I shall feel much obliged for any particulars about this literary curiosity which you or any of your correspondents can give.
A. B. R.
Belmont.
Footnote 2:[(return)]
[Drnam stands for differentiam.]
ON A DIGEST OF CRITICAL READINGS IN SHAKSPEARE.
With reference to this subject, which has been so frequently discussed in your columns, daily experience convincing me still farther in the opinion that the complete performance of the task is impracticable, would you kindly allow me to ask what can be done in the now acknowledged case of frequent occurrence, where different copies of the folios and quartos vary in passages in the very same impression? What copies are to be taken as the groundworks of reference; and whose copy of the first folio is to be the standard one? Mr. Knight may give one reading as that of the edition of 1623, and Mr. Singer may offer another from the same work, while the author of the "critical digest" may give a third, and all of them correct in the mere fact that such readings are really those of the first edition. Thus, in respect to a passage in Measure for Measure,—
"For thy own bowels, which do call thee sire,"—
it has been stated in your columns that one copy of the second folio has this correct reading, whereas every copy I have met with reads fire; and so likewise the first and third folios. Then, again, in reference to this same line, Mr. Collier, in his Shakspeare, vol. ii. p. 48., says that the folio edition of 1685 also reads fire for sire; but in my copy of the fourth folio it is distinctly printed sire, and the comma before the word very