[4] Greene was then lying on his last pallet of rhyme and misery, dictating this sad legacy of “a groat’s worth of wit bought with a million of repentance.”
[5] Bombast is not here used in the present application of the term, in a depreciating sense, but is a simile derived from the cotton used in stuffing out or quilting the fashionable dresses.
[6] Collier’s “New Facts,” 13. Dyce’s edition of “Greene’s Dramatic Works.”
[7] Heywood’s “Apology for Actors.”—The Epistle to his bookseller at the end.
[8] In the comedy of Eastward Ho! the joint production of Jonson, Marlowe, and Chapman,—Shakespeare is ridiculed, particularly the madness of Hamlet and Ophelia.
[9] Robert Chester, a fantastical versifier, whose volume is priced in the “Bib. Anglo-Poetica” at 50l., but this price was too moderate; for, at the sale of Sir M. Sykes, some ingenious lover of absurd poetry willingly gave 61l. 19s. I have not yet seen this extraordinary production, and derive my knowledge only from a specimen in the catalogue.
[10] In 1612 or 13.
[11] Most of our old plays come before us in a corrupt and mangled state. They were often imperfectly caught by the scribe, or otherwise surreptitiously obtained; hurried through the press from some illegible manuscript by a careless printer, who would throw three distinct speeches into the mouth of one character, transpose the names of the dramatis personæ, and omit the change of scene; while others again with indiscriminate fidelity, from a stolen transcript of the prompter’s book, preserved his private memorandums and directions in the stage-copy. Even in the first folio of Shakespeare, so absent from their work were the player-editors, that “tables and chairs” are introduced to direct the property-man, or the scene-shifters, to be in readiness. Verse is printed as prose, to save the expenditure of those small blank spaces which divide those two regions of genius. The dramatists themselves, who probably conceived that they had consigned all their property in their vended plays, never read their own proof-sheets. The reader may form a clear conception of the injuries inflicted on these writers by the existing presentation copy of Massinger’s “Duke of Milan,” in which may be seen how the poet, after its publication, indignantly corrected the multiplied and the strange errata. The printer gave this text—
| “Observe and honour her as if the SEAL Of woman’s goodness only dwelt in hers.” |
The poet corrected this to “the Soul.” The sagacity of an English Bentley could hardly have conjectured the happy emendation; only the poet himself could have supplied it.