So Mr. Dyce also reads.
Sc. 2.
"Spread thy close curtain, love-performing Night!
That runaway's eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen."
Of 'runaway,' which cannot possibly be right, the Cambridge edition enumerates no less than twenty-nine various corrections! Warburton understood by it the sun; Steevens, the night; Douce, Juliet; and a Mr. Halpen, Cupid. Jackson, followed by Collier, read unawares. Mr. Dyce conjectured roving, soon day's, and rude day's, which last he has placed in the text, but which seems to me to be too young-ladyish for the ardent and naïve Juliet; and moreover she had already called for the winking of day's eye, i.e. for sunset. Some sense might also be made of runagates, as persons wandering about by night, and still better of runabouts, a word used by Marston (What you Will, iii. 1), and which I have placed in the text, as making tolerable sense and bearing resemblance to 'runaways.' Mr. Singer read rumourers, against which little objection can be made. My own opinion—to which I was led by Singer's reading, and in which I find I had been anticipated by Heath and Mr. Grant White—is, that the poet's word may have been Rumour's. In the poem on which this play is founded, Juliet, when pondering, before her marriage, on what might be the consequence of admitting Romeo to a lover's privilege, says:—
"So, I defil'd, Report shall take her trump of black defame,
Whence she, with puffed cheek, shall blow a blast so shrill
Of my dispraise, that with the noise Verona she shall fill."