Setting aside those who care merely to see a play on the stage, it may be said that of Shakespeare there are readers and readers; and both classes have rights and privileges which should be treated with deference. The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all. Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare's through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds? When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop and philosophically investigate what Hamlet means by a "dram of eale"? Must we lose a scruple of the sport by turning aside to find out what Malvolio means by the "lady of the Strachey"? If Timon chooses to invite Ullorxa to his feast, are we to bar the door because no one ever heard the name before? No: let us have our Shakespeare (is he not as much ours as yours?) free from all notes, on a page purified from the musty cobwebs of black-letter pedants. We want no jargon of bickering critics to drown the music that sings at Heaven's gate. Give us those immortal plays just as Shakespeare wrote them, that we may read them without let or hinderance.
But, fair and softly, is not this the very point at which we are striving? With all our twistings and turnings, our patchings and piecings, have we aught else in view than to decipher just what Shakespeare wrote? Where are Shakespeare's exact words to be found? Not in the so-called Quartos; for they are said by Shakespeare's intimate and dear friends to have been "maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors," and taken down perhaps from the lips of some of the actors, bribed by stoops of liquor at Yaughan's (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to be feared that the potations were at times pottle deep). Nor can we take the Folio in which all his dramas were first collected: Shakespeare never saw a line of it; for seven years he had been hid in death's dateless night when that volume was printed. What, then, is to be done? The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have, and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably Shakespeare's exact words. In dealing with the text we must never for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors. Is such a text, thus transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of Shakespeare? Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to hang over his text? Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken, in our opinion, to believe this. Rather, let us regard these pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases—namely, as but little better than our modern proof-sheets. And they should be dealt with accordingly by a modern critic; but only on one condition precedent: he must be Shakespeare's peer. In default of this we can only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up the wheat also.
And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred and forty years has aimed at—merely to get at what Shakespeare really wrote. We know that he could not write sheer nonsense, and yet at times sheer nonsense mows at us from his printed page. Those who clamor for Shakespeare's text, pure and simple, divested of all notes and annotations, have no idea how much thought and time have been expended on every line, —nay, on every word, on every comma,—in the text of any good modern edition of his dramas, and with the single aim, be it remembered, of revealing exactly what the poet wrote.
It must not, however, be thought that since the original texts of Shakespeare's plays are so corrupt, any criticaster has good leave to expunge or expand at will, under a roving commission to hack and hew wheresoever and howsoever it may please him, under the plea of restoring the text. On the contrary, since we cannot fulfill the condition precedent of being Shakespeare's peers, we must exercise the greatest caution in changing a reading of the Quartos or Folios, lest in condemning the text as corrupt we pass judgment on our own wit.
He who the sword of Heaven would bear
Must be as holy as severe.
And we must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it. First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda 'st should be a frontlet between our brows. The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer's interpretation of what he failed to comprehend.
But to understand Shakespeare's meaning in a degree that will authorize us to amend the text, we must understand Shakespeare's speech; that is, we must be thoroughly familiar with the words and usages of Elizabethan English; and not only with Elizabethan words and phrases, but also, as far as possible, with the very pronunciation.
This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby's book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of The Still Lion, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton's text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming. Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics. Thus, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to "seek thy help by beneficial help." At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of "Corruption!" "Sophistication!" "Cacophonous repetition!" etc. etc. "But gently, friends," says Dr. Ingleby: "may not 'help' have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?" and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's own son-in-law), he proves that heal and help having a common origin, help was used by Shakespeare's contemporaries as a synonym for cure, deliverance. The text, then, is perfectly correct, Ægeon being bid to seek his deliverance from the doom of death by the help of what friends he can find. The lion's slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins. Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic. The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future. We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett. In As You Like It occur the familiar lines, "And thus our life ... finds ... books in the running brooks, sermons in stones," etc. "This is stark nonsense, and must be remedied. Who ever found a book in a rivulet or a sermon in a rock? It is clearly an error of a most ignorant or careless compositor, who has transposed the nouns. Read, 'stones in the running brooks and sermons in books.' Sense is vindicated. Stones are frequently found in brooks. David chose smooth pebbles from the brook, and sermons are quite frequently printed and sold in a book-form. By this restoration Shakespeare's wonderful observation is," etc., etc., etc.
Great as is the service done in particular cases, the most valuable part of The Still Lion is the moral which it points, that "successful emendation is the fruit of severe study and research on the one hand, and of rare sensibility and sense on the other." And in our opinion Dr. Ingleby might have gone even farther, and demanded for it a spark of that creative power which is genius. But it must not be inferred that all the difficult passages in Shakespeare can be thus explained away. Despite all learning, or acuteness, or genius, there remains a considerable number that have never yet been solved, and never will be, in general acceptation, till the crack of doom. These, however, bear so small a proportion to the vast mass of perplexing riddles that have been satisfactorily settled that, like an infinitely small quantity in mathematics, they may be neglected. Therefore, let not him who wishes to read his Shakespeare unalloyed by notes and textual comment, despise the painful critic or accuse him of playing at loggats with the words of Shakespeare. It is through the labors of critics that the text is in such a shape that the work-a-day reader can read it at all. In the Folios and Quartos we see Shakespeare as through a glass darkly, but, thanks to those drudges, the commentators, in numberless places we can now see him face to face.