Again the printer’s text runs—
“From any lip whose Honour writ not Lord.”
The poet corrected this also to “whose Owner.”
These errors of the press are far more important to the readers of Shakespeare than many suspect. “Who knows,” exclaimed the acute Gifford, “whether much of the ingenious toil to explain nonsense in the variorum edition of Shakespeare is not absolutely wasted upon mere errors of the press?” Not long after this was said, an actual experiment of the kind was made by a skilful printer. This person, during the leisure of eleven years of a French captivity, had found his most constant companion in a Shakespeare.* By his own experience of the blunders and the mischances of the typographer, to which we may add also a little sagacity, he recovered some of the lost text. His new readings were accompanied by an explanation of those mechanical accidents which had caused these particular errata. The practical printer mortified the haughty commentator by several felicitous and obvious emendations. The grave brotherhood of black-letter looked askance on such humble ingenuity, and turned against the simple printer. Unluckily for Zachary Jackson, he had the temerity, in the flush of success, of abandoning his type-work to err in “the dalliance of fancy” into an ambitious Commentary of “seven hundred passages,” when seventy had exceeded his fair claim. The commentating printer therefore met with the fate of the immortalised cobbler who ventured to criticise beyond the right measure of his last.
* So numerous were the English prisoners in France during the persecuting war of Napoleon, and so general was the demand for a Shakespeare, that more than one edition, I think, was printed by the French booksellers, which I have seen on their literary stalls.
[12] Collier’s “Poetical Decameron,” i. 52. Steevens thought The Yorkshire Tragedy to be Shakespearian; and the Rev. Alexander Dyce, struck by the Shakespearian soliloquy of the wife, decides that “it contains passages worthy of his pen.”—Dyce’s Mem. of Shakespeare, xxxi.
[13] That Shakespeare was the favourite poet of Charles the First is confirmed to the eyes of posterity; for on the copy the king used, he has written his own name, and left other traces of his pen; the volume now bears also the autograph of George the Third. It is preserved, it is hoped, in the library of the sovereigns of England.
[14] Milton, however, has been misinterpreted by some modern critics; when, on this occasion, having quoted that passage in Richard the Third which displays his hypocrisy, Milton adds—“Other stuff of this sort may be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the poet used not much license in departing from the truth of history.” Pye, in his “Commentary on the Poetic of Aristotle,” is indignant at the language of Milton. He takes the term “stuff” in its modern depreciating sense; but it had no such meaning with Milton, it merely signified matter. Pye exclaims—“Could Milton have imagined that the stuff of Mr. William Shakespeare would be preferred to ‘Comus’ and the ‘Samson Agonistes?’”—212.
[15] I derive my knowledge from the “Roscius Anglicanus” of Downes, the prompter; it is a meagre chronicle, and the scribe is illiterate; but the edition by F. Waldron, 1784, is an addition to our literary history. Though chiefly dramatic, it abounds with some curious secret history. Waldron, himself an humble actor, was, however, a sagacious literary antiquary; but his modesty and failure of encouragement impeded his proposed labours. Gifford found him intelligent when that critic was busied on Jonson; and I possess an evidence of his acute emendations.
By this chronicle of our drama, it appears that in a list of fifteen stock plays there are seven of Beaumont and Fletcher, three of Jonson, and three of Shakespeare. In another list of twenty-one plays there are five of Jonson, and but one of Shakespeare and that Titus Andronicus.