UNANSWERED QUERIES REGARDING SHAKSPEARE.
Domestic anxieties having unavoidably detained me in this place during the last three or four months, I am necessarily without nearly all my books. My corrected folio, 1632, is one of the very few exceptions; and as I have not the No. of "N. & Q." to which A. E. B. refers, I am unable to reply to his question, simply because I do not remember it.
To whomsoever these initials belong, he is a man of so much acuteness and learning, that, although I may deem his conjectures rather subtle and ingenious than solid and expedient, I consider him entitled to all the information in my power. I do not, of course, feel bound to notice all anonymous speculators (literary or pecuniary); but if A. E. B. will be good enough to take the trouble to repeat his interrogatory, I promise him to answer it at once.
My recent volume was put together with some rapidity, and under many disadvantages: not a few of the later sheets were corrected, and several of them written, two hundred miles from home. Such was the case with the note on the suggestion I hastily attributed to Mr. Cornish, on the faith of his letter in "N. & Q." I did not advert to the circumstance that Warburton had proposed the same emendation; and it may turn out that a few other notes by me are in the same predicament. The authority I usually consulted as to the conjectures of previous editors was the Variorum Shakspeare, in twenty-one volumes 8vo.
I need hardly add that I was acquainted with the fact that Mr. Singer had published an edition of Shakspeare; but, like some others, it was not before me when I wrote my recent volume, nor when I printed the eight volumes to which that is a supplement. Even the British Museum does not contain all the impressions of the works of our great dramatist; but I resorted, more or less, to twenty or thirty of them in the progress of my undertaking.
Mr. Singer's edition, no doubt, deserves more than the praise he has given to it: on the other hand, I am thoroughly sensible of the imperfectness of my own labours, however anxious I was to avoid mistakes; and when I prepare a new impression, I will not fail duly to acknowledge the obligations of Shakspeare to Mr. Singer. One of my notes on a celebrated passage in Timon of Athens will have shown that there was no reluctance on my part to give Mr. Singer full credit for a very happy emendation.
I hope and believe that he does not participate in the anger some have expressed, because I have been merely the medium of making known other emendations at least equally felicitous.
J. Payne Collier.
Torquay.