[List of Notes and Queries volumes and pages]
Notes.
READINGS IN SHAKSPEARE, NO. III.
Hamlet, Act I. Sc. 5.
"My tables, my tables,—meet it is I set it down."
This line (which might have suggested to our worthy patron, Captain Cuttle, the posy on our title-page) has, in my opinion, been misapplied and misinterpreted; and, as I am unable to convince myself that the view I take of it, albeit in opposition to all other readers of Shakspeare, is wrong, I venture to remove my light from under the bushel, although in so doing am sorely in dread of its being rudely puffed upon.
The more so, because the natural hesitation which must be felt, in any case, when challenging for the first time the correctness of a generally received reading, is, in this instance, greatly augmented, by finding that an illustrious commenter upon Shakspeare—himself a great and congenial poet—has conferred a special approbation upon the old reading, by choosing it out as an item in his appreciation of Hamlet's character.
I allude to Coleridge, whose remark is this:
"Shakspeare alone could have produced the vow of Hamlet, to make his memory a blank of all maxims and generalised truths that 'observation had copied there,' followed immediately by the speaker noting down the generalised fact—
"'That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.'