full three thousand ducats."

Although the verb eke is not frequent in Shake
speare, it presents itself several times with all the
air of a familiar phrase. It is generally coupled
with out (to eke out\ but in one place stands by
itself. In the " Merchant of Venice " (act iii.
sc. 2), Portia says :

"I speak too long, but 'tis to piece the time,
To eke it, and to draw it out at length
To stay you from election."

In " Henry V.," act iii., we have it with the
preposition : the Chorus says :

" Still be kind,
And eke out our performance with your mind."

But for the most apposite passage — singularly
apposite in such a case, as showing the combined

THE COMEDY OF EREORS. 143

use of the two words — I am indebted to Spenser.
It contains indeed the exact phrase in my proposed
emendation, both terms included, and without
the preposition :

" I demt there much to have eked my store"

Shepherd's Calender, September.

Of course an example from another author can be
regarded as only a slight and indirect corrobora-
tion.

Having said so much in favour of the sugges
tion, I will again bring the passage before the
reader, to enable him to appreciate it when altered
accordingly :

Therefore merchant, I'll limit thee this day
To eke thy store by beneficial help.
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus;
Beg thou or borrow to make up the sum,
And live: if no, then thou art doom'd to die.

Thus the proposed emendation not only com
pletely rectifies the erroneous text, but does it in
Shakespearian and apposite language, without
lowering the tone of the composition ; and I think
I may conclude that its excellence in these respects
is to be received as the crucial circumstance
required to determine the genuine reading. I will
further remark, how inevitably the blunder of
substituting help for store, which must have been
the first committed, led to that of making eke into
seek.

144 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The objection that store and help bear no resem
blance to account for one being transformed into
the other, is sufficiently met by referring to what
I before stated, and shall hereafter fully explain,
that in cases of repetition, resemblance, although
sometimes available, is not needed, while to search
for it exclusively often misleads.

145

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

MOST of the emendations which I have proposed,
have occurred to me from patiently considering,
in the first place, the train or combination of
thoughts in the passage under criticism: the one
which follows, and which is comparatively unim
portant, presented itself from a similar attention
to the grammatical structure of the speech given
to Biron at the close of the third act of " Love's
Labour's Lost."

After having launched forth against Dan Cupid,

he continues : —

" O my little heart !
And I to be a corporal of his field,
And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop !
What! Hove! I sue! I seek a wife!
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing; ever out of frame;
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch'd that it may still go right.
Nay to be perjured, which is worst of all;
And amongst three, to love the worst of all ! "

Act iii. sc. 1.
L

146 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The line in italics evidently wants a syllable, and
the whole question with the critics is how the
vacancy shall be supplied. It is something mar
vellous that in this simple case they should differ.
One of them proposes reading " What I! I love !
I sue," &c. which is plausible, but rejected by
Mr. Knight and Mr. Collier ; the former consider
ing the metrical defect as an intentional pause.
Another editor suggests, " What ! what ! I love ! "

Both the readings here mentioned make good
the metre, but the structure of the context shows
that they scarcely suit the place.

To correspond with the other clauses the line
should be : —

What I to love! I sue! I seek a wife!

In the homogeneous exclamations before and
after, the particle to is inserted, e. g.

" And I to be a corporal of his field ! " *
"Nay to be perjured !" *

• " And amongst three to love the worst of all ! " *
"And I to sigh for her, to watch for her !"
" To pray for her ! "

Surely then it was a matter of course that the
line in question should run, " What I to love !
I sue ! I seek a wife ! " It would have been going
out of the way to write it otherwise, and we may
feel quite certain that the little monosyllable was
accidentally dropped.

Before quitting this speech, I have to suggest

LOVE'S LABOUK'S LOST. 147

another alteration of greater magnitude, which
perhaps will not be so readily admitted. Imme
diately following the line,

"And amongst three to love the worst of all!"

comes the description of the lady : —

" A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes."

Whitely (in the old editions spelt whitly} has
been objected to on the ground that the lady is
represented in other places as dark-complexioned.
The Perkins folio proposes witty, but, as Mr. Singer
remarks, witty must be wrong, inasmuch as
" Biron's whole tirade is disparaging." A cursory
glance at the passage confirms this, and shows
further that the speaker is engaged in decrying her
exterior personal gifts, so that an epithet charac
terising her mental qualities would be out of place.
In the immediately subsequent words, he describes
parts of her person by the names of two coarse
materials, namely velvet and pitch ; and to preserve
that sort of consistency which is natural in un
affected speech, the epithet of which whitely has
usurped the place should denote a substance
somewhat analogous in point of coarseness. On
these grounds I have little doubt that the received
text is wrong, and that the poet wrote,

A whitleather wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.

148 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The word whitleather, it is true, does not occur at
all in Shakespeare, and hence, if it were not found
in contemporary writings, we might at once reject
it; unless, indeed, the felicity of the amendment
should be deemed great enough to over-ride all
rule. But we are not driven to this last resource.
The word was familiar to those times and con
tinues to be used down to the present day.

Nares in his " Glossary," after denning whitlether,
"leather made very rough by peculiar dressing,"
cites the following examples of its use :

" Thy gerdill made of the whitlether whange
Which thou hast wore God knowes how longe."

M.S. Lansd. 241.

" As for the wench, I'le not part with her
Till age has render'd her whitlether^

Homer, a la Mode, 1665.

As to contemporary usage it will be sufficient to
adduce the authority of Beaumont and Fletcher.
In the " Scornful Woman," on Abigail's weeping,
the elder Loveless breaks out, " Hast thou so
much moisture in thy whit-leather hide yet, that
thou canst cry?" The author afterwards uses the
expression tawny hide, in reference to the same
attractive specimen of her sex, which removes all
difficulty about the absolute whiteness of the
material. In regard to the employment of the
term in our own day, I can vouch for its being
the current name for a kind of leather used in

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. 149

some of our manufacturing districts, and also for
the article being of a colour which does not so
closely correspond with the appellation or its
etymology but that it might be employed to
disparage the complexion of even a dark beauty.
In other places our author gives us the phrases
inky brows, bugle eye-balls, cheeks of cream, tripe-
visaged, paper-faced, so that the epithet whitleather,
although not used by him, is not without sufficient
countenance from analogous expressions in his
writings.

The following passage in " Love's Labour's Lost "
requires only a single word to rectify it.

Biron, speaking of women in his long, rambling,
and redundant oration, says, —

" They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world ;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent :
Then fools you were these women to forswear ;
Or keeping what is sworn you will prove fools.
For wisdom's sake a word that all men love,

Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,

*****

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves."

Act iv. sc. 3.

The phrase, a word that loves all men, is meaning
less, or, at the best, pointless, in a situation that
requires point. For the suggestions and remarks
to which it has given rise I must refer to BoswelPs
Variorum edition, vol. iv. p. 390. A brief attention
to the course of thought will I think yield the true

L 3

150 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

reading. A comparison is made between wisdom
and love — the wisdom which men love is placed
in a sort of antithesis with the love which does
something to men — the received text says which
loves men, but the parallel evidently requires the
sense to be " which gives wisdom to all men." The
change of a few letters effects this as follows : —

For wisdom's sake a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake, a word that learns all men,

in the sense of teaches all men, which is what
Biron has been so long harping upon. I may add
that a plausible reading would be obtained by a
transposition of the concluding phrase, making it
" a word that all men learn" but it would be at
the expense of the antithesis.

In a subsequent part of the drama before us,
another error occurs : Rosaline says,

" So pertaunt-like would I o'ersway his state,
That he should he my fool and I his fate."

Act v. sc. 2.

Portent-like say the commentators: potently says
the Perkins folio, with much more plausibility.

The latter reading, it is fair to say, is counte
nanced by a passage in " Coriolanus," Act ii. sc. 3.
Brutus, speaking of Coriolanus to the people, says
that he

" Ever spake against

Your liberties and the charters that you bear
1'th body of the weal : and now, arriving
A place of potency and sway of the state," &c. &c.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. 151

There is a compound adverb, however, which
seems to fill the place of the unprecedented phrase
that has been expelled, more happily than either
of the proposed emendations, namely, potentate-like:
"she would rule his state like a monarch." The
first part of the word must of course be pronounced
as a dissyllable :

So pofntate-like would I o'ersway his state,
That he should be nay fool and I his fate.

The term potentate is used again in the same
scene,

"Dost thou infaraonize me among potentates'?"

I, 4

152 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

IN this admirable drama an extraordinary blun
der has established itself in the text.

Demetrius, on awakening from a supernatural
sleep, bursts forth into extravagant praises of
Helena; and lavishes the following hyperbolical
eulogium on the whiteness of her hand. He says
to her, —

" That pure congealed white, high Taurus' snow,
Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow,
When thou hold'st up thy hand : O let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal of bliss !

Act iii. sc. 2.

The expression in italics is (to me at least)
obviously corrupt, and has naturally enough per
plexed some of the critics. Sir Thomas Hanmer
reads this pureness of pure white, which is adopted
by Dr. Warburton, but does not commend itself by
any special appositeness. Steevens and Malone
support the old reading by citing such expressions
as the " princess of fruits," applied by Sir Walter
Raleigh to the pine-apple, and " the queen of curds

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. 153

and cream," applied in the " Winter's Tale " to
Perdita, both of which appear to rne irrelevant.
The Perkins folio, backed without scruple by
Mr. Collier, gives us " the impress of pure white,"
of which I can make no sense.

In reference to the two quotations, adduced by
Steevens and Malone to support the received text,
it deserves to be remarked that the titles of dignity
therein severally mentioned are used in two dif
ferent ways, and could not consequently both be
applicable. The pine-apple in the first is placed at
the head of its own class, denominated/rwzYs ; while,
in the second quotation, curds and cream do not, I
take it, form a class of which Perdita is the head,
but constitute the territory over which she reigns;
yet Malone cites the second passage as confirming
the received text like the first. The princess of
pure white cannot, if I am correct, avail herself of
both offers to support her.

Since the proposed readings are none of them
quite satisfactory, I will suggest another, which has
occurred to me from looking to the tenour of the
passage. Demetrius evidently wishes to extol the
whiteness of Helena's hand as reaching the utmost
perfection. I therefore propose to read,

This quintessence of white, this seal of bliss.

It is an emendation which at any rate must be
allowed to make good sense of the line, without
straining on the one hand or refining on the other.

154 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The accent must, of course, be on the first syllable,
as it is in the passage I am going to cite in support
of my proposal from "As You Like It," act
iii. sc. 2 :

" The quintessence of every sprite
Heaven would in little show."

I have still two points to account for, the intro
duction of pure before white, and the transmu
tation of quintessence into princess. The latter is
such a blunder as almost any printing-office might
turn out. Inasmuch as the two main sounds in
each of the words (in and ess) correspond, one of
the terms would be easily converted into the other,
and when once quintessence had been changed into
princess, the addition of pure would naturally
follow in order to complete the metre.

After this explanation, let me bring the passage
before the reader again, and he will probably
acquiesce in the appropriateness of the emendation.

That pure congealed white, high Taurus' snow,
Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow,
When thou hold'st up thy hand : O let me kiss
This quintessence of white, this seal of bliss !

Since writing the above, I have recollected
another passage in Shakespeare which still better
supports my proposed amendment, than the quota
tion from " As You Like It," and will at all events
serve as a corroboration.

The same remarkable term on which the emen-

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. 155

dation turns, is made use of by Hamlet in his
celebrated exclamation on the nature of his own
species : " What a piece of work is man ! How
noble in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form,
and moving, how express and admirable! In
action how like an angel! in apprehension how
like a god ! the beauty of the world ! The para
gon of animals ! And yet to me what is this quin-
essence of dust ? " *

* Hamlet, act ii. sc. 2.

156 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

THE MERCHANT OF TENICE,

THAT delightful comedy the " Merchant of Venice,"
furnishes several instances of errors in copying or
printing.

In act i. sc. 3, there is a verbal repetition, which,
although it does not injure the sense, is displeasing,
and might be easily removed. Antonio says to
his friend, in reference to Shy lock's appeal to the
patriarch Jacob,

" An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek ;
A goodly apple rotten at the heart ;
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath ! "

I suggest comely in place of the second goodly,
O, what a comely outside falsehood hath !

To support the emendation, I will adduce only
one quotation from our author :

" O what a world is this when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it ! "

As You Like It.

The use of the two words in those days, and

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 157

their wont to go in couples, are well shown by a
passage in " Ascham's Schoolmaster," describing
what kind of being 'Eu$uij$ is. Amongst other
things he has " a countenance not werish and
crabbed, but fair and comely; a personage not
wretched and deformed, but tall and goodly; for
surely a comely countenance with a goodly stature,
giveth credit to learning, and authority to the
person." Afterwards he speaks of a comely per
sonage, and a comely body. Mr. Sidney Walker*
suggests godly in place of the second goodly, and
shows by numerous citations how frequently good
and god are misprinted for each other. His emen
dation, nevertheless, appears to me more displeasing
from the very nearness of the sound than the old
reading from its identity.

The same play (act iii. sc. 1) presents us with
a remarkable instance in which even the partial
repetition of a word is generally, and I think
justly, regarded as a proof of corruption :

" Thus ornament is but the gulled shore
To a most dangerous sea ; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty ; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest."

The greatest defect here, however, is not the
repetition (although that is great enough), but it
is that the intention of the poet is evidently de-

* " Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare," vol. i.
p. 303.

158 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

feated. He meant his beauteous scarf to veil
something not beautiful : otherwise the point
would be lost. Now of those things which a scarf
is capable of covering, or usually employed to
cover, what is most unsightly to us in an Indian
may be said to be his colour, and I would accord
ingly propose to read,

Veiling an Indian's blackness,

which expresses in the most direct way, what was
manifestly in the author's mind. In former times
the colour was certainly not regarded with greater
favour than it is at present. It is said in Barclay's
"ShipofFooles":

" He that goeth right, steadfast, sure, and fast,
May well him mocke that goeth halting and lame,
And he that is white may well his scornes cast,
Agaynst a man of Inde."

I ought perhaps to notice the amendments of
Sir Thomas Hanmer, and of the Perkins folio;
but they are both so unlikely that I must content
myself with merely referring to them.

The same play in the second scene of the third
act, presents us with an unquestionable error,
which the critics have altogether failed to set
right.

Referring to Portia's portrait and the painter of

it, Bassanio exclaims :

"But her eyes, —

How could he see to do them ? Having made one,
Methinks, it should have pow'r to steal both his,
And leave itself unfurnished."

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. 159

For the explanation and defence of the last word
which has really no appropriateness, and scarcely
an assignable meaning where it is placed, I must
refer to the Variorum edition of 1821, vol. v.
p. 86. The vindication of the received text
strikes me as wholly unsuccessful. To speak of
one eye in the portrait leaving itself (by having
destroyed the sight of the painter) unfurnished,
seems exceedingly vague if not entirely destitute
of sense; and the phrase could scarcely have
proceeded from any writer who had a passable
command of language. However it may be inter
preted, it does not give the natural sequel of the
preceding sentiments, which, fantastical as they
are, almost beyond a lover's licence, must be con
sistent amongst themselves.

Fortunately there is a word used by Shakespeare
in another place which so exactly expresses what
he evidently meant to say here, and might be so
readily transformed into the received reading, that
I have little doubt it was the epithet which unfur
nished has "pushed from its stool." It is unfellowed,

And leave itself unfellow'-d.

Osric says to Hamlet, speaking in commen
dation of Laertes,

" In his meed, he is unfellowed" — Act v. sc. 2.

If I mistake not, to name this emendation is to
ensure its reception.

160 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAKE.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

THERE is a passage in this drama overlooked by
the commentators in the Variorum edition of
Boswell and Malone, but which appears to me
corrupt on the ground of containing a tasteless,
and even disagreeable repetition, and which, on
account of its excellence in other respects, it is de
sirable should be freed from all blemish. Orlando
says to Adam, an old serving-man : —

" O, good old man ; how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,
Where service sweat for duty not for meed ! "

Act ii. sc. 3.

Mr. Walker remarks, that it is the first service
which in his opinion is corrupt, yet he can imagine
(he continues,) Shakespeare to have written,

" Where duty sweat for duty not for meed,"

which to my taste would spoil the line. There is
no reason why duty should be repeated, and if so,
the repetition must weaken the sentiment. The

AS YOU LIKE IT. 161

Perkins folio presents us with favour instead of the
first service, but it is feeble, and has no apposite-
ness or superiority in any way over several other
words which might be inserted. I propose to read
fealty as follows :

O, good old man ! how well in thee appears
The constant fealty of the antique world,
Where service sweat for duty, not for meed !

I know no word in the English language which so
happily fits the context, and Shakespeare, in
another place, couples the quality in question with
the attribute of durableness.

" I am in parliament pledge for his truth,
Arid lasting fealty to the new-made king."

Richard II. act v. sc. 2.

M

162 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

PART III.

INDETERMINATE READINGS.

A GREAT number of passages which have been
corrupted in various ways must, as I have before
remarked, remain, after all is done, in a dubious
position. Each of them admits of being corrected
in several different modes equally plausible. Not
any of the emendations proposed exhibits a marked
superiority over the rest.

In these cases it is often useful, and sometimes
necessary, to examine the claims of the suggested
readings and to put the result on record.

Considerations may occur to future inquirers,
upon a review of them, which will determine the
superiority amongst competitors at present appa
rently equal, or bring a new one into the field
which will unite all voices in its favour. And
even should no advantage of this sort accrue, it is
frequently indispensable to scrutinise and invali
date proposals urged, perhaps with undoubting

INDETERMINATE READINGS. 163

confidence, and even incorporated into the text of
current editions, although you may have no
unquestionable emendation to bring forward your
self, and can only show that the reading is to be
held as doubtful, and waiting for any new light
that may be cast upon it. With these aims I
proceed, in the present section, to discuss a number
of instances in which the described indeterminate-
ness exists, and cannot with our actual resources
be dispelled.

M 2

164 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

CORIOLANTJS.

THE tragedy of " Coriolanus," as we have already
had occasion to notice, contains numerous corrup
tions, and it furnishes several examples of doubt
ful readings.

Amongst these, the one I am about to adduce
has caused considerable controversy. Coriolanus
himself is speaking :

" Therefore, beseech you, —
You that will be less fearful than discreet ;
That love the fundamental part of state
More than you doubt the change on't ; that prefer
A noble life before a long, and wish
To jump a body with a dangerous physic
That's sure of death without it, — at once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue." Act iii. sc. 1.

To jump, in this connection, although supported
by Steevens and Malone, has been, whether justly
or not, discarded by several modern editors and
annotators. The expression adduced by the for
mer, in reference to hellebore, "it putteth "a body to

COKIOLANUS. 165

a jump or great hazard," is not precisely the same
phraseology as the expression to jump a body, for
which there is not any plausible precedent to be
found in Shakespeare, and it would in this place
be, at the best, a somewhat awkward term.

Jump, nevertheless, is preferable both to Mr.
Singer's imp, and to a reading noticed by Steevens
— vamp.

To vamp a body would signify to patch or piece
it, which is not here in question, and this is also
the meaning ingeniously extracted by Mr. Singer
from imp.

The speaker manifestly* intends to say to his
audience, in substance, "you that have nerve
enough to make trial of a dangerous medicine,
which may cure the body, and at the worst will
only result in that death which is sure to take
place without it', at once pluck out," &c., &c.

Now, if we discard jump, we want a word in
its place which will help to express this, and not
differ from it too much in point of sound. Of all
the terms I can think of, tempt is the one that
accomplishes the desired end the best :

To tempt a body with a dangerous physic
That's sure of death without it.

i. e. to try a body, to make an experiment upon it.
So in " Henry VIII.," act i. sc. 2, we have

" I am much too venturous
In tempting of your patience."
M 3

166 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

I scarcely need point out how well this sense
agrees .with the Latin etymon of the verb tento,
tentare, of which the radical and paramount signi
fication is to try; and the word is to be found
with the same import in our early English writers
as well as in the current literature of the day.

In Wickliffe's translation of the Bible there
is a good example to the purpose : "I beseech
tempt or assaie (tenta) vs thi seruauntis ten days "
(Dan. i. 12); which passage is rendered in the au
thorised version, "Prove thy servants, I beseech
thee, ten days." Here, I think, are ample grounds
for accounting the text doubtful, but if the ques
tion were required to be imperatively decided, I
should be disposed to give my voice in favour of
the received reading.

Under the head of indeterminate readings, may
be ranked many of those which have been dealt
with by the old corrector in the Perkins folio. As
an example, I will take a passage in the same
tragedy of " Coriolanus." Volumnia is addressing
her exasperated son :

"Pray be counsell'd.
I have a heart as little apt as yours,
But yet a brain that leads my use of anger
To better vantage." Act iii. sc. 2.

To remedy the obvious solecism here, the Perkins
folio introduces a whole line : *

* Collier's "Notes and Emendations," p. 361, 2nd edition.

CORIOLANUS. 167

"I have a heart as little apt as yours
To brook control without the use of anger,
But yet a brain that leads my use of anger
To better vantage."

This interpolation undoubtedly restores sense to
the prior line, but there is no external evidence for
it; there are no grounds for admitting it in pre
ference to a score of other amendments; and it
does not commend itself to our acceptance by any
peculiar felicity. Although I cannot unite with
Mr. Singer in calling it absurd, I agree with him
that " if a line is missing it must have been some
thing very different."*

Far from being happy, the new line is indeed
intrinsically feeble, while it causes an awkward
repetition of the phrase "use of anger," and if I
mistake not, involves the necessity of putting a
different construction on the repeated phrase in
each line, — confounds, in fact, two different mean
ings. In the interpolated line the use of anger can
mean only actual anger : in the next line it means
pr oneness to anger — the custom or habit of grow
ing angry. Other lines, moreover, by the score,
might be devised that would answer the purpose
equally well; e.g.

To bear unmov'd the people's rude demands.

But without the violence of interpolating a line
for which no evidence can be brought, due signi-

* " The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated," p. 220.
M 4

168 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

ficance may be given to the passage by substituting
a single word. Let "apt" be replaced by "cool,"
or "calm" or "tame:"

I have a heart as little cool as yours,

But yet a brain that leads my use of anger

To better vantage.

The proposed substitution would, at all events,
effect the requisite antithesis between the fiery
heart and the cool head. Mr. Singer suggests soft,
which perhaps would more easily slide into the
received reading than any other epithet; but a
heart may be hard without being irritable, and the
latter attribute seems to be required by the con
text.

Another mode of dealing with the faulty line also
suggests itself. Allowing " apt," which is rather a
sounding word, to stand as it is, let us try the effect
of supposing the corruption to have taken place
in the words " as little," and read,

I have a heart to kindle apt as yours,
But yet a brain that leads my use of anger
To better vantage.

The word kindle occurs twice before in the same
tragedy :

" This is the way to kindle, not to quench."

says Menenius to the tribunes.

The transition, however, from to kindle to the
received reading as little, is not easy to imagine,

CORIOLANUS. 169

and the suggested reading consequently is not
entitled to more than to be held in doubt with the
rest of the conjectures I have cited.

On a review of what has been said, it is plain
that the crucial circumstance is here wanting.
Amidst the abundance of actual and possible
suggestions, we find no distinctive ground for
determining with positiveness what the reading
ought to be, although we may safely reject, I
think, the feeble emendation of the Perkins folio.

170 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

T1MON OF ATHENS.

ALMOST innumerable other examples, to illustrate
the subject in hand, might be selected from the
annotations of editors as well as from the manu
script corrections of the old Perkins folio, which,
as emendations, are plausible enough, but are de
ficient in any special claim to be received or to be
preferred over others equally plausible. From the
notice which the latter corrections have attracted,
I am induced to animadvert upon a few more
that come under this description.

The passage which first offers itself to my hand
is from " Timon of Athens ; " I quote it as usually
given :

" I have a tree, which grows here in my close,
That mine own use invites me to cut down,
And shortly must I fell it : tell my friends,
Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree,
From high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe,
And hang himself." Act v. sc. 2.

TIMON OF ATHENS. 171

The expression to take haste* is certainly not to
be found in any other place in the poet's writings*
and I never met with it any where else. He
constantly uses make haste. Singularly enough, it
has not attracted the attention of any of the
commentators in Boswell. For the half line in
italics the old corrector proposes to substitute,

To stop affliction let him take his halter,

which Mr. Collier says he is convinced is the
genuine language of Shakespeare. See preface to
" Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton,"
page Ixxx.

The proposed emendation is intrinsically good :
it removes an awkward expression which could
hardly have proceeded from the poet, but we
might, I think, hit upon other emendations falling
in more aptly with the course of thought, and quite
as likely, or even more likely, to be perverted into
the actual reading.

It is plain that the dominant point intimated in
the sarcastic recommendation of the speaker, is that
his countrymen should use despatch in availing
themselves of his generous offer. He tells the
senators that he must shortly fell the tree, and
that consequently no time is to be lost in the matter.

* It is worthy of notice, that although we do not say tale
haste, yet when we wish to express the opposite idea we say
take time, — let him take his time. It is possible that this idiom
might have suggested the phrase in the text.

172 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

To name the instrument, whether sash, or halter, or
scarf, or handkerchief, is unimportant to the pur
pose in view, while to urge haste just at this
point is essential to the force of the irony.

This end is eifected in the following modifica
tion of the line :

To stop affliction, let him make wise haste,

which would have been more readily corruptible
into take his haste, than the correction proposed in
the old folio.

As a number of other epithets, however, might be
severally prefixed to haste, all occasionally used by
Shakespeare in connection with that noun, as well
as with the Verb make, and none of them having
any decided claim to preference over its brother-
monosyllables, such as quick, hot, post, swift, we
can only class the reading as indeterminate. If
the one I have selected (wise) has any superiority,
it is in being perhaps more ironical, and coming
nearer in sound to his than the rest.

After all, however, is it needful to do more than
change take his haste into make his haste? In
" Antony and Cleopatra," Antony says to Octavia,
who is anxious to reconcile the two rivals,

" But as you requested,

Yourself shall go between us ; the meantime, lady,
I'll raise the preparation of a war
Shall stain your brother : make your soonest haste"

which proves that the phrase make haste was some-

TIMON OF ATHENS. 173

times used with an intermediate possessive pro
noun.

There is a singular use of haste in the same
tragedy, which may be worth remarking. Cleo
patra says to one of her attendants in reference
to the fatal asp,

" Hie thee again ;

I have spoke already and it is provided ;
Go, put it to the haste" Act v. sc. 2.

174 THE TEXT OF SIIAKESFEARE.

HENRY IV.

A VIGOEOUS passage occurs in " Henry IV." Part II.
act iv. sc. 1, which appears to me to have sus
tained several disfigurements, two of them not
noticed by the commentators, exemplifying the
same inadvertent repetition of words (presumably
by the copyist or compositor) which has elsewhere
been or will be more particularly enlarged upon.
A third portion of the received text has, on other
grounds, been the subject of much dispute whether
it is genuine or spurious, and it may be admitted,
at the outset, that all the amendments now to be
discussed are of a character which can scarcely
aspire to a higher title than doubtful.

Westmoreland, on behalf of the King, is remon
strating with the contumacious Archbishop of
York:

" Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself
Out of the speech of peace, that bears such grace,
Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war ;
Turning your books to grieves, your ink to blood,
Your pens to lances, and your tongue divine,
To a loud trumpet and a point of war?"

HENRY IV. 175

The first thing to allege in proving this pas
sage to be corrupt, is the tasteless and unskilful
repetition of the sonorous word tongue in the fifth
line. We can hardly suppose it to have proceeded
from Shakespeare, if we consider merely the phonic
effect; and that impression is strengthened by
discerning that the repeated word is first used in
the sense of language, and secondly in the sense of
the organ of speech. I would suggest the substi
tution of voice for the second tongue, not only as
obviating the defects indicated, but as better suit
ing the epithet divine. This suggestion receives
support from the next scene, where Prince John,
harping on the same string, styles the Archbishop,

" To us the imagin'd voice of God himself."

And throughout the Bible (it may be added),
voice is the term uniformly employed in reference
to the Supreme Being.

It will be observed, on looking at the ends of the
third and sixth lines, that there is a double occur
rence also of the phrase of war, the first very much
impairing, by pre-occupation of the ear, the sonor
ous force of the close — a defect which might be
remedied by eliminating war from the third line,
and inserting strife in its place. Any reader who
attends to the cadence of the two lines must, I
imagine, be sensible of a disagreeable monotony in
their inflection, and the proposed substitution would
not only obviate the sameness, but do it by a word

176 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

often applied by Shakespeare to designate intestine
broils.

Besides the separate bad effects of the two
repetitions, both are so mixed together that the
music of the lines is inartistically jangled in a style
anything but Shakespearian; all which defects
the suggested corrections in combination would
rectify.

The last thing to note, in the passage before us,
is the word point — point of war — which is here
interpreted by Dr. Johnson to signify tune. Ob
jections have been frequently made to it, but the
phrase is well defended by Mr. Dyce, who affirms
that it is not an uncommon expression, and quotes
an example of its use from Greene's " Orlando
F arioso : "

" Tell him from me, false coward as he is,
That Orlando, the County Palatine,
Is come this morning with a band of French,
To play him hunt's-up with & point of war," &c.

He also cites another instance, from Peele's
" Edward I.," as follows :

"Matrevers, thou

Sound proudly here a perfect point of war
In honour of thy sovereign's safe return."

Dyces Ed. 1861, p. 378.

These instances undoubtedly prove that the term
was in use in that age, and seem, at first sight,
amply sufficient to prevent the received reading
from being disturbed. On the other side, it may

HENRY IV. 177

be urged that the phrase does not occur elsewhere
in Shakespeare's works, and therefore, like all
remarkable phrases in the same predicament, can
maintain its position only by its peculiar appro
priateness. Amidst his frequent descriptions of
battles and sieges and encampments, it seems
scarcely probable that he should have used so
notable an expression only once, and then with no
special felicity.* The old corrector and Mr. Singer
have each proposed a substitute for point; the
first suggests report, the second bruit: but these
suggestions have met with so little favour that
it is needless to discuss them. Both writers have
missed a much more plausible emendation, namely,
the substitution of portent for a point as follows,

To a loud trumpet and portent of war.

Portent is frequently used by our author and
always, as far as I can find, with the accent on the
second syllable. In the first part of this play of

* I say with no special felicity, because to designate the
Archbishop's voice a point of war as well as a trumpet would
be to describe it in the same breath as both a musical instru
ment and the tune played upon it. Nevertheless, it is a pretty
and even poetical phrase, and therefore we need not wonder
that it was caught up by Sir Walter Scott in " Waverley,"
"The trumpets and kettledrums of the cavalry were next
heard to perform the beautiful and wild point of war appro
priated as a signal for that piece of nocturnal duty, and then
finally sank upon the wind with a shrill and mournful ca
dence." I have taken this extract from the Supplement to
Dr. Richardson's Dictionary.

N

178 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

" Henry IV." we have a passage corresponding in
some respects to the remonstrance of the Earl of
Westmoreland with the contumacious Archbishop,
already quoted, and which makes greatly in favour
of the suggested reading. It is a remonstrance of
the King himself with the Earl of Worcester, one
of the rebellious Percies and uncle to the redoubted
Hotspur, in which he stigmatises the Earl (as my
emendation would the Churchman) as a portent
of coming evil.

" Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all abhorred war,
And move in that obedient orb again,
When you did give a fair and natural light,
And be no more an exhal'd meteor,
A prodigy of fear, and a portent
Of broached mischief to the unborn times ? "

Let me now gather up my proposed emendations
including this last one, and try how they look
together :

Wherefore do you so ill translate yourself
Out of the speech of peace that bears such grace
Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of strife ;
Turning your books to grieves, your ink to blood,
Your pens to lances, and your voice divine,
To a loud trumpet and portent of war.

My suggestion regarding the last line may per
haps be strengthened by the following address of
King John, in the play of that name, to Chatillon
the French Ambassador, who had just bidden him
defiance in the name of his master : —

HENKY IV. 179

"Bear mine to him and so depart in peace:
Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France ;
For ere thou can'st report 1 will be there,
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard :
So hence ! Be thou the trumpet of my wrath,
And sullen presage of your own decay."

Another passage also gives us trumpet in con
nexion with the premonitory function of the in
strument :

" The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And by his hollow whistling in the leaves
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.

Henry IV, Part I. act v. sc. 1 .

I can, however, adduce these extracts only to show
that if point of war were set aside there might be a
better substitute than either bruit or report. At
present I regard the reading of the whole passage
as doubtful.

The following is another apparently happy cor
rection, which will not however stand the proposed
tests, and since rival emendations of equal plausi
bility may be suggested it must be considered
doubtful. In " Henry IV. " Part II. there are some
lines at the end of Scroop's speech, in which, as
given in the received text, a manifest error appears,
which could scarcely have come from the author's
pen : —

" So that this land, like an offensive wife
That hath enraged him on to offer strokes,
As he is striking, holds his infant up,
And hangs resolved correction in the arm
That was uprear'd to execution." Act iv. sc. 1.

K 2

180 TIIE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The simile here being of course intended to be
complete in itself, the pronoun him is without
antecedent, and the defect mars a very graphic
picture. The old corrector alters the second line
to : —

" That hath enraged her man to offer strokes,"

which completely rectifies the error ; nor does any
great difficulty present itself, in conceiving how
the substitution arose. On the other hand there
are reasons for concluding that the erroneous
reading is to be found in the first, not the second
line Offensive wife is scarcely Shakespeare's dic
tion ; the epithet is used by him in only one other
place, and there applied to things not persons.
That solitary instance occurs in " Lear." Oswald,
when addressing Goneril in reference to her hus
band, says,

" What most he should dislike seems pleasant to him ;
What like, offensive."

Further the noun man substituted in the second
line is not a Shakespearian synonyme for husband.
In one passage, the compound good man is found
in the sense of husband, but man by itself, in that
sense (unless I am greatly deceived), nowhere.
Besides, enraged to offer is far less expressive than
enraged on to offer, which implies accumulated pro
vocation, and palliates in some degree (if any
thing can palliate) the unmanliness of the ima-

HENRY IV. 181

ginary wife-beater. Dropping the on damages the
force and the poetry of the line.

The suggestion I have to make preserves the
significant particle and rectifies the anomaly of a
pronoun looking blank for want of an antecedent
to keep it in countenance, quite as effectually as
the old annotator's correction, which extinguishes
the pronoun and the want together. I propose to
read :

So that this land, like a man's peevish wife
That hath enraged him on to offer strokes,
As he is striking, holds his infant up
And hangs resolv'd correction in the arm
That was uprear'd to execution.

In favour of this suggestion I would further point
out that the comparison of the land [England] to
a man's peevish wife, is far more appropriate than
to an offensive wife, the latter not properly symbo
lising the relation of the kingdom to the king.
When King John, in the play of that name, is with
his troops before Angiers, which would submit to
neither English nor French, Falconbridge styles it
this peevish town.

The epithet in question is also employed by the
poet in divers other places. The resemblance be
tween the two locutions a man's peevish and an
offensive, is, indeed, small enough. Possibly the
compositor's eye caught the letters offe from the
line below. Another weak side may be found too
in the emendation. Several epithets equally plau-

N 3

182 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

sible perhaps with peevish, might be prefixed to
wife, such as froward or envious, and with any of
these epithets the suggested alteration would be
superior to the manuscript correction in the Perkins
folio, but such a plurality of rival readings without
marked superiority in any, necessarily renders the
genuine one uncertain. Nor is it clear to every
body beyond dispute that the anomaly of a pronoun
without an antecedent did not originate with
Shakespeare himself. Mr. Dyce pronounces the
correction in the Perkins folio, " as not only quite
unnecessary, but as one of the corrector's very
worst conjectures," an opinion, however, which he
does not vindicate by a single reason.* Mr. Singer,
on the other hand, says, " The substitution of her
man for him on at the end of Scroop's speech, is a
very plausible correction, and is evidently called
for. This may be considered one of the corrector's
few admissible conjectures." f Since neither of
these critics assigns the grounds of his conclusion,
neither of them helps us to come to a decision.

* " The Works of William Shakespeare," vol. iii. p. 552.
t "The Text of Shakespeare Vindicated," p. 117.

183

HENRY V,

THE following description of Falstaff on his death
bed has given rise to much comment and contro
versy. The Hostess is the speaker : " after I saw
him fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers,
and smile upon his fingers' ends, I knew there was
but one way ; for his nose was sharp as a pen and
a table of green fields." " Henry V." act ii. sc. 3.

The expression in italics, which is not to be
found in the quarto editions of 1600 and 1608, first
appears in the folio of 1623, and is universally
pronounced to be spurious. Theobald introduced,
the extraordinary correction, and 'a babbled of green
fields" which has been generally adopted.

The favoured emendation seems to me not only
to have no support whatever in the context but to
be quite discordant with it. It has doubtless been
recommended by its prettiness and the supposed
ease with which '« babbled might have been
perverted into a table.

On the other hand babbling of green fields is

N 4

184 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

inconsistent with the rest of the talk ascribed to
him ; for immediately after the expression in dis
pute, the Hostess proceeds to tell her audience that
he cried out God three or four times : he " bade me,"
she adds, " lay more clothes on his feet : " and we
are further informed that " he cried out of sack : "
he affirmed women were devils incarnate : he said
once the devil would have him about women : he
talked about the whore of Babylon : he saw a flea
stick upon Bardolph's nose, and said it was a black
soul burning in hell. These are the particular
details of his last moments. Amidst such topics,
such images, and such language, reported partly
by the Hostess and partly by the Boy to have
been the utterances of Falstaff immediately before
death, what place is there for babbling of green
fields?

Several suggestions with a view to correct the
wrong reading, have been brought forward, for the
particulars of which I must refer to the Variorum
.Edition. One commentator supposes it to have
originated in a marginal direction having slided
into the text, for which supposition there appear
to be no grounds : another proposes to read on a
table of green fells, meaning a table-book with a
shagreen cover.

This — perhaps the likeliest of all the proposals
— might be rendered still more likely by substitut
ing greasy for green, and putting fell in the singular
number; which alterations would transform the

HENRY V. 185

passage into " his nose was as sharp as a pen on a
table [or tablet] of greasy fell."

Even the correction thus modified has so little
probability in its favour that it is scarcely worth
while referring to any other passages by way of
supporter invalidation. Greasy fells is a phrase
in " As You Like It," but applied to living ewes
with the fells still on their backs*, and it is not to
be found elsewhere. In the use of the epithet
there may be supposed to have been a covert
reference to the personal condition of Falstaff
himself, who in one place (" Merry Wives " act ii.
sc. i.) is called a greasy knight, and in another
("Henry IV." Part I. act ii. sc. iv.) an obscene
greasy tallow-keech. It may also be said that
there is at least congruity in connecting pen and
tablet of parchment f , and none in connecting pen,
table, and green fields.

The emendation is, nevertheless, not satis
factory; and the same may be said of the one
registered in the Perkins folio : " his nose was as
sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze" Why
should the sharpness of a pen be coupled with the
covering of a wooden table? And the question
here put leads me to remark that strict congruity
seems to require the nose to be compared in point

* "Is not parchment made of sheep -skins?" asks HamLt,
act v. sc. 1 .

f King John on his deathbed utters a curious expression
" I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen upon a parchment."

186 THE TEXT OF SHAKES: BARE.

of sharpness to something which projects from a
surface, as the gnomon of a dial.

It will be concluded from this discussion, that
the reading of the passage must be set down as
indeterminate ; though " the babbling of green
fields " should certainly not be kept up.

187

HENRY YL

THE passage I have next to cite can scarcely be
brought under the head of indeterminate, but
since it has given rise to a correction in the
Perkins folio, not only needless but easily driven
from the field by competitors, and deservedly
condemned by the generality of critics, I do not
know that I can find a more appropriate place
for it.

It furnishes us with a sample of the quality of
those whole lines which are occasionally inter
polated by the manuscript corrector.

The passage referred to forms part of Glouces
ter's reply to the King Henry the Sixth's requi
sition that he should give up his staff of ofiice.
The received reading is,

" My staff? here, noble Henry, is my staff;
As willingly do I the same resign,
As e'er thy father, Henry, made it mine ;
And even as willingly at thy feet I leave it,
As others would ambitiously receive it."

Henry VI. Part II. act ii. sc. 3.

188 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The corrector after the first line, introduces
another to make up with it a rhyming couplet :

" To think I fain would keep it makes me laugh."

Here, it may at the outset be remarked, there is
no proper starting-place for emendation, no call to
tamper with the received text : there is no fault to
correct in the sense, and there is certainly no
necessity to supply the blank in the rhyme, for
the sake of making the passage correspond with
the rest of the dialogue, where rhyme and blank
verse alternate without rule. But were the case
otherwise there remains the fundamental objection
to the interpolated line that it does not fall in with
the tone of the context. Not only is it feeble but
it jars on the feelings like a discord on the ear.
Nor is this all. I find on proceeding to apply the
other criteria to the correction that the mere words
of the addition are Shakespearian enough, but there
is no special reason why this particular line
should be added rather than any one of half a
dozen other lines which might be devised to
complete the couplet equally well.

For instance, the supposed deficiency in the
verse might be supplied as follows :

My staff? here, noble Henry, is my staff,
1 never held it on my own behalf.

A line which if not perfect in point of rhyme,
would at least have the merit of harmonising

HENRY VI. 189

better with the spirit of the speaker; but which at
the same time I am bound to admit there are no
grounds whatever for believing Shakespeare to
have written.

I may here take occasion to observe that when
ever the old corrector of the Perkins folio ventures
on the interpolation of a whole line (an experi
ment trying enough to any one's intellectual vigour
when the task is to eke out the composition of
Shakespeare) his attempts are, as far as I have
examined them, and I think I have missed none,
alike unsuccessful and almost uniformly feeble.

This is important, because as he adduces no
extrinsic considerations to prove the interpolated
lines to be the legitimate progeny of our great
poet, the only possible circumstance to throw
upon them a colour of genuineness is their in
trinsic excellence. Whole lines invented to fill
up vacancies left by lost ones must in the na
ture of the case be destitute of the same kind
of evidence as offers itself for single phrases, and
it is not easy to devise a combination of circum
stances which would take any of them out of the
category of mere conjectures.

190 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

HENRY VIII.

THE Perkins folio proposes a correction of the
following passage in " Henry VIII." in which a
phrase is manifestly corrupt. It represents Anne
Boleyn speaking to a friend, an old lady, who had
just been rallying her on her sudden elevation to the
rank and title of the Marchioness of Pembroke :

" Good lady,

Make yourself mirth with your particular fancy,
And leave me out on't Would I had no being,
If this salute my blood a jot ; it faints me
To think what follows." Act ii. sc. 3.

"Whatever meaning," says Mr. Collier, "may
be attached to the expression salute my blood, the
sense of the poet is rendered much more distinct
if we substitute a different word easily misread

or misprinted : —

Would I had no being,
Tf this elate my blood a jot.

" Elate" Mr. Collier continues, " as an adjective,
is of very old use in our language, and it is doing

HENRY VIII. 191

no great violence to Shakespeare to suppose that
here he converted an adjective into a verb."*
He then states it to be one of the corrections made
in the Perkins folio.

Even Mr. Singer thinks this emendation specious,
although, as he remarks, "we have no other in
stance of Shakespeare's use of the word either as a
verb or an adjective."

Thus on the one hand it may be urged that the
word here proposed is not Shakespearian and also
that it is unusual with writers generally to talk of
elating the blood by exaltation of rank, or any
other gratifying incident. We speak of warming
and quickening the blood and of elating or ele
vating the spirits. For these reasons the emen
dation cannot be said to command the assent by
its eminent felicity.

On the other hand, we say of an angry man his
blood is up, and our author makes Hotspur
address his followers in similar phraseology : —

" Fellows, soldiers, friends,
Better consider what you have to do,
Than I that have not well the gift of tongue,
Can lift your blood up with persuasion."

Henry IV. Part I. act v. sc. 2.

Another reading has suggested itself to me, the
transition from which to the received text would
be easy :

If this shall heat my blood a jot.
* " Notes and Emendations," 2nd edition p. 325.

192 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Against which there is certainly the objection
that the verb here is better in the present tense,
while the whole plausibility of my suggestion
depends on its being in the future, the emendation
assuming that shall heat has lapsed into salute.
Amidst these hostile considerations the reading I
think may be held as dubious.

193

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

IN " Much Ado about Nothing " there is a word
used by Dogberry which has given rise to some
discussion.

The sapient constable, having been called an
ass, recalcitrates in a well-known passage, and,
amongst other boasts, says —

" I am a wise fellow ; and which is more, an officer ; and which
is more, a householder ; and which is more, as pretty a piece of
flesh as any in Messina ; and one that knows the law, go to ;
and a rich fellow enough, go to ; and a fellow that hath had
losses ; and one that hath two gowns, and everything hand
some about him.". Act iv. sc. 2.

The expression had losses seems away from the
purpose, as the man is enumerating his claims to
consideration, and losses can scarcely be regarded
in that light. To substitute leases, as proposed by
the Perkins folio, would be adopting an alteration
quite destitute of appropriateness. I have two rival
suggestions to offer : (1) that the true reading is

o

194 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

horses, or hosses — a perversion of horses now, at
least, widely prevailing both in town and country
amongst persons of Dogberry's rank. It seems
quite in character that the " officer " and " house
holder," in repudiating the appellation of ass,
should allege, as a point blank contradiction, that
he himself had kept horses. How could an ass
have been the master of those superior animals ?
The logic is irresistible. I suspect, however, that
this particular boast, like the rest, ought to be
in the present tense, and that had was inserted
to make sense of losses. It is more congruous to
say, " and a fellow that hath horses"

But horses after all are rather too magnificent
a possession for Dogberry, and it would be a sad
anti-climax to descend from such a vaunt to the
boast of two gowns. In order to prepare secun-
dum artem for the latter, we ought to find a still
humbler garment. I venture therefore, if my first
suggestion be rejected — in which I am disposed
to concur — (2) to propose trossers in its place :

a rich fellow enough, go to; and a fellow that hath trossers;
and one that hath two gowns, and everything handsome about
him.

Trossers or trowses is a word, we are told, that is
very frequently met with in our old dramatic
writers, and it occurs once in Shakespeare, coupled
with the epithet strait, to denote tight breeches.

JHUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. 195

Had losses may possibly have been converted from
strait trossers*

Taking into view all the emendations suggested,
we can go no farther, I think, than discard
had losses, and leave the other proposals unde
cided.

* In Nares's " Glossary " a quotation is given, under this
word, which says of the Irish : " Their trowses commonly spelt
trossers, were long pantaloons, exactly fitted to the shape."
Malone's Shakespeare, Boswell's Edition, vol. xvii. p. 376,
contains a long train of notes and references on the same
topic.

o 2

19G THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DEEAM.

THE next example that I shall select is from "• A
Midsummer-Night's Dream."

Theseus is commenting on the "brief" or
catalogue of sports to be played before him and the
rest of the company. He comes to —

" A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love, Thisbe ; very tragical mirth."

On which he exclaims—

"Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is — hot ice, and wondrous strange snow."

All sorts of epithets have been proposed to
replace strange, which falls flat on the ear, and
manifestly does not form the requisite antithesis
with snow. Scorching, strong, black, seething,
strange black, swarthy, have all found advocates.
The desideratum seems, at first sight, plain enough.
As ice is the type of cold, so snow is usually the
type of whiteness, and the natural antithesis or

A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DEEAM. 197

rather contradictory combination being in the first
case hot ice, ought in the second to be black snow.
But then there is no discernible way in which black
could have been perverted into strange, — an ob
jection partially, indeed, removed by substituting
raven, which Shakespeare uses elsewhere in con
trast with snow. In " Romeo and Juliet " occurs
the expression, "whiter than new snow on a raven's
back." The line in question would then be —

That is — hot ice and wondrous raven snow.

There is, however, a strong argument against the
supposition that this, the most natural and simple
antithesis, was the one intended; and that is the
application of the epithet wondrous; for if the
reading were black or raven snow there would be
nothing certainly more wonderful in that than in
hot ice, and the epithet in question ought to have
ushered in the latter. To prefix it to the second
contradictory combination, and not to the first,
would show want of skill or tact in the poet.

As Shakespeare seldom used or placed an epithet
without a good reason for it, there is a probability
that wondrous was intended as a sarcastic allusion
to some marvellous traveller's story recently given
to the world, and describing a country covered
with some highly tinted snow, such as crimson, or
golden, or cerulean. Cardan, who died when
Shakespeare was a boy, stated in one of his books
that blue snow was common near the Straits of

o 3

198 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Magellan ; and to come to more recent times,
thirty or forty years ago Captains Ross and Parry
reported that they had met with red or pink snow*
— a phenomenon subsequently confirmed by others.
It is not, therefore, an outrageous supposition that
some voyager in Shakespeare's days had brought
back an account of having seen snow of a red or
golden colour, and that the passage before us is a
sly fling at the marvellous, and at that time perhaps
incredible, tale. If we adopt this theory the read
ing is easily set right :

" hot ice and wondrous strange snow,"

becomes

hot ice and wondrous orange snow.

The only change here is the substitution of o for
st, with the advantage to the metre of wondrous
being reinstated in its character of a dissyllable,
whereas in the received text it must be read as a
trisyllable, won-der-ous.^

* These facts are mentioned in Mr. Hunter's " New Illus
trations of Shakespeare," vol. i. p. 142, where he cites them in
quite a different connection. I have never had an opportunity
of looking into Cardan.

f " The extraordinary phenomenon of red snow observed by
Captain Ross and other Arctic voyagers naturally excited the
greatest interest both at home and abroad. This singular
aspect of a substance with which we never fail to associate an
idea of the purest aad most radiant whiteness, has been ascer
tained to result from an assemblage of very minute vegetable
bodies, belonging to the class of cryptogamic plants, and the

A MIDSUMMER- NIGHT'S DREAM. 199

I must fairly own, however, that this reading
can scarcely be considered as more than possibly
right unless some antecedent or contemporary
traveller's account can be produced of such a mar
vellous phenomenon.

What also makes against it is, that orange-tawney
was then the adjective employed to designate the
colour in question, not simply orange.

As moreover there was, as already stated, a tale
extant at that time about blue snow, the line in the
above extract might have reference to that alleged
phenomenon, and the epithet employed to describe
it might have been azure. We thus have three
readings besides those of the commentators :

That is — hot ice and wondrous orange snow.
„ „ „ raven snow.*.

„ „ „ azure snow.

natural order called Algts. They form the species named
Protococcus nivalis by Agardh, which is synonymous with the
Uredo nivalis of Mr. Bauer." . . . . " There is no reason
to suppose that the colouring matter itself, as well as the snow,
is a meteorological product, although Humboldt certainly
mentions a shower of red hail which fell at Paramo de Guana-
cos in South America." "Mr. Scoresby conjectured that the
red colour of the Arctic snow derived its origin from innume
rable multitudes of very minute creatures belonging to the
order Radiata. He had frequently observed the ice to be
tinged with an orange colour, obviously resulting from an
assemblage of small transparent animals." — Discovery and
Adventure in the Polar Seas and Regions, pp. 107, 108, 110.

* Another reading has occurred to me, since the text was
written, instead of raven, equally denoting black, and perhaps
equally convertible into strange, — namely, sable.

o 4

200 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The word orange would be the most easily
perverted into strange; but the transformation of
raven or azure into that epithet would not be
difficult.

On a retrospect of the various suggestions which
have been thrown out in regard to this one de
signation, we may well pronounce the reading
indeterminate.

201

ALL'S WELL TEAT ENDS WELL,

THE passage which I have next to bring forward
may possibly show how an expression in one place
sometimes serves to correct a wrong reading in
another.

In "All's Well that Ends Well," act iii. sc. 2,
Helena, apostrophising Rousillon, says : —

"Poor lord! is 't I

That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event
Of the none-sparing war ? and is it I
That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Wast shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark
Of smoky muskets ? O, you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim ; move the still-piecing air
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord ! "

Shakespeare would scarcely have used piecing (or
peering, as the old folio, 1623, has it) and piercing
in such close proximity. One of these words pro
bably led to the erroneous insertion of the other.
I suggest still-closing for still-piecing, and support

202 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

it by the following lines from " The Tempest,"

act iii. sc. 3.

" the elements,

Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well
Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs
Kill the still-closing waters."

Yet there is scarcely sufficient evidence in favour
of the emendation to establish it and take it out of
the present category, especially when we advert to
the consideration that the passage, insignificant as
it may seem, has been commented upon by War-
burton, Steevens, Malone, Tyrwhitt, and Douce,
most of whom are for the retention of still-piecing*,
first introduced by an unnamed critic.

With regard to the preceding verb move, which
it will be observed, is also in italics, the Perkins
folio has proposed to substitute wound — a decided
improvement on the received text, and not very
remote in resemblance, f Move is certainly flat,
and without particular significance where it is
placed. Another reading has occurred to me —
cleave — but although better than move, it is in
ferior to wound in appropriate meaning, and is not
a term used by Shakespeare in reference to air or
water, while wound has in its support the passage
already cited from " The Tempest."

* See Malone's Shakespeare, by Boswell, vol. x. p. 406.
f Compare wounde (often so spelt) and the old form

203

TWELFTH NIGHT.

IN " Twelfth Night " we have another instance of
indeterminate reading in the following passage:
Sebastian is describing his sister Viola : —

" A lady, sir, though it was said she much resembled me, was
yet of many accounted beautiful ; but though I could not with
such estimable wonder over-far believe that, yet thus far I
will boldly publish her, — she bore a mind that envy could not
but call fair."*

The words in italics are obviously destitute of
meaning : they are mere nonsense, and could not
have been written by Shakespeare. The Perkins
folio presents us with the following emendation : -

"But though I could not with self -estimation wander so far to
believe that, yet thus far I will boldly publish her."

Here the alteration is successful in restoring sense
to the clause, maintains the tone of the composi
tion, is consonant on the whole with Shake-

4'

* "Twelfth Night," act ii. sc. 1.

204 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

speare's usual style of expression, and is so near
in sound to the corrupt reading as to render the
substitution of the latter sufficiently probable.
Nevertheless it is not quite satisfactory ; for not
only is self -estimation a word not found in any
other place, but other equally plausible emendations
may be suggested. Mr. Singer brings forward a
rival reading by another "old corrector," which
strikes me as an improvement : —

" A lady, sir, though it was said she much resembled me, yet
was of many accounted beautiful ; but though I could not with
such estimators wander over far to believe that, yet thus far
will I boldly publish her," &c.

It unfortunately happens, nevertheless, for this
emendation that the word estimators is not Shake
spearian ; and as it also does not come in with any
particular felicity it may, on that ground, be set
aside. But if we change estimators into estimate
we shall adopt a term used familiarly by our
author *, and at the same time make passable sense
of Mr. Singer's reading :

I could not with such estimate wander over-far to believe that.

There is no particular harshness in saying that
an "estimate wanders," alias "opinion errs," or
that any one errs with it.

I should not have dwelt so long on this correc-

• * " Of name and noble estimate"

Richard II. act ii. sc. 3.

TWELFTH NIGHT. 205

tion of the Perkins folio, had it not been adduced
by an able critic in the " Edinburgh Review " as a
happy one. The conclusion to be drawn on a
review of the whole argument is, I think, that the
reading must come under the class which I am
engaged in elucidating.

The comedy of " Twelfth Night " in a subse
quent part contains another misreading, which
has exercised the ingenuity of a number of an-
notators without any decisive result. It occurs in
Act ii. sc. 5. I cannot perhaps introduce it more
succinctly than in the words of Mr. Collier : —

" Fabian is enforcing silence in order that
Malvolio, while they are watching him, may not
discover them, and says in the folio 1623 — 'Though
our silence be drawn from us with cars, yet peace ! '
The folio 1632 prints ' cars ' cares, and many
proposals have been made to alter ' cars ' to cables,
carts, &c. ; but 'with cars' turns out to be an error
of the press for by th' ears, or by the ears, and the
meaning is perfectly clear when we read, ' Though
our silence be drawn from us by tW ears, yet
peace ! ' :

Mr. Singer, who justly terms this a most impro
bable phrase, is not happy in his own suggestion —
" with tears." The proposed emendation, however,
of the Perkins folio is more than improbable,
— it is utterly devoid of appropriate meaning.*

* There is a part of the dialogue between the Prince and
Falstaff in " King Henry IV." Part II. act ii. sc. 4, which

206 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

The poet is talking figuratively of silence being
drawn from the persons in the scene, instead of
sounds being drawn from them. He is in fact
employing the same terms in regard to silence
as we usually employ with regard to a secret ;
and when did anyone speak of drawing a secret,
or indeed utterances of any kind, from another
" by the ears." We usually look to the tongue as
the organ through which such communications
are to come.

Nothing can be plainer than the speaker's in
tention to enjoin in a strain of half-humorous
exaggeration, that • his comrades should preserve
silence, even though the utmost violence should
be employed to make them break it, though, in
fact, they should be put to the torture. This was
meant to be expressed in the curt way alone
practicable under the circumstances by some mo
nosyllable which cars has unfortunately displaced,
and which it is our business to recover. If we
read screws instead of cars the restoration will, if
I mistake not, be accomplished. " Though our
silence should be drawn from us with screws, yet
peace ! "

may seem at first sight to countenance this reading. Falstaff
says to the Prince — " I am a gentleman, thou art a drawer;"
to which the latter replies, "Very true, sir; and I come to
draw you out by the ears." But to make this bear upon the
case, silence must be supposed to be drawn out of Fabian
and his companions by her own ears — a somewhat violent
metaphor.

TWELFTH NIGHT. 207

So late as the days of Shakespeare, and even
later, judicial torture for the purpose of extorting
confessions was not obsolete, and we find sundry
allusions to it in his dramas. Long after the pre
ceding emendation had struck me, I was pleased
to find that the late Mr. Sidney Walker had
proposed to read racks*, which as completely suits
in point of meaning as my own suggestion, but is
liable to certain objections. Racks would not per
haps have been so easily perverted into cars as
screws would;' and on looking at the context we
shall see that, if the proposed noun were inserted,
the singular number with the definite article would
be required to square with common usage : we
should have to read the rack, not racks, in conse
quence of which the proposed emendation would
be farther removed from probability.

On the other hand the term rack occurs a
number of times in the plays (once or twice in the
plural), and is evidently a familiar phrase, while
the noun screw does not occur once, and the paro-
nymous verb only twice, in neither case with any
reference to torture. An instance of the use of the
former word presents itself in the " Merchant of
Venice," act iii. sc. 2.

" Portia. Ay, but, I fear, you speak upon the rack.
Where men enforced do speak any thing."

Giving all these considerations their due weight,
* " A Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare."

208 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

although I still retain a father's preference for
screws, I think the reading cannot be regarded as
otherwise than undetermined.

It is fair to add, that there is one passage in
another play which has been cited as favourable
to the received reading : Launce in the "Two Gen
tlemen of Verona " (act iii. sc. 1) says —

" I am in love, but a team of horse shall not pluck that from
me."

Surely, however, drawing with a team of horse —
an every day operation — is not drawing with cars,
which no one ever witnessed. Those vehicles, al
though they may be convenient machines for
carriage, are clearly not instruments of draught.

200

THE WINTEE'S TALE,

AMONGST the minor alleged corruptions in the
text, there is one, consisting of a single mono
syllable, about which Sir J. Hanmer, Dr. Warburton,
Dr. Thirlby, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Steevens, Mr. Ma-
lone, Mr. John Mitford, Mr. Singer, Mr. Dyce, and
the old corrector of the Perkins folio, or rather his
editor, with other critics, have all given us their
several opinions. It occurs in " The Winter's
Tale" (act. iv. sc. 3). Perdita says to Florizel:

" Sir, my gracious lord,

To chide at your extremes it not becomes me ;
O, pardon that I name them ; your high self,
The gracious mark o' the land, you have obscur'd
With a swain's wearing ; and me, poor lowly maid,
Most goddess-like prank'd up : but that our feasts
In every mess have folly, and the feeders
Digest it with a custom, I should blush
To see you so attired ; sworn, I think,
To show myself a glass."

Of the contending parties, some are for retaining
sworn ; others advocate swoon ; others, scorn ; and
the corrector in the Perkins folio, seconded by

p

210 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Mr. Collier, offers us so worn. It appears to me
quite unlikely that Shakespeare wrote either sworn
or so worn, neither of them having any particular
appropriateness, or even tolerably clear sense.
Swoon imports a rather too violent effect to be
produced on a maiden by seeing in a mirror a dress
of which every article was already known to her, —
an objection not applicable to scorn, which is
perhaps the " best of the bunch," although some
what pointless, if not misfitting the context.

Since none of these suggestions can be considered
perfectly satisfactory, I will hazard a still different
one, namely, frown, which seems indeed less easily
convertible into sworn than the rest, but contains
all the same letters except the initial consonant,
and every critic knows that s and / are frequently
interchanged. All that I can further say in its
favour is, that the fair speaker, having talked of
blushes, might very naturally mention another
phenomenon of her own face, and put frowns in
antithesis with them :

I should blush

To see yon so attired ; frown, I think,
To show myself a glass.

But there is another way of dealing with the
passage. The phrase / think, looks very much
like an excrescence in any of these readings : why
use it after frown rather than after blush? The
natural course of thought would be, "I should
blush to see you so attired, and recoil from looking

-^' THE WINTER'S TALE. 2 1 1

|C/i

at myself in a mirror." To get quit, then, of this
superfluous phrase and express the natural sequence
of ideas, we might read :

I should blush

To see you so attired ; sorely shrink
To show myself i' th' glass.

This emendation, however, is by no means so
felicitous as to command adoption, or to preclude
me from a further attempt.

When no decisively happy reading has been hit
upon, emendations are apt to multiply themselves
in conception without end. Another has just
occurred to me, which has the recommendation of
retaining and imbuing with significance the phrase
I think, and is, perhaps, superior in simplicity to any
hitherto mentioned:

I should blush

To see you so attired * ; more, I think,
To show myself a glass ;

or perhaps better i1 th\ glass. Here the train of
thought seems perfectly natural : " I should blush
to see you dressed like a swain, and blush still
more I think, to view myself in the glass prank'd-up
like a goddess." The phrase / think, becomes less
out of place, or rather surrenders its character

* One of the commentators — Mr. Walker, if I recollect
right — has made the just remark that it is not necessary to
read attired, as the word was probably intended to be pro
nounced att-i-erd.

r 2

212 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

of a patch, and the required incident of the word
more lapsing into sworn (probably through the
intermediate form swore), is easily conceivable.

Nevertheless, the passage, after all is said, cannot
be rescued from the rank of doubtful without more
light or more sagacity than any one has hitherto
shown himself to possess. I prefer the last pro
posed emendation, on the whole, as the simplest
and most appropriate to the speaker.

213

PART IV.

VERBAL REPETITIONS.

SINCE there appears to be some difference of
opinion, how far the repetition of a word is to be
considered an indication of spuriousness in the
received text of Shakespeare's Plays, I purpose to
discuss the question in the present chapter.

It must be admitted at the outset, that when a
word which has been once used is, without apparent
reason, used again before the sound of the first has
had time to fade from the ear, the effect is generally
felt to be displeasing. Every one has probably
noticed the disagreeable impression so produced on
himself and others. I have personally remarked
such sensitiveness in actual life hundreds of times.
It has, for example, frequently happened to myself,
while I have been dictating to a secretary in the
presence of friends interested in what was going
on, and have inadvertently made use of the same
expression twice in one sentence, that some one or

p 3

THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

other of the auditors, not perhaps remarkable for
literary fastidiousness, has called my attention to
the repetition by observing, "you have had that
word before."

I mention this trivial circumstance to show the
prevalence of distaste for such verbal repetition as
occurs without apparent reason, even amongst
those who do not cultivate style ; and I scarcely
need to add that, amongst those who do, it is
regarded as a blemish in composition, and habitually
shunned by the practised writer.*

We must, then, consider it in this light when it
is found in Shakespeare ; and since we cannot
suppose him inferior to ordinary men in nicety of
taste or in sensibility to (if I may so apply a
scientific term) the interference of sounds, we may
safely conclude that he would instinctively, if not
systematically, avoid it. Hence the passages of
his writings in which it appears without special
reason, and in a way to offend the ear, may be set
down as so far spurious. A few examples may be
cited where this conclusion seems inevitable.

The following occurs in "As You Like It "

* One eminent writer within my recollection systematically
adopted the practice of repeating a word or a phrase, whenever
the least ambiguity was possible through employing a pronoun
or other substitute. This, no doubt, rendered his composition
clear and precise, but detracted from both its agreeableness
and its force. I allude to Mr. John Austin, in his " Province
of Jurisprudence Determined," first edition. A second edition,
which I have not seen, has recently appeared.

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 215

(act v. sc. 2), in answer to the inquiry " what 'tis
to love : "

" It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes ;
All adoration, duty, and observance ;
All humbleness, all patience and impatience ;
All purity, all trial, all observance"

From this clumsy iteration, every voice and pen
unite to exonerate Shakespeare. It can be the
result of nothing but miscopying or misprinting.

A no less palpable instance of the same fault
presents itself in Part II. " Henry IV." (act i.
sc. 1 ), where Travers is giving an account of what
he saw and heard to the Earl of Northumberland.
He had met with a horseman riding hard, who
paused to tell him of Hotspur's death in battle :

" With that he gave his able horse the head,
And bending forward, struck his able heels
Against the panting sides of his poor jade
Up to the rowel head" —

another undisputed blunder either of the copyist
or of the compositor, which no one thinks of
imputing to the author of the play.

A third example may be cited from " Hamlet "
(act ii. sc. 2). Polonius says to the King, according
to the received text :

" Give first admittance to the ambassadors ;
My news shall be the news to that great feast."

So evidently corrupt, that not a single editor, I
believe, is found to defend it.

p 4

216 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

That the repetition in the preceding cases is not
considered genuine, does not depend merely on the
monotony or cacophony produced. In each case
there is another defect. The occurrence of the
word observance twice in the first-cited instance is
sheer tautology, in itself displeasing ; and the same
may be said in regard to news in the third. In
the second example, the application of the epithet
able to heels is not tautological, but altogether
inappropriate, and contrary to usage.

There are many cases, however, where the
fault may be said to be pure. The double oc
currence of a verb in the third and fourth lines
of the following quotation (which I do not find
noticed by any prior critic) is exceptionable,
purely on the ground of its being a repetition,
without that objection being, as in the preceding
cases, mixed up with considerations of either
tautology or inappropriateness. The same verb, it
will be observed, occurs again both in the eighth
and the tenth lines with unimpeachable propriety ;
so that the passage presents us with a specimen of
genuine as well as of spurious recurrence of a
word, in apposite illustration of the subject in
hand :

" My name is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk ;
Who hither come engaged by my oath
(Which God defend a knight should violate),
Both to defend my loyalty and truth
To God, my king, and his succeeding issue,
Against the Duke of Hereford that appeals me ;

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 217

And, by the grace of God and tins my arm,
To prove him, in defending of myself,
A traitor to my God, my king, and me :
And as I truly fight, defend me heaven !"

Richard II. act i. sc. 3.

Here, I think, the first defend has crept into the
text from the eye of the compositor undesignedly
catching the word from the line below. The term,
it will be observed, is used in the two lines in two
widely different senses, in both of which it was
regularly employed in those days, and often by
Shakespeare himself. The improbability is that
he should employ the verb, with those two diverse
significations (of which he must doubtless have
been aware), in two successive lines, when there
was a phrase at hand with the first signification,
which he was more in the habit of using.

For the reasons assigned, I would suggest the
reading,

My name is Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk ;
Who hither come engaged by my oath
(Which God forbid a knight should violate),
Both to defend my loyalty and truth.

The word for/end would answer the purpose
equally well with forbid, and may at first sight
seem preferable on account of its near resemblance
to defend; but if I am right in my hypothesis as to
the origin of the repetition, that circumstance is
really not material; and, if it were, would be out
weighed by the fact that Shakespeare uses the

218 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

phrase God forfend only once, while his most usual
phrase to express the same meaning is God forbid.
It is remarkable, indeed, that in all other cases
than that one, when he uses forfend in an invoca
tion to supernal power, he joins it with heaven —
heaven for/end ; or with the plural of the divine
name — the Gods forfend.

Spurious duplications, equally striking and equally
incontrovertible, might be cited to an extent not
generally suspected.* They have obviously arisen,
or might have arisen, in the ordinary course of
transcribing or putting into type.. Every one who
has been concerned with copying or printing must
have encountered or committed similar mistakes ;
and, considering the condition of authorship and of
the press when Shakespeare's works were produced
and published, it may be safely pronounced that
the occurrence of numerous blunders of this class
was inevitable. No kind of error is, in truth, more
easy to commit.

There are repetitions, however, of a very dif
ferent character from those which are justly held
as indications of corruption; repetitions which
claim to be genuine, and can show good cause why
they make their appearance.

As the first-mentioned sort were unavoidable

* Mr. Walker adduces between one and two hundred in
stances, but a number of them I conceive may be shown to be
genuine, and others of doubtful spuriousness. See his " Critical
Examination," vol. i. p. 276.

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 219

from the channels and processes through which the
plays made their way to the public, so those others
were sure to occur in the regular course of author
ship. In such an extensive range of composition
as Shakespeare's works embrace, numerous occasions
must arise in which the repetition of a word, so far
from being a mistake on the part of copyist and
compositor, would be introduced by the author
himself because it was conducive to clearness, or
emphasis, or compactness of expression, or to the
complete bringing-out of a comparison, or anti
thesis, or point of wit, or turn of thought. Of
this kind of duplication, which is, of course, always
to be taken as genuine, and can seldom give rise to
controversy, I will also adduce a few examples.

One of the simplest cases is the following, from
the second part of " King Henry IV.," where the
Prince is kneeling at the death-bed of his father, and
explaining the rather premature act of taking away
the crown. It contains two repetitions, both
unexceptionable.

" If I do feign,

G, let me in my present wildness die,
And never live to show the incredulous world
The noble change that I have purposed !
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead
(And dead almost, my liege, to think you were).
I spake unto the crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it : ' The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father ;
Therefore thou best of gold, art worst of gold' "

Act iv. sc. 4.

220 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEAKE.

Here the natural play of thought could be
effected only by the double employment of the
respective terms.

I take next another repetition, the propriety of
which is too evident to be enlarged upon. Hotspur
("Henry IV." Part I. act iv. sc. 1) is endeavour
ing to show the advantages of his father's absence
on the approaching contest :

" You strain too far.

I rather of his absence make this use : —
It lends a lustre and more great opinion,
A larger dare to our great enterprise,
Than if the earl were here; for men must think,
If we, without his heJp, can make a head
To push against the kingdom, with his help
We shall o'erturn it topsy-turvy down."

To have varied the expression by substituting a
synonyme (as aid, e.g.) would have weakened the
antithesis as well as loosened that compactness or
colligation of the sense which a recurrence of the
same word frequently effects.

The following instance strikes me as well show
ing how iteration may contribute to the point of a
sentiment. It is from " King John " (act iii. sc. 4).
The dauphin Louis, in despair after the defeat of
the French forces by the English, breaks out :

" There's nothing in this world can make me joy :
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man ;
And bitter shame hath spoil'd the sweet world's taste,
That it yields nought but shame and bitterness"

VEKBAL REPETITIONS. 221

In regard to this repetition, I differ from Mr.
Sidney Walker when he remarks, " Something is
wanting that shall class with bitterness; possibly
gall." To myself, on the contrary, it appears that
nothing is wanting. It is a complete expression
of what was intended — a turn of sentiment rather
than a play upon words, for which the repetition
of both shame and bitterness is necessary. Not to
insist on the pleonasm of coupling gall, as suggested,
with the latter term, to take shame from the last
verse and leave bitterness, as Mr. Walker is disposed
to recommend, would spoil the point of the lines,
whatever that may be worth, and only half extin
guish the repetition. The latter (were it requisite)
might be effectually and appropriately got rid of by
saying,

That it yields nought but gall and infamy ;

but we have no grounds for such an alteration,
while the actual reading is altogether in the poet's
style, and well expresses a familiar truth, — that
when we have suffered any bitter shame, the whole
world is for us full of nothing else.

Whatever we may, in point of taste, think of the
lines I shall next quote, it will be evident to all
that every repetition in them is genuine. They
form part of the lamentation of the Lady Anne
over the corpse of Henry VI., in the tragedy of
"Richard III.:"

" O, cursed be the hand that made these holes !
Cursed the heart that had the heart to do it !

222 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence !
More direful hap betide that hated wretch,
That makes us wretched by the death of thee,
Than I can wish to adders, spiders, toads,
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives ! "

It would be difficult to find more decided ex
amples than the foregoing lines present of repetition
conspicuously genuine, both from the necessity of
the sentiment and from an intentional play upon
words.

I will cite one more instance in which there is
good reason to suppose the verbal iteration to be
genuine, premising that the first word put in italics
is so distinguished for a different purpose, to be
hereafter explained.

The Earl of Northumberland having just re
ceived the news of Hotspur's defeat and death, says
to the messengers :

" For this I shall have time enough to mourn.
In poison there is physic ; and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,

, Being sick, have in some measure made me well ;
And as the wretch, whose fever-weaken'd joints,
Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life,
Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire
Out of his keeper's arms ; even so my limbs,
Weaken'd with grief; being now enrag'd with grief,
Are thrice themselves."

The substitution of pain for the first grief has been
proposed. Not only, however, does there seem too
little call for alteration to warrant a disturbance of

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 223

the text (especially as abundance of authorities
have been adduced for the use of the latter term in
the sense of bodily suffering*), but the antithesis
requires the repetition of the word: — weakened
with grief is contrasted with enraged with grief,
the contrast lying, not in the affection, but in the
effects of it.

Having cited this speech, I take occasion to
suggest the exchange of buckle, in the sixth line,
for knuckle. Since the earl is talking of his limbs
and joints, not of his armour (which comes after
wards), the latter of the terms in question seems
to me the more appropriate of the two.

This is the only instance in which buckle under,
in the sense of bend under, is attributed to Shake
speare, and I can find the phrase nowhere else;
while, apart from any force of custom, which it
appears not to have, it is in itself unmeaning — or,
more properly, the combination of those two words
is at variance with the usual signification of the
first of them.

It may be alleged, indeed, that knuckle under has
no precedent in Shakespeare, any more than buckle
under, — which is true enough; but it has in its
favour that it bears a strong affinity to joints, and
that unlike buckle under, which is never met with,
it may be heard amongst our peasantry and arti-
zans even in the present day.

* Boswell's "Malone," vol. xvii. p. 17.

224 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

To return from this digression.

The preceding exposition has, if I mistake not,
sufficed to show (1) that there are repetitions in
Shakespeare which are decidedly spurious ; and
(2) that there are others which are as decidedly
genuine; but, in addition to such, there are many
which are so far dubious as to have formed sub
jects of controversy.

It may be instructive to notice a few of
these.

The first I will cite occurs in " All's Well
that Ends Well" (act i. sc. 3). The Countess
of Rousillon is addressing Helen, who conceives
she has the means of restoring the sick king to
health :

" Countess. — But think you, Helen,

If you should tender your supposed aid,
He would receive it ? He and his physicians
Are of a mind ; he, that they cannot help him,
They, that they cannot help ; how shall they credit
A poor unlearned virgin, when the schools,
Embowell'd of their doctrine, have left off
The danger to itself?"

" Evidently wrong," says Mr. Walker, " though I
am not sure that cannot heal him is the true cor
rection."

Most of the commentators pass this repetition
without notice, but it can scarcely be genuine. If
any reader will take the trouble of turning back
to the instance already adduced of a legitimate

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 225

repetition of the same word,* he will see that
there is not the same reason for the iteration here.
In the former case there was an antithesis to bring
out, best done by identity of phrase ; in the latter
there is a unanimity to be set forth, which cannot
be expressed without monotony except by varying
the language.

I concur with Mr. Walker in not accepting the
correction cannot heal, especially as a passage in
the next act, sc. 3, assists us, I conceive, to the
genuine reading. Helen, it may be premised,
having, before this scene ensues, accomplished the
cure of the king, a dialogue in reference to it takes
place between Lafeu and Parolles. Lafeu has
just said that the king had been " relinquished of
all the learned and authentic fellows " (namely, the
physicians), when the conversation proceeds :

* It is somewhat remarkable that I have had*to call atten
tion to three passages in which the word help is repeated. In
two of them, one of the helps I have shown to be spurious, in
the other, both to be genuine. There is a fourth passage noticed
by Mr. Walker, which does not, perhaps, fairly come under the
head of faulty recurrence, because the helps are separated by
two lines of interrupted dialogue ; but the first of them, as he
has pointed out, is the wrong word. See " King Henry VI."
Part II. act ii. sc. 1.

" Come offer at ray shrine, and I will help thee."

There can scarcely be a doubt that the reading ought to be
heal thee.

226 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

"Parolles. Right ; so I say.

Lafeu. That gave him out incurable,

Parolles. Why there it is ; so say I too.

Lafeu. Not to be helped,

Parolles. Right ; as 't were a man assured of an

Lafeu. Uncertain life, and sure death."

Incurable and not to be helped seem to point to
the genuine wording of the previous lines, also
relating to the king's illness, and I accordingly
propose to read :

He and his physicians

Are of a mind ; he, that they cannot help him,
They, that they cannot cure.

For reasons not perhaps worth detailing, the
substitution of the verb cure for help seems to come
better in the last line than in the preceding one.

Another passage in the same play, condemned
by Mr. Walker, may, I think, be retained as
it is:

Bertram, says to Helena (actii. sc. 2):

" Prepared I was not

For such a business ; therefore am I found
So much unsettled : this drives me to entreat you,
That presently you take your way for home,
And rather muse than ask why I entreat you."

I think it may be allowed to remain unaltered,
on the ground that the monotony of the repetition
is completely relieved by laying a proper emphasis
on why, in the last line ; so that the first entreat you,
having in natural course the rising inflexion, the
second entreat you may have the falling one'.

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 227

Mr. Walker suggests dismiss, to replace the
second ; but the proper regulation of the emphasis
(which, in fact, can scarcely be avoided) removes
all objection on the score of taste, and appears to
me to render the received reading more expressive
than the lines would become by the substitution of
another verb.

Besides, if we would get quit of the repetition
entirely, we must go further than Mr. Walker, and
discard the duplicate pronoun as well as the verb
preceding it. A line may easily be found that
would do both ; for example :

And rather muse than ask why I request it ;

in which line the last verb may be safely adopted
as a proper supplement to entreat, on the authority
of no less a personage than Quince the carpenter,
who says, " I am to entreat you, request you, and
desire you," — offering us a choice of synonymes, if
not as copious as Dr. Roget * would supply, yet
quite sufficient for the emergency.

From this discussion we appear to arrive at
something like definite principles in reference to
the subject of it.

(1) Repetition, as such, offends the taste when
there seems no reason for it; and is especially to
be condemned if it involves tautology, or an
inappropriate and unsanctioned use of terms.

* Vide his " Thesaurus of English Words."
Q 2

228 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

(2) Repetition, on the other hand, does not
offend the taste, and is consequently not to be con
demned, when it conduces to compactness or
emphasis, or strengthens antithesis, or assists the
point or turn of a sentiment, or is requisite for an
intentional play upon words.

When, accordingly, any repetition in Shakespeare
can be shown to fall under the first of these pre
dicaments, the probability is that it was not the
product of his pen.

If, on the other hand, a repetition can be brought
under the second description, we may fairly set it
down as genuine.

With regard to repetitions of a dubious cha
racter, which cannot be ranged decidedly under
either class, or which admit of controversy, one
safe rule may, I think, be laid down — namely,
where better sense is made by the repeated word
in both places than by any substitute, we shall
probably be right in allowing the repetition to
remain undisturbed, giving sense the victory
over sound.

Before concluding the subject, I would again
advert to a point of some importance in our at
tempts at correcting the fault under review.

Take an admitted instance of it. Everybody, we
will suppose, sees the fault ; no one defends the re
ceived text, which is condemned simply on account
of the want of purpose and consequent bad taste
in the repetition. The majority of annotators, in

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 229

attempting to correct the fault, will proceed on the
assumption that the supplanted phrase must bear
some resemblance to the one substituted for it ; but
since the aimless and disagreable recurrence of
words may be owing to widely varying causes,
such resemblance cannot be regarded as necessary,
and to seek for it indiscriminately or exclusively
often misleads. So it has done, if I mistake not,
in a case which I have already adduced as an
undisputed example of faulty duplication. For
the convenience of the reader, I will quote the lines
again, which are in reply to an inquiry what it is
to love : —

" It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes ;
All adoration, duty, and observance;
All humbleness, all patience and impatience ;
All purity, all trial, all observance."

The critics have suggested, some obedience, and
others obeisance, in place of one of the duplicate
words, because these two nouns are somewhat like
observance, in beginning, at all events, with the
same syllable; not, I think, duly noticing that
while neither of these corrections would furnish
peculiarly appropriate sense, whichsoever of them
might be selected would still keep up a disagreeable
jingle, arising from the terminations of the three
last lines — namely,

obedience.

impatience.

observance.
Q 3

250 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare, we have a right to conclude, would
not have given utterance to so tasteless a mixture
of monotony and dissonance. The pursuit of
similarity has here, in my estimation, led the
critics astray.

If, leaving it out of contemplation, we assume
that we have nothing to guide us in the selection
either of the duplicate word to be dismissed
(whether that in the third or that in the fifth line)
or the word to be installed in its place, except con
siderations of taste, fitness, and conformity of style,
we shall probably succeed better.

After making trial of several emendations that
presented themselves, the following strikes me as
having a slight probability in its favour :

All adoration, duty, and observance,

All humbleness, all patience and impatience,

All purity, all trial, all devotion.

The last word accords well enough with the rest,
and may easily be shown to be Shakespearian.
Malcolm, in the fourth act of the tragedy of
u Macbeth," enumerating the graces befitting a
king, includes in the list, "mercy, lowliness, devo
tion, patience; " and in " Troilus and Cressida,"
purity and devotion are brought together in the
same sentence (act iv. sc. 4).

Should we adopt the word here suggested, we by
so doing should, at the same time, determine in
which line to put it; for there being already a

VERBAL REPETITIONS. 231

noun ending in tion in the first of the three lines
here quoted, it would be a departure from the very
principles of good taste we are insisting upon, to
force upon the verse the unwelcome addition of a
second noun with that ending, especially when the
third line offers no such objection to receive it.
Devotion, too, forms a better climax.

232 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

PART V.

CONCLUSION.— OBJECTIONS OBVIATED.

IT is not in the nature of the case that all the
attempts made in the preceding pages to restore
the text of our great dramatist should prove
successful, or be at once estimated at their real
value, whatever that may be.

The business, however, of justly appreciating
each of them has been rendered comparatively easy
by my having proposed no emendation without
assigning the reasons on which it is founded.

Leaving the particular alterations suggested to
maintain themselves by these reasons against ob
jections which it is impossible to foresee in their
exact shape, and therefore impossible individually
to obviate, I think I may venture to anticipate and
try to remove a few difficulties which even the
thoughtful may find in the principles applied to
the correction of the text.

It is probable enough that an objection of a

CONCLUSION. 233

somewhat subtile character may be raised to the
very nature of the method that I have pursued in
many of the most important emendations.

It may be alleged that some of the chief consi
derations adduced by me to prove that Shakespeare
could not have written certain lines or used certain
expressions as they stand in the received text, or
afterwards to justify the proposed emendations of
those lines, must have been unknown to the poet,
and could not possibly have swayed him in the heat
of composition. I have, it is true, in the prosecution
of my design, frequently endeavoured to trace the
natural or the habitual course and logical sequence
of his ideas and expressions, with a view of proving
that in a given passage his thoughts, as proceeding
from a man of clear and strong head, must have un
folded themselves in a particular way, and that the
passage in its received form, differing from the way
indicated, could not have been written by him.

For example : in discussing the language of a line
containing a question put by the physician to
Macbeth, where stuffed has usurped the place of
foul, I point out not only a violation of good taste
not Shakespearian, by a monotonous and disagree
able repetition, but that there is an incongruity in
using the word cleanse in the case of anything
merely stuff'd, which Shakespeare could not have
fallen into ; and that, if we look at the context, we
shall find the string of questions there introduced
uniformly characterised by a close correspondence

234 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

between the several verbs and their objects, so that
the marked deficiency of mutual adaptation be
tween the two terms, in this one question, proves
that they cannot both be genuine. From these
and other facts I infer that stuff 'd is wrong, and
that foul is right.

Now, it may possibly be said that I am here re
presenting the poet as expressing his thoughts with
a conscious reference to principles which we have
no reason to suppose he had at all in view. He
probably never glanced for an instant at the
circumstance that . the verb cleanse requires a
phrase expressive of pollution to follow it, or at
the uncouthness of aimlessly repeating a word in
the same line. But I have really made no such
representation of Shakespeare's consciousness.
We are all of us guided in intellectual action by
principles to which we seldom make conscious
reference. Our thoughts are suggested, combined,
associated, and uttered, without any advertence to,
nay, without any knowledge of, the principles on
which these incidents depend, unless we purposely
make them objects of attention. A hypothetical
example will elucidate this. Our convenient
friend A (by supposition) meets with a certain
person in the street ; that person, by having on
some peculiar article of dress, brings to his mind a
scene in Wales, where he first saw it worn ; hence
follows the recollection of the Welsh mountains;
thereupon certain geological phenomena are imme-

CONCLUSION. 235

diately suggested ; these take him to pre-historic
periods — to the igneous rocks, to the earliest traces
of vegetable and animal life ; to the first appear
ance of mankind on the mutable crust of our
diversified sphere ; and so his ideas run on till he is
landed, perhaps, in the " Vestiges of Creation," or
Mr. Darwin's " Origin of Species." Through this
long train of conceptions, you may trace that some
were suggested by proximity, some by resemblance,
some by causation; but whatever were the rela
tions that brought them into his mind, our friend
A was (a thousand to one) utterly unconscious that
any such governed his thoughts, or were circum
stances on which the intellectual procession de
pended.

So the man of genius is totally unconscious, not
only, like the rest of us, of the common principles
that lead on our ideal trains, but also of those
subtile causes which shape, or those peculiar links
which connect, his lofty or beautiful or powerful
thoughts — thoughts which come and marshal
themselves and depart without any law of which he
is at the moment cognizant. He is unaware, for
the most part, how his genius is determined to pro
duce the clear crystal of good sense, the brilliant
flashes of wit, or the richly-coloured flowers of
fancy by which his writings are distinguished.
But although unconscious of the principles which
direct him, he obeys them, or yields to their control,
or, in simpler and more accurate language, they are

236 THE TEXT OF SIIAKESPEAKE.

the recurring ways in which his mind spon
taneously acts ; and we, his readers, can often trace
those connections of thought, whether common or
peculiar, when they are before us in written lan
guage, of which he himself was insensible in the
act of creation.

Hence, in the event of his writings being vitiated
and mutilated by careless or incapable or unfaithful
copyists, it is a safe and legitimate proceeding on
our part to attempt, by studying the habitual con
nections of his ideas and the general characteristics
of his genius, together with his customary phrase
ology, to determine whether particular sentences
and expressions ascribed to him are genuine or not.
But by so doing we by no means assert that he was
conscious of the principles which governed the
operations of his intellect. We are only dealing, as
observers, with the relations we find in his uttered
thoughts and with their consequences.

A man like Shakespeare, of powerful intellect and
great command of language (not to complicate the
subject by naming other qualities), is naturally so
constituted that he cannot, so long as he is in a
healthy condition of body and mind, deliberately
utter anything weak, incoherent, or confused ; not
that he intentionally avoids weakness, incoherence,
and confusion, and is conscious that he does so, but
because these are not the fruits which his peculiar
cast of mind yields, any more than haws are the
fruit of the vine, or hips of the fig-tree.

CONCLUSION. 237

When, therefore, you find the composition of
such a man deformed by the faults just named, you
may conclude with much confidence that they are
patches put upon it by some external agency, — just
as you would conclude if you found haws and hips
on your vines and fig trees, that they had not grown
there, but had been stuck on by some mischievous
urchin or eccentric humorist. You would draw
a very different inference from merely finding a
grape discoloured, or a fig deficient in fullness and
flavour.

But, passing from the question regarding con
sciousness, objectors may further urge that I have
gone on the hypothesis of the poet's undeviating ex
cellence and impeccability — at least in certain par
ticulars. It may possibly be said that I have
assumed him to have been always a consistent
thinker and correct reasoner; to have steered clear
on every occasion of absurd propositions, lame
antitheses, and incongruous metaphors, and to have
uniformly expressed himself in the most forcible
and appropriate language : whereas he, like other
writers, doubtless sometimes failed and blundered
in argument, in figures, and in expression : conse
quently such assumptions are untenable, — and if we
start from them as principles by which to judge of
the received text, we shall be led into much falla
cious criticism and many erroneous conclusions.

The preceding objection is not without plausi
bility and even weight. It may be allowed that

238 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE.

Shakespeare occasionally committed such errors,
that such blots may be now and then found in his
composition. We may be here and there crossed
by the paucis maculis quas aut incuria fudit aut
humana parum cavit natura. The admission,
however, does not shake the validity of the proce
dure which the objection is meant to impugn. It
is possible that in a thousand instances, or even in
a hundred, the assumptions may fail once ; and, of
course, in that instance of failure I shall be attempt
ing to correct incoherence of thought and inanity
of language which really issued from his pen.

Well, what then ? Where is the mischief ? Let
us suppose ninety-nine criticised passages (or any
other proportion) out of a hundred to be restored
from corruption to the state in which they origi
nally came from his hands, and the hundredth,
with all its imperfections, to be genuine, and to be
erroneously improved.

What is the amount of evil? One passage is
transformed from its genuine faultiness into some
thing better, by following out the same principles
which effect the restoration of ninety-nine corrupt
passages to their genuine excellence. Would it be
good sense to abandon the method of proceeding,
and to insist on retaining the ninety and nine with
all their imperfections, lest, by restoring them to
their original purity, we should in a single instance
substitute a greatly better reading than the author's
own?

CONCLUSION. 239

The probability is so much in favour of coming
to a right result under such assumptions, that it is
wise to make them, notwithstanding the slight
chance of blundering into an improvement. The
latter is doubtless to be deprecated, since our object
ought to be the simple restoration, not the meliora
tion, of the original text ; but it is an evil, the
chances of which need not disturb us if we can
secure the greater good. There is, besides, another
consideration of much weight. If there are in
congruities and weaknesses and other faults in
Shakespeare, discordant with his usual strain, and
yet the genuine product of his pen, we may make
ourselves almost sure that they occur in the less
important parts of the dialogue. In those which
are of great pith and moment, we may take it for
granted that he could not fail to put forth all the
powers of his mind, his clearness of discernment,
his closeness of reasoning, his keen insight into the
analogies of things, his vigour of conception, his
richness of imagination, his almost preternatural
sense of the import of words, his unparalleled com
mand of language, and his admirable faculty of
condensation ; consequently, the risk of error which
we incur by proceeding on the assumptions in
question when we are dealing with those remarkable
passages where the restoration of the genuine text
is most to be desired, becomes exceedingly small.

Accordingly, I have ventured, with some confi
dence, to assume that in producing that masterly

240 THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE

composition distinguished as Hamlet's soliloquy,
the powers of Shakespeare's mind were fully awake,
and that he could not have originated the incon
gruity and inconsequence of thought by which the
received text in the early part of the soliloquy is
deformed. I have felt similar confidence in as
suming that, with an intellect at its full tension, he
could not have committed those faults of inco
herence of thought and awkwardness of expression
which disfigure and enfeeble the taunts of Lady
Macbeth when she is instigating her less resolute
husband to the murder of his guest.

Widely at variance with these views is the timid
reluctance of some editors and critics of Shakespeare
to admit any considerable emendation, notwith
standing their acknowledgment that the text is
spurious, or at least inexplicable, and although the
amendment proposed is capable of enduring the
most rigorous tests, as well as confessedly fits the
place assigned to it. Rather than innovate, they
will resort to the most strained interpretation of
language, and tenaciously hold to a reading, be
cause it has possession which could not have origi
nated with any writer of common sense, much less
with our clear and strong-minded dramatist. They
fail to see how the case really stands.

Here is a book written by one of the greatest
men of genius that ever lived, but handed down to
us with a text so imperfect and perverted, that it
contains hundreds, not to say thousands, of spu-

CONCLUSION. 2-41

rious passages. A critic takes the book in hand,
and, complying with the strictest rules and condi
tions which can be reasonably imposed, shows irre
futably a passage to be corrupt, and proposes a way
to correct it. If, unable to disprove his reasons, we
refuse to adopt what is thus offered to us, we are
rejecting an emendation extremely likely to be the
genuine reading while it is certainly an improved
one, and instead of embracing the proffered good, we
are retaining a word or a sentence shown on unim
peachable grounds to be spurious. We are casting
away what is proved to be very probably right, and
clinging to what has no probability in its favour.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX,

ARTICLE I.

A CURSORY COMPARISON OF THE CORRUPTIONS IN SHAKESPEARE'S
TEXT WHICH ARE NOTED IN THE PRECEDING COMMENTARY, WITH
MODERN ERRORS OF THE PRESS.

SUCH of the readers of the foregoing treatise as have had
little or nothJSTg to do with transcribing manuscripts and
printing or correcting proof-sheets, may possibly regard
some of the emendations brought forward in it as ex
tremely improbable from the magnitude of the blunders
implied ; in other words, from the great difference between
the received text in certain passages and that which I
have proposed to substitute for it. To the inexperienced
in those details which are necessary before a volume in
type can be placed under their eyes, it may be almost
inconceivable that such great mistakes should be com
mitted by either copyist or compositor ; and if they had
been committed, that they should have escaped the eyes
of those coadjutors whose business it was to revise the
written or printed sheets. Such readers can imagine,
perhaps, that kin might have been inadvertently changed
into knit, or niece into near, but are slow to apprehend the
probability, or even the possibility, of armed being trans
muted into able, or fruit into news.

B 3

24:6 APPENDIX.

The best way of obviating or removing an objection of
this nature is to show that equally great errors are com
mitted in the present day, when it is so much easier to
avoid them.

With this view I purpose to adduce actual instances from
recent works, and place them alongside some of the prin
cipal defects which I have pointed out or found already
noted, and have attempted to amend, in Shakespeare. If
such a parallel do not afford much novelty or instruction
to the literary adept, it may amuse the uncritical reader.
The comparison will be made under some disadvantages,
inasmuch as it is errors of the press alone in modern books
that can be cited, — that is, unintentional deviations of the
printing from the manuscript, without of course the know
ledge or conscious concurrence of the author ; but the
errors in Shakespeare to be compared with these are such
as may have arisen from two sources : some of them may
have originated in the printing-office, and some in the
preparation of the manuscript itself.

Since there are thus two sources of corruption in the
latter case, it is natural to expect the mistakes to be of a
grosser or more flagrant character than the errata in the
publications of our own time. As some set-off against
this, I may here premise that a number of the modern
errors of the press which I shall adduce will be taken from
daily and weekly journals — publications more liable to
lapses of that description than works printed and issued at
leisure. Still, were we to take into view the whole of the
errors in Shakespeare's plays, it might possibly appear that
they were of a grosser kind than those of our modern
press, newspapers included.

Whether this is really the case or not may be here,
however, left undetermined, since it is not requisite for my

APPENDIX. 247

present design to go beyond that limited number of spu
rious readings which I have myself made the subjects of
comment, and endeavoured to correct.

All I need undertake to show is, that these are not
grosser mistakes than such as are now daily committed .
and that, consequently, the alterations in the text made to
rectify them do not labour under any antecedent impro
bability on account of their magnitude.

I may, however, digress into the general remark, that
the prominent difference between the errors in Shake
speare's dramatic writings and those in modern books is
in their quantity, not in their quality.

If we take up a recent publication, even a newspaper,
we shall probably find the mistakes of the press " few and
far between :" if we take up « Macbeth," or "Hamlet," or
the " Tempest," as they appear in the earliest copies, we
shall perceive the defects in the text to be numerous ; but
if we proceed to compare the character of the two sets of
errors, we shall discover the greater portion of both to be
near akin. I say the greater portion, because there are in
the old copies omissions and mutilations beyond remedy,
which have, in the nature of the case, no counterpart in
the regular tenour of modern literature. It. is only between
errors of a corrigible kind that any comparison can well
be instituted such as I am engaged in.

The causes of this multiplicity of spurious passages iii
the works of our great dramatist have been already
several times adverted to, and have been explained,
as far as existing records supply the materials, by
various commentators. From the scanty evidence ac
cessible to us, it appears that, owing to the way in
which the manuscript itself was formed previous to
being placed before the compositor, many errors were

K 4

248 APPENDIX.

occasioned by circumstances not incident to the prepara
tion of modern works: some were committed in taking
down the words from dictation or recitation; others
originated in transcription ; and such, when once in
corporated with the text, would, in the absence or
aloofness of the author, have little chance of being
rectified at any subsequent stage. It further appears
that the manuscript thus formed was often badly written,
with the words much abbreviated, if not actually in short
hand ; and of all the causes originating errors of the
press, the illegibility of hand-writing is perhaps the
most prolific and influential. "When the proof-sheets
are revised by the author himself, mistakes from this
source can be easily rectified ; but such was not the good
fortune of any of the plays at present in question.

The causes which thus increased the quantity of
errors in the text of Shakespeare had not, however, the
same influence over their quality. The blunders and
oversights committed by copyists, and compositors, and
revisers, depend very much, in every age and in all
countries, on the same principles, — that is to say, on
the same mental defects and frailties; and hence, how
soever they are multiplied, a family resemblance is
generally traceable between those that respectively
deform the works of different authors, although the
parties to the blunders may have been widely separated
from each other in point of time and birth-place.*

* Thomas Hey wood, in his "Apology for Actors," 1612 (four years
before the death of Shakespeare), gives rather an amusing account of
his fate amongst the printers. " The infinite faults," he says, " escaped
in my book of ' Britaines Troy,' by the negligence of the printer, as
the misquotations, mistaking of syllables, misplacing half-lines, coin
ing of strange and never-heard-of words, these being without number ;
when I would have taken a particular account of the errata, the

APPENDIX. 249

"Waiving, however, the attempt to establish or ade
quately illustrate the general proposition above laid
down, which would require a disproportionate space
here, I have in view on the present occasion, as already
intimated, the less arduous task of showing that the
particular errors in Shakespeare's text, which I have
undertaken to deal with in the foregoing commentary,
can be paralleled by errors of the press in our recent
literature.

One of the most remarkable changes in the received
text which I have ventured to propose, is replacing
the sounding phrase a sea of troubles, in Hamlet's
celebrated soliloquy, by the humbler expression the
seat of troubles, — an alteration which, in its mere verbal
character, is rather slight, but which seems almost
violent in virtue of withdrawing the imagination from
the boundless ocean and fixing it on the narrow region
of the human breast.

The error, colossal as it looks, is paralleled by
a mistake which occurred a few years ago in a review
of one of my own works. The right reading of the
passage in question was

" The reasoner must have been acquainted with a similar case,"

which was perverted in the review to,

" The seamen must have been acquainted with a similar case."

The transition from reasoner to seamen is verbally as
great as from the seat to a sea.

printer answered me, he would not publish his owne dis- workmanship,
but ' rather let his owne fault lye upon the necke of the author.' " If
a work published under the author's eye thus contained infinite faults,
•we need not wonder that Shakespeare's works, of which a complete
edition did not appear till seven years after his death, abound with
the errors here described.

250 APPENDIX.

Almost as remarkable a change as the preceding
follows in the next line of the same soliloquy: by
a poniard end them, is put, as an amendment, in the
place of by opposing end them, in which the disparity
in meaning is not so marked, but the verbal alteration
is greater. The same review, however, will furnish
a tolerable match to this blunder. In citing a passage
which correctly given is, " The chief cases of similarity
being those of causation," the review ingeniously trans
forms it into, " The chief cases of similarity being those
of accusation."

A poniard is not more different from opposing than
causation is from accusation ; and the difference between
the two first readings becomes still less, if, as I before
suggested, we take the old forms. Compare

a poynard vice opponing,
with

causation vice accusation.

I have taken occasion to adduce several singular
mistakes in the tragedy of " Macbeth," all of which might
be easily "followed" by "modern instances." The two
I am about to cite are notable for having transformed
nouns with the abstract termination ness in the original
text (as I read it) into others with different endings and
different significations, making them into concrete terms.
Blanket is substituted for blackness, and beast for baseness;
to which I may add an analogous instance from another
play, where beauty has replaced blackness. The two first
may be met by a single example which I took down from
a newspaper in the current year, presenting us with gen
tlemen instead of gentleness; and the last is matched in
point of grossness by a misprint in another journal of
guardians for gentleman.

APPENDIX. 251

In the same tragedy the perversion of evade it into
inhabit is fully equalled by a corruption which crept into
one of my own volumes, and was not detected either by
the reviser at the printing office, or by the author who care
fully went through the proofs ; — an oversight the more
extraordinary, as the substituted word (like inhabit above
quoted) completely ruined the sense ; monstrous was put
in the place of monotonous.

When proposing to make the change (in Lady Macbeth's
strong expostulation with her husband) of love into liver,
I could not help anticipating that many wise heads would
be shaken at so bold a proposal and so derogatory a descent
from the tender passion. Lately taking up Emerson's
" Conduct of Life," I came to the following passage on a
somewhat different subject, where the verbal transmutation
is not less, and where the chasm between the meanings of
the right and the wrong reading is, to say the least,
equally wide :

" Not Antoninus, but a poor washerwoman, said, ' The more trouble
the more lion ; that's my principle.' " *

Linen transformed into lion, is certainly as extraor
dinary a metamorphosis as liver into love, whether we regard
it as typographical or substantial.

Another error in this great tragedy is so singular,
that it is difficult to find any analogous blunder in recent
publications, although there is no lack of equal ones.
Time and the hour, by a very natural lapse, has been sub
stituted for Time's sandy hour, — a corruption, however,
not surpassing one I met with lately in a newspaper, which,
having occasion to mention the eminent political economist
Thomas Tooke, called him Mr. Toolie.

* London Edition, 1860, p. 224.

252 APPENDIX.

The next example I have to cite brings before us a name
which all Englishmen, and especially all soldiers (if the
sentiment can admit of degrees) delight to honour. Miss
Florence Nightingale, in a letter not long ago addressed
to the chairman (I think) of some meeting of volunteer
rifle-men, liberally offered to present to the corps a pair
of colours. The report of this offer in the newspaper
wherein I first saw it, converted the intended gift into a
fair of colours, which future commentators, proceeding on
the principle that no change should be made in the text
when any possible meaning can be extorted from it, will
doubtless explain, as designed by that distinguished lady,
to signify a fancy fair and its lucrative proceeds ; such fairs
(they will add) having been often held in those days (some
times under the denomination of bazaars) for benevolent
or public-spirited purposes.

This is not a bad, although an easily detected, instance
of those simple substitutions of single letters which make
such disproportionate havoc with an author's meaning ; and
as it concerns what are eminently destined to be the play
things of the wind, it will help to keep in countenance my
proposed transformation in " Julius Caesar " of the lane
into the vane of children.

A single line in the tragedy of " Coriolanus " is re
stored to its genuine reading (as I think it) by two altera
tions ; one is a substitution of trump for tomb, the other of
child's for chair ; neither of which constitutes a greater
difference than I observed a short time ago in a country
journal, where administrative purposes had been sup
planted by administrative paupers. And if it be objected
by any reader that two errors ought in this case to appear
in the same sentence, otherwise there can be no complete
parallel, I can meet the objection by citing the following

APPENDIX. 253

passage from another journal : " The fleet of the British
government is at this moment winning its way across the
waters of the Atlantic," where fleet is printed instead of
flat, and winning instead of winging.

I have been somewhat at a loss to match the perversion
of the quintessence of white into a princess • — the princess
of pure white, as the received text gives it. On looking
over some notes, however, which I had made on errors of
the press, I found a case in point, so far at least as dealing
with a high potentate can render it so. A journal in the
present year (1861) unsexes Louis Napoleon's Consort,
and styles her the Emperor Eugenie. The reader will
notice perhaps a small difference, which is however of no
account in the comparison, — namely, that the first error
makes a princess, the second unmakes one.

The last name reminds me that I have yet to find a
counterpart to the blunder which has so injuriously (spretoe
injuria formci) discarded the attitude of the Queen of
Beauty, transmuting the shrinking Venus of the genuine
text into the shrine of Venus, which may mean anything.*
Abundance of equal transformations offer themselves, but
not one of them constitutes a notable parallel. In sub-

* A literary humorist might insist, for example, on its referring to
the scrinium unguentarium of Venus, of which Rich gives a representa
tion from a painting found at Pompeii. See the article SCRINIUM, in
his excellent " Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary and
Greek Lexicon," — a work which it would have cheered Locke's heart
to see, so .well does it correspond with what he recommends in his
" Essay on Human Understanding," and enforces in a section, from
which I can afford space for only a brief extract : " Toga, tunica, pal
lium, are words easily translated by gown, coat, and cloak ; but we
have thereby no more true ideas of the fashion of those habits amongst
the Romans than we have of the faces of the tailors who made them.
Such things as these, which the eye distinguishes by their shapes,
would be best let into the mind by draughts made of them." Book III.
Chap. xi. § 25.

254 APPENDIX.

stance, if not in form, the following error of the press may
serve the turn: — It is mentioned in the "Life of Edward
Forbes " as having occurred in a paper of his printed in
the " Edinburgh Philosophical Journal," and as having
been purely the consequence of his illegible hand-writing.
The correct manuscript reading was " Natural History
unlike her sister sciences ; " which was printed in the journal
" Natural History under its sub-sciences."

Like this gross corruption, the two last mis-readings
pointed out in Shakespeare were owing, I have little
doubt, to the illegible condition of the manuscript.

In the reprint of Gosson's " Schoole of Abuse " a
curious error occurs : " He that goes to sea must smel of
the ship, and that which sayles into poets wil savour of
pitch : " in which, I presume, poets was intended for
ports* ; and as only a single letter is in question, the
instance may serve to corroborate the prop which in
" Cymbeline," by an equally slight change, I have ventured
to substitute for the crop.

Shakespeare's works do not exhibit many mistakes in
compound words, or I have overlooked them ; for, in the
course of the preceding commentary, I have corrected only
two : I have restored winter-fend, which had been perverted
into winter-ground, and counterwait, which had been
perverted into countermand.

My memoranda of modern errors of the press afford me
only a single analogous one : " heir-apparent was lately
transmuted by a respectable journal into heir-apparel;
which I conceive leaves neither of the preceding blunders
in Shakespeare's text " unfellowed."

The fault or corruption which I have separately con-

* The reprint quoted from is by the Shakespearian Society, p. 14,
but whether the blunder is owing to the old or the modern typographer
I am not able to say.

APPENDIX. 255

sidered under the title of verbal repetition, I do not find
at all common in modern publications. My notes indeed
contain only two instances of it. Its rarity compared
with its former frequency is owing, I conceive, partly to
the stricter supervision which the proof-sheets have now
to undergo, and partly to the other circumstances, before
detailed, affecting generally the quantity of errors in
Shakespeare's text. In one of the instances I have just
referred to, the word author is printed twice — once in
stead of advocate ; in the other, there is fact + fact instead
of fact + part.

To those authors who are in the habit of making
extracts, or of copying their own compositions for the
press, this species of blunder must, I conceive, be familiar,
—at least if their experience tallies with my own. As a
case in point I may mention that, while preparing the
present treatise, I inadvertently fell one evening into a
palpable error of this description; and although I re-
perused at the time what I had written, I did not detect
the oversight till next morning, when the intellectual film
(i. e. pre-occupation of mind) which seems occasionally to
dim the discernment as to certain objects, and not to others,
had been dissipated. It was in transcribing a passage from
"Cymbeline," in which the following lines occur, that I
made the false step : —

" I have heard of riding wagers,
Where horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i' the docks by half." Act iii. sc. 2.

Instead of writing clocks in the third of these lines, I
repeated sands from the second line — an incident worth
mentioning only as an illustration of a real and frequent
source of literary mistakes.*

* In the quotation from " Cymbeline " I have adopted the emen
dation of the Perkins folio, viz. "that run i' the clocks by half,'

256 APPENDIX.

The proneness to this sort of iteration is rather curiously
exhibited in a slight error of the press which I accidentally
remarked in Bowdler's " Family Shakespeare ; " and the
same error may be cited as showing another thing worthy
of notice, that the repetition is sometimes made (para
doxical as the statement may be) before the original word
repeated, as in the line which has already been the subject

of comment —

" To seek thy help by beneficial help"

where it is the first help that has been thrust into the line
by the second.

So in the passage I have referred to as misprinted in
Bowdler —

" Yoo shall have me assisting you in all,
But will you woo this wild cat ? "

Taming of the Shrew, Act i. sc. 2.

instead of the received reading, " that run i' the clocks' behalf," not
withstanding the contemptuous denunciation of it by Mr. Singer, who
too often discredits criticism by bitterness of spirit and intemperance
of language, which are never the aids, although frequently the substi
tute?, of fact and argument.

The sound of both expressions in pronunciation being very com
monly the same, the question as to the genuine reading is to be de
cided by propriety and usage alone. To call an hour-glass a clock has
nothing forced about it, especially in a writer who tells us " larks are
ploughmen's clocks ; " and to say that the sands in it are not so nimble
as horses by half, or to keep strictly to the text, that horses are
nimbler by half than the sands in the glass, is only to employ a form of
speech exceedingly prevalent amongst the people. " Better by half,"
"quicker by half," "prettier by half," are common phrases. An
article in a Magazine (dated Dec. 1861), which I have just taken up,
uses the expression, " too fast by half."

On the other hand, to speak of the sands of an hour-glass running
in behalf of the clock, is, to say the least, strained ; and the difficulty of
telling exactly what it means, if we may judge from Mr. Singer's at
tempt, is not small. He explains the sense to be that the sands run in
lieu of, or on the part of, the clock ; expressions which are so far from
being always equivalent, that they are in this case diverse in signifi
cation.

APPENDIX. 257

Where it is evident that woo by a back stroke has trans
formed the first you into an orthographical likeness of
itself, passing over the two other you's without touching
them ; as the lightning sometimes wreaks its fire on one
privileged mortal (according to the poet*) and takes no
heed of his neighbours.

Occasionally very curious blunders arise from a misar-
rangement of the type. I do not recollect noticing any
such in Shakespeare ; there are none at least in the passages
I have dealt with; but it may be worth while adducing one
or two instances in modern printing, were it only to show
the possibility of committing gross oversights, even with
our improved methods of supervision, and thence to infer a
similar liability with inferior appliances two or three hun
dred years ago.

In a newspaper last July, I remarked a most extraordi
nary passage, viz. " an inch oateact" of which at the first
glance I could make nothing at all. It looked most like
an inch oatcake, but as that article of human sustenance is
not usually measured with a foot-rule and had no con
nexion with the context, I looked again, and after a little
perplexity saw that the dislocation of the type had revo
lutionised the meaning. When the letters were properly
marshalled, the right reading proclaimed itself to be an
inchoate act, and thus escaped from the dominion of men
suration and the category of eatables.

The celebrated " Essays and Reviews," amidst the
heavy blows aimed at it, will not be damaged by my noticing
a misarrangement of this kind in the seventh edition of
the work f, where the letter s (whatever the authors may

* u Qr favour' d man by touch ethereal slain.'' — THOMSON.
t Page 400.

S

258 APPENDIX.

have done) has certainly wandered out of bounds in
reason, that word being printed reaons.

Sometimes there is a clandestine exchange of letters
between an upper and a lower line, which is perplexing
enough till you detect the illicit barter. Knight's Pocket
Shakespeare (1851) presents us with as simple an instance
of this as can well be found :

" I dreading that her purpose
Was of more danger, did compound for her
T certain stuff, which, being ta'en, would cease
Ahe present power of life."

Cynibeline, act v. sc. 5.

The initial letters of the two last lines have so obviously
changed places, that I scarcely need point it out. The
marvel is how an error so gross could escape correction.

The occurrence of such extraordinary errors as the
preceding may in some measure facilitate to incredulous
readers the reception of my theory as to the origin of that
strange blunder with the word comma, which disfigures a
passage in " Hamlet " and which I have attributed to the
incorporation of a marginal direction into the text. I
must candidly own however that my very desultory search
has not met with any similar fusion in modern literature :
but if oversights are made in the present day, such as
those last described, there cannot be much difficulty in
supposing the one in question to have been committed
nearly three centuries ago, especially since the colla
teral circumstances so well combine to account for it,
and the proposed emendation so completely fills and fits
the vacancy created by turning out the intruding words.

Besides, although I have no corresponding blunder to
adduce in the literature of our own times, the classical and
biblical scholar knows that amidst abundance of errors of
all sorts, it has happened sufficiently often to show such

APPENDIX. 259

blending not to be particularly difficult — that the text of
ancient manuscripts has absorbed into itself the marginal
glosses of critics and commentators with much more
serious effect on the meaning than is exhibited in the case
before us.

s 2

260 APPENDIX.

ARTICLE II.

NOTE A, SUPPLEMENTARY TO PAGE 116.

WHEN I was proposing an emendation in the 1st act of
" Cymbeline " and the 7th sc., it was an oversight on my
part not to advert to another error, a few lines farther on,
where the speaker is affecting to be perplexed how to
account for the alleged faithlessness of Posthumus to his
wife and his defection to an ordinary trull. He goes on
to say,

" It cannot be i* the eye ; for apes and monkeys,
'Twixt two such shes, would chatter this way, and
Contemn with mows the other : Nor i' the judgment ;
For idiots, in this case of favour, would
Be wisely definite : Nor i' the appetite ;
Sluttery to such neat excellence oppos'd,
Should make desire * vomit emptiness,
Not so allured to feed."

The commentators, with the exception of Tyrwhitt,
strangely enough, receive the eccentric phrase vomit
emptiness without demur, and earnestly set themselves to
explain it as they best can. ' Notwithstanding all their
efforts, they do not succeed in proving that it has any
appropriate significance here.

Malone, indeed, has shown that it describes sufficiently
well an incident of sea-sickness, to which I need not more

* It may be well to mention, that desire is to be pronounced here
as a trisyllable, as if written (as it frequently was), de-si-er.

APPENDIX 261

particularly allude; but admitting that, we want to know
the propriety of its appearance in the passage before us.

Let us examine the exposition of it furnished by one of
the principal critics.

" lachimo," says Dr. Johnson, " in this counterfeited
rapture, has shown how the eyes and the judgment would
determine in favour of Imogen, comparing her with the
present mistress of Posthumus, and proceeds to say that
appetite too would give the same suffrage. Desire, says
he, when it approached sluttery, and considered it in com
parison with such neat excellence, would not only be not so
allured to feed, but, seized with a fit of loathing, would
vomit emptiness, would feel the convulsions of disgust,
though being unfed, it had no object."

Now, allowing this interpretation to be correct, its own
incoherence betrays that the passage is spurious. The
able critic quite overlooks the requirements of the person
ification. A man may first long for a thiug and then
loathe it, but to describe desire itself as loathing is to
make it " deny its nature ; " commit contradictory acts ;
"empty itself of its identity and become the opposite of
what it is."

The other terms used by the poet in speaking of desire
are correct enough : he represents it as susceptible of
being allured and capable of feeding ; in which there is
nothing self-contradictory, and we have on that account
as well as on general grounds a right to suppose that the
incoherent description of a passion, the very essence of
which is to long, as in a fit of repugnance and retching,
cannot be his.

All that is needed to extricate Shakespeare and his
readers out of this embarrassment, appears to me to be an
exceedingly slight verbal alteration. The poet, as T read

262 APPENDIX.

him, intended to say that sluttery should make Desire
prefer going without a repast to feeding on such diet as
that described. This meaning would be effectively brought
out by the substitution of a single word sufficiently re
sembling the spurious one. We have only to read,

Sluttery to such neat excellence oppos'd,
Should make desire covet emptiness,
Not so allured to feed.

The reader will discover for himself without my assist
ance how readily covet might be perverted into the received
reading. The error might have originated in the similarity
of the two sounds, or it might have arisen from an acci
dental transposition of the first and third letters in setting
up the type, turning covet into vocet. This done, the
blunder as it now stands would be virtually achieved, for
any reviser coming upon such a word would inevitably
convert it into vomit.

APPENDIX. 263

ARTICLE III.

NOTE B, SUPPLEMENTARY TO PAGE 118.

I HAVE intimated in a note at the foot of p. 118 that
there are reasons for altering the word feature, in the
passage quoted in that page, to figure. I will here add
that there are also grounds for substituting in a subsequent
line another epithet in the place of brief.

That the questions may be brought fully before the
reader, I will again quote the passage as I have corrected
it in the page referred to.

lachimo says that Posthumus was

" sitting sadly

He ring us praise our loves of Italy,
For BEAUTY that made barren the swell'd boast
Of him that best could speak ; for FEATURE laming
The shrinking Venus, or straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature : for CONDITION
A shop of all the qualities that man
Loves woman for : besides that hook of wiving
FAIRNESS which strikes the eye."

Here — set forth with almost the formality of a puri
tan's sermon — there are four distinct topics of eulogy, or
topics which ought to be and were doubtless intended to
be distinct; beauty, feature, condition, and complexion:
but since female beauty, as ordinarily regarded, lies in the
countenance, it seems an unskilful repetition to introduce
feature afterwards as a separate topic : it is a sort of cross
classification. What however is a greater fault is that the
speaker proceeds to append to the latter term circum-

264 APPENDIX.

stances not at all congruous with its import. He says in
fact that the Italian boasters on this occasion praised their
mistresses for features which made even the Venus and
the Minerva, in their respective attitudes, appear lame.
Surely while the beautiful features of one woman may so
surpass those of another as to reduce the latter to plainness
in the comparison, they cannot cause the inferior fair one to
wear the appearance of lameness in any attitude she may
assume. The two things have no connexion. Feature
consequently is not here the right phrase. The whole
train of thought requires the mention of an attribute dis
tinct from beauty of countenance and harmonising with
what follows. Such a one we have in figure. I propose
to read

for figure, laming
The shrinking Venus or straight-pight Minerva,

making even these much admired forms look lame in the
comparison. The change implied by this correction of the
received text, of figure into the corrupt reading feature,
can furnish no reasonable ground for demur, since greater
blunders are every day committed.

Let us now turn to the word brief, the objection to which
as an epithet applied to nature is that it is difficult to attach
a precise signification to it. We can understand what the
poet intends when he tells us that the exquisite postures
of the two statues are beyond nature, but when he speaks
of brief nature, the meaning is no longer clear; the objects
before our intellectual vision seem to vacillate ; and when
we call to mind that Shakespeare is not in the habit of
using epithets or designations without a precise .and
special significance, we may feel tolerably sure that brief,
which cannot be wrested by the greatest ingenuity into a
satisfactory acceptation, did not come from him.

APPENDIX. 265

It is not easy to find an adjective that will suit the
place. The poet evidently meant to say that the attitudes
of the Venus and the Minerva excel in gracefulness the
postures of untutored nature. They are such as spring
from cultivation and refinement. To express this meaning
with due observance of the rhythm, we have only mono
syllables to turn to, so that our choice of epithets is exceed
ingly narrow. Since a limiting rather than a character
ising term is required, mere prefixed to nature might do,
were it not so totally unlike brief both in sound and form.
I would therefore suggest another adjunct similar in
meaning to mere, but more resembling the spurious word in
its component letters. Bare nature would, it appears to
me, express all that the occasion requires or the poet
intended ; and it agrees in its predominant initial sounds
with the word it would displace.

If this be adopted along with the other corrections
which I have suggested and explained, the passage will run
thus :

for figure laming,

The shrinking Venus and straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond bare nature.

Compare this with the received text :

" for feature laming,

The shrine of Venus and straight-pight Minerva,
Postures beyond brief nature."

It is needless, I conceive, to do more than mention that
Theobald proposed stature instead of feature ; and that
Warburton, dissenting from this, defended the received
reading, by the assertion that, it meant proportion of parts,
which Theobald, he added, did not understand.* Since

* Boswell's Malone, vol. xiii. p. 213.
T

266 APPENDIX.

this assertion is not accompanied by any proof, it is suffi
cient to say that I never met with the term so used in
Shakespeare or anywhere else, and doubt much whether
any writer was ever guilty of such a misapplication of
language. Stature as suggested by Theobald is quite out
of place, that term being limited to height.

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