Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 1.
Such is the present state of the text; and notwithstanding its evident corruption, it has been judiciously preferred by modern editors to the various emendations and additions which, even to the manufacture of a complete line alleged to be deficient, had been unscrupulously made in it.
But the slight change I now wish to propose, in the substance of one word, and in the received sense of another, carries such entire conviction to my own mind of accordance with the genuine intention of Shakspeare, that I may perhaps be pardoned if I speak of it with less hesitation than generally ought to accompany such suggestions, particularly as I do not arrogate to myself its sole merit, but freely relinquish to Malone so much of it as is his due.
With Malone however the suggestion, such as it was, appears to have been but a random guess, abandoned as soon as formed, and avowedly prompted by very different considerations from those that have actuated me. That he should have been on the very brink, as it were, of the true reading, and yet fail to discover it, is only to be accounted for by his subjection to that besetting sin of the day which denied to Shakspeare all philological knowledge except what he might derive through his own language.
In order to give Malone strict justice, I shall transcribe his suggestion, together with the comment by which Steevens appears to have stifled it in the birth:—
"The disagreeable recurrence of the word stars in the second line induces me to believe that As stars, in that which precedes, is a corruption. Perhaps Shakspeare wrote:—
Astres with trains of fire—
——and dews of blood
Disasterous dimm'd the sun.
The word astre is used in an old collection of poems entitled Diana, addressed to the Earl of Oxenforde, a book of which I know not the date, but believe it was printed about 1580. In Othello we have antres, a word of exactly a similar formation."—Malone.