ON A PASSAGE IN "CYMBELINE," ACT IV. SC. 2.
It is so usual with Malone and some other commentators on Shakspeare to impute the errors of the printer to the poet, that we often find the most glaring instances of false grammar, and anomalies of construction, laid to his charge, and defended as the practice of the time; and as his own practice!
The following passage is an instance in point:
"Gui. Why, he but sleeps;
If he be gone, he'll make his grave a bed;
With female fairies will his tomb be haunted,
And worms will not come to thee."
Steevens with reason says:
"This change from the second person to the third is so violent, that I cannot help imputing it to the players, transcribers, or printers."
He proposed to read him for thee. Malone of course defends the absurdity. We may, however, be assured that it is not attributable to the poet. Whoever reads the passage with attention will perceive that the allusion in the last line is not to Fidele, but to the fairies haunting his tomb. It should be remembered that it was held that no noxious creatures would be found where fairies resort.
The compositor, as in other cases, mistook the word, probably written "thē," and printed "thee" for "them."
Your correspondent Mr. Halliwell having noticed my approval of the emendation of a passage in Coriolanus, found in Mr. Collier's copy of the second folio, where "bosom multiplied" is happily corrected to "bissom multitude," perhaps I may be permitted to say that I cannot subscribe to his opinion, that "it is one of those alterations which no conjectural ingenuity could have suggested." To me it appears that the steps are obvious by which any intelligent reader of the poet might be led to make the correction. The word which was mistaken by the printer for "bosome" occurs in a previous scene of the play, where it is "beesome" in the folios; and a recollection of this would naturally lead to the conjectured emendation. Indeed the word appears to have been not unfrequently written "beasom," as we find it in Huloet's Dictionary. The word "multitude" would suggest itself to any attentive reader of the play, from its repeated occurrence in the 3rd Scene of Act II.: and we must always suppose the writer to have been intent upon correcting errata. The correction of "infuite comming" to "infinite cunning," in Measure for Measure, is, in my mind, an instance quite equal in "conjectural ingenuity;" and we know that we owe it to that of the late Mr. Sidney Walker.
I must candidly confess that the specimens of the corrections given by Mr. Collier in his first two communications to the Athenæum gave me the same dissatisfaction and apprehension that Mr. Halliwell appears to have entertained; but I do not draw the same inference that gentleman seems to do, from the occurrence of this one truly happy conjectural emendation. It is, however, sufficient to convey a favourable notion of the acuteness of the writer of the emendatory notes, and nothing more.
S. W. Singer