Balliolensis.
Queries.
MR. HALLIWELL'S ANNOTATED SHAKSPEARE FOLIO.
"This volume contains several hundred very curious and important corrections, amongst which I may mention an entirely new reading of the difficult passage at the commencement of Measure for Measure, which carries conviction with it; and shows, what might have been reasonably expected, that that to is a misprint for a verb."—Mr. Halliwell in Notes & Queries, p. 485.
In common, doubtless, with many other of your readers, I am curious to know what this verb can be, which, while carrying conviction with it, is yet so mysteriously withheld from publication.
In a small pamphlet, published a month or two since by Mr. Halliwell, in opposition to Mr. Collier's folio, he lays down at p. 7. "a canon in philology;" from which he deduces the following as one of the "circumstances under which no manuscript emendation of so late a date as 1632 will be admissible."
"It will not be admissible in any case where good sense can be satisfactorily made of the passage as it stands in the original, even although the correction may appear to give greater force or harmony to the passage."
Now, in the case referred to from Measure for Measure, I had previously ("N. & Q." Vol. v., p. 410.) shown to Mr. Halliwell that "good sense can be satisfactorily made of the passage as it stands in the original;" and therefore I feel the greater curiosity to know what this verb can be which carries conviction to him even in the face of his own canon?
A. E. B.