The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Shakespeare-Expositor: An Aid to the Perfect Understanding of Shakespeare's Plays, by Thomas Keightley

Transcriber's Note

A [list] of the changes made can be found at the end of the book. Author's corrections are underscored with a thin gray dotted line "like this". Other corrections are underscored by a dotted red line "like this". Hover the cursor over the underlined text and an explanation of the error should appear.

THE
SHAKESPEARE-EXPOSITOR:
AN AID
TO THE PERFECT UNDERSTANDING OF
SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS.

BY

THOMAS KEIGHTLEY,

EDITOR OF THE 'PLAYS AND POEMS OF SHAKESPEARE.'

LONDON:

J. RUSSELL SMITH, 36 SOHO SQUARE.

1867.

Printed by Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street.

PREFACE.

The object of this volume is to form a manual for the use chiefly of those who, not being possessed of a voluminous annotated edition, are fain to content themselves with the simple text. But even those who have a perfect Shakespeare library cannot well dispense with it; for my original corrections, which are very numerous, are nowhere else to be found.

It was originally intended to form the complement to my Edition of the Plays, and as such I had announced its immediate appearance. Why it did not appear has been explained in Notes and Queries (3 S. vii. 175), and the statement there made was incontrovertible; for it was the simple truth. The delay, however, has been no injury, but rather a benefit to it. Its relation to the Edition now is that, while it is perfectly independent and suited to any edition, the Edition without it is somewhat like what a Euclid would be without diagrams or demonstrations, as the reader will meet with numerous alterations of the text, and be quite ignorant of how or why they were made. Moreover the errors and oversights which escaped me in it will be found here all corrected.

To my own Edition I regard it, then, as indispensable; and if I were to mention any other to which it is peculiarly adapted, I should say that which is named the Globe; for it contains a copious and excellent Glossary—that in mine, which is not by me, is scanty—which, with the Notes and [Index] of this volume, will leave little unexplained.

It is certainly very disheartening to those who devote their time and labour to the elucidation of our Classic authors to find how small the number is of those readers who are at all anxious to understand them perfectly. The great majority, in fact, are quite satisfied if they can get at the general meaning of a difficult or obscure passage, and so glide over it. Still I am not without hope that among the tens of thousands who buy, and I presume read, these Plays, there may be found a few, a very few, hundreds who may wish to understand what they read, and will therefore possess themselves of this volume. Profit is not dreamed of, but it is hoped that loss may not be incurred.

When I was preparing my Edition of Milton's Poems, I fell into the habit of correcting the text of our old writers. Hence I have corrected copies of Chaucer, Spenser, the dramatists and others, which mayhap may prove useful to future editors. The corrections of Shakespeare proved so numerous as to form the present volume; but the idea of editing his works never entered my mind till it was proposed to me, when I fear my vanity became interested. I had been confessedly the best editor of Milton, I might perchance stand in the same relation to Shakespeare. My wish had been to be to the Faerie Queen what I had been to Paradise Lost; and I may yet, perhaps, communicate some remarks on it in the pages of Notes and Queries.

It was on the first edition of Collier's Shakespeare that I made my corrections, and of previous emendations, if not noticed there, I knew nothing. I afterwards read the Variorum and later editions; hence I shall often be found saying that I had been anticipated. This was always a source of pleasure to me, as a proof of the correctness of my emendation. Porson, we are told, actually shed tears of joy when on meeting with a copy of Aristophanes with MS. notes by Bentley, he found his corrections had so frequently been anticipated. His delight was still greater when on the discovery of the Ravenna MS. he saw so many of his readings confirmed.

I must confess that experience has given me a good deal of confidence in my own critical powers, and I am apt to fancy that when I cannot conquer a difficulty it is nearly insuperable. Hence I have been little anxious about learning what has been written by late critics.

At the risk, or rather I should say with the certainty, of being charged with egotism, I will here state the following fact; for why should truth be concealed? As I was one day, many years ago, discussing some points in my 'Tales and Popular Fictions' with the late Mr. Douce, he suddenly exclaimed "Oh, that you had but my knowledge! What discoveries you would make!" I believe he was right, and that, under more favourable circumstances, I should have done much; but it was not to be.

I have endeavoured to grapple with every difficulty, to leave, if possible, no knot unloosed. Some of my corrections must (many, I think, probably will) be admitted into the text. At the same time, I freely confess that some of these emendations are merely desperate remedies for desperate diseases; and it may be that future critics may have more success than I have had. I have, I believe, advanced the criticism of Shakespeare some stages; and if succeeding critics follow the path I have traced, the Plays will perhaps be, ere long, brought as near their original state as is possible.

I regard the Introduction to the Notes as the most valuable part of this volume, as I have there endeavoured to reduce emendatory criticism to rule and law. I would earnestly recommend the reader to make himself master of it before using the Notes. It would also perhaps be well to do the same with the Index. The chief object of the Life, I may add, is to remove suspicion respecting the poet's private character.

The portions of the text given in the Notes are always that of the original editions, unless when it is otherwise expressed. I have made them as brief as possible, as this book will, of course, only be read in conjunction with the Plays themselves. I have only occasionally given the metrical arrangement; those who would enjoy the pleasure of reading the Plays in perfect metric order must read them in my Edition. Finally, in very obvious corrections I have not deemed it necessary to state that I had been anticipated.

This is the last of my works; my literary life here terminates. I am fast approaching the utmost limit set to human life by the Psalmist, my powers are necessarily on the decline, and prudence counsels obedience to the precept:

"Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne

Peccet ad extremum ridendus, et ilia ducat."

T. K.

Belvedere, Kent,

December 20, 1866.

^*_*^* I have also contributed to English literature:—

The Poems of John Milton with Notes. Two vols. 8vo, 21s.

An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton, with an Introduction to Paradise Lost. 8vo, 10s. 6d.

CONTENTS.

Errata.

Page [122], "If thou engrossest," etc. This note should come after the two next.

Page [302], line 2, for pulling read putting.

LIFE OF SHAKESPEARE.

A FAMILY of the name of Shakespeare—pronounced, it would seem, Shǎkspěr—was numerous in Warwickshire during the middle ages. About the middle of the sixteenth century John, the son of Richard Shakespeare, a farmer residing at Snitterfield in that county, was settled at Stratford-on-Avon, and was—though it appears he could neither read nor write—a leading member of the Corporation. Various accounts are given of his trade and occupation. We have proof that in 1556 he was a glover; he was afterwards a farmer or yeoman; Aubrey says he was a butcher; and according to Rowe, he was "a considerable dealer in wool." He would seem in fact to have been one who was ready to turn to any honest occupation by which money might be made.

In 1557 John Shakespeare married Mary, the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote, a man of good landed property, and belonging to a family of no mean note in the county of Warwick. By her he had either eight or ten children, of whom we need only notice William, the third, who was baptized April 26th, 1564; but the exact date of his birth is unknown. As his father was a member of the Corporation, it is highly probable that, as Rowe asserts, he was sent to the Free School of the town. How long he continued at it, and what he learned there, are matters on which we have no certain information. He had probably an ordinary English education, and he certainly, as his writings show, had learned some Latin; but he does not seem to have got beyond the elementary books, and of Greek, if it was taught in the school, he learned nothing whatever. We are told by one authority that he acted as an assistant in the school; by another that his father took him away early to assist in his own business of wool-stapling or, as the former, namely Aubrey, says, of butchering, who adds that "when he killed a calf he would do it in a high style, and make a speech,"—of course a mere figment. Malone conjectures—and in my opinion not without a show of probability—from the frequent occurrence of law-terms in his dramas, and his correct appreciation of their meaning, that he may have been for some time in the office of an attorney in Stratford. This, however, is all uncertainty; but at all events, judging from the turn of his mind, I should be inclined to say that, beside his accurate observation of men and manners, he read all the books he could obtain in his native town.

In the registry of the diocese of Worcester is preserved a document bearing date November 28, 1582, securing the Bishop against injury in the case of his licensing certain persons to be married with once asking of the banns. These persons are William Shakespeare, then in his nineteenth year, and Anne Hathaway, then apparently aged twenty-six years; for she died in 1623 at the age of sixty-seven years: she was therefore about eight years her husband's senior. When their marriage was celebrated we are unable to learn; but the baptism of Susanna, their first child, took place on the 26th of May, 1583, just six months after the date of the document quoted above. The natural inference is obvious. Shakespeare, like Burns, knew his wife before the law had made her his; and, like him, he acted honourably towards her.

This, perhaps the only imprudent act of Shakespeare's life, has been variously judged. Nothing, we know, is more common than for young men to fall in love with women older than themselves; and among the class of society to which both parties belonged, instances were, and are, not uncommon of the rules of prudence being transgressed in moments of weakness, while the moral principle remains untainted. We know that Burns's "Bonnie Jean" proved a most exemplary wife; and one of the most truly virtuous and unaffectedly modest women I ever knew was one who had acted thus imprudently. The bride of the future poet was Anne, daughter of Richard Hathaway, a husbandman, or substantial yeoman, of Shottery, a hamlet about a mile from Stratford, an intimate friend, it would appear, of John Shakespeare's; and hence we may presume that an intimacy prevailed also between the two families, and the not unlikely result was what has been stated.

We now have Shakespeare, at the commencement of his twentieth year, a married man, and the father of a child. On the 2nd of February, 1584-85, before he had completed his twenty-first year, were baptized Hamnet and Judith, twins. We hear of no more children of William and Anne Shakespeare; and soon after—most probably in 1586—Shakespeare left Stratford, and set out to seek his fortune in the metropolis. According to Rowe, he fled to escape from the persecution of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote-park, near Stratford, from whose park he and some other young men had stolen deer—a not unusual, and not very discreditable practice in those days. The knight, we are told, was indignant and vindictive, and the transgressor took his revenge by writing and affixing to the gate of Charlecote-park a satirical ballad, of which the first stanza has been preserved, and which, if genuine, is mere doggrel and utterly unworthy of Shakespeare. He may, however, have so written it on purpose. This is said to have added oil to the fire of the knight's rage, and to escape from it the author fled to London. His biographers in general are of opinion that his resentment against his persecutor did not die out, and that after his death and the lapse of many years he ridiculed him in the character of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But this was little in the character of "gentle" Shakespeare; and the whole theory is refuted by the fact that the allusion to "the dozen white luces" in the Justice's coat-armour, on which it is founded, does not occur in the original form of that play. It may have been made afterwards by way of joke, and without any malignity.

There is certainly no inherent improbability in this narrative; and it may have had its effect in determining Shakespeare to quit Stratford. But that it should have been the sole cause of his doing so is what I am disposed to question. We must recollect that Shakespeare was a man endowed with genius of the very highest order, and that he must have aspired to a wider field for its exercise than his native town could afford, that he had a family, and that his circumstances were very slender, while those of his father, as we have sufficient evidence, had been greatly reduced. Nor does it appear that he—who, as has been already observed, except in the case of his marriage, was always prudent—set out for London without having a definite object in view.

Now various companies of players, as we learn, were in the habit of visiting Stratford, like other country towns, and performing there in the Guildhall. It can be hardly doubted that Shakespeare, in whom dramatic genius was inborn, must have been excited by these performances, however low the merit of the pieces—perhaps even have felt that he was capable of producing something superior to them of the same kind. He probably then made the acquaintance of the players, one of whom, Burbage, was, it is supposed, a native of the town, and some others, natives of the county, and proposed embracing their profession. He was young, handsome, of animated and even brilliant conversation. There can be little doubt, then, that he met with encouragement, and was readily received among them. This was, it is most likely, in the year 1586, when he was two-and-twenty. Rowe says "he was received into the company at first in a very mean rank;" and in 1693 the parish-clerk of Stratford, a man eighty years of age, told a person named Dowdall, that he "was received into the playhouse as a serviture." Of course, like almost every other actor, he began at the bottom, having as it were to serve his apprenticeship. This, then, seems to be all true enough; not so another tradition, related by Johnson as coming from Pope and Rowe, namely, that his first occupation in London was holding gentlemen's horses at the door of the playhouse, in which business he succeeded so well that he hired boys to act under him. How little like Shakespeare this is need hardly be said.

A question which cannot be answered very satisfactorily is, What did Shakespeare at this time do with his wife and children? The probability would seem to be, that he left them at Stratford, and, as is most likely, at his father's, till he should see what success he was likely to meet with in London.

It would seem that for the first few years he was merely an actor; and if the Ellesmere Papers, published by Mr. Collier, be genuine, he had in 1589 become a sharer in the Blackfriars Theatre. Before this date he may have begun to try his hand at making additions and alterations in the plays of others. Of these we seem to have examples in the Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI.; and there is a manifest allusion to this practice of his in the following passage of Green's Groat's Worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, published after his death in 1592. Green is addressing his fellow dramatists Marlow, Peele, and others; and he says, "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygre's heart wrapt in a player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." Here the allusion to Shakespeare's name is quite plain, and the line in italics is a parody on one in one of the plays which he appears to have thus treated. As this allusion seems to have caused just offence, Chettle, who had given Green's work to the world, took occasion shortly after in a work of his own, his Kind-hart's Dream, to make an apology, in which he says of Shakespeare, "Myself have seen his demeanour, no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art." We thus see that Shakespeare was regarded as an excellent player (for quality then answered to profession at the present time), as an elegant writer (facetious being employed in its classic sense), and as an upright and honourable man, and further, perhaps, as moving in what we should term good society.

Moreover this work of Chettle's, published at the end of 1592 or beginning of 1593, furnishes what I regard as a proof that Shakespeare had not at that time brought an original piece on the stage; for speaking of Green he says, "He was of singular pleasance, the very supporter, and—to no man's disgrace be this intended—the only comedian of a vulgar writer in this country;" of which last words the plain meaning is, that Green had as yet been the only tolerable writer of English comedy. Now we have sufficient means for judging of Green's comic powers; and surely no man in his senses would have ventured to write these words, had he been ever so prejudiced, if Shakespeare had already produced the Comedy of Errors or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We may therefore venture to assert that neither of these plays was acted earlier than 1593.

We may here, by the way, notice some curious coincidences between Shakespeare and the great comic poet of France, Molière. There is some reason to suppose that both of them were originally connected with the law; they both went on the stage at, we may say, the age of twenty, or a little later. Shakespeare was in his thirtieth year when he produced his first original play, Molière in his thirty-second when he wrote L'Etourdi; but he had previously given some short pieces. Finally, the former died at the close, the latter at the commencement of his fifty-second year.

The allusion to the poet's literary character in Kindhart's Dream was in all probability to his Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593, but which may, as was the custom in those days, have previously circulated in manuscript among his "private friends;" or it may have been to his Sonnets, which, as we shall presently see, thus circulated at this time. It is impossible to say when this poem was written; but there certainly is no necessity for supposing, with Mr. Collier, that it was composed at Stratford. Shakespeare's mind easily retained the requisite rural imagery; and with his power of rapid composition and command of language, a very few weeks would suffice at any time for its production. This poem, which he terms his "unpolished lines," and "the first heir of my invention," was dedicated to Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton. It met with general applause, and was followed, in 1594, by Lucrece, also dedicated to the same accomplished nobleman. The dedication, commencing with "The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end," would seem to intimate some degree of friendship on both sides; and as Shakespeare's private character, as we have seen, appears to have been most respectable, and Southampton was a well-known admirer of the drama, some kind of intimacy between him and the poet is not by any means improbable. There is also nothing incredible in what Rowe says had been "handed down by Sir William Davenant," of Lord Southampton's having "at one time given him £1000 to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to." But the amount must be much exaggerated; for none of Shakespeare's purchases that we hear of ever came to so large a sum. Mr. Collier thinks, with some probability, that, as it appears that the Globe Theatre on the Bankside was built in 1594 by the company to which Shakespeare belonged, Lord Southampton may have given him as much money as his share of the cost came to, which could not well have been more than a few hundred pounds.

It was probably also about this time that he wrote his very enigmatic Sonnets, which Meres, in 1598, calls "his sugred sonnets among his private friends," meaning perhaps which only circulated privately in manuscript. I assign them this early date because their style and language so strongly resemble those of his two poems and his early plays, such as Love's Labour's Lost. They were not published till 1609, and then not by the author himself. They seem to have been collected from those who had the manuscripts by a Mr. W. H., whom therefore the publisher in his dedication terms "the only begetter" of them, "begetter" in the language of the time being getter, collector, &c. It has been conjectured, with great probability, that many of them were written in the person of Lord Southampton for the lady with whom he was enamoured; and others may have been written for other persons, a usual custom then of the poets of France and England. I feel almost convinced that few or none of them were written in the poet's own person. Thus in 1598 he was only thirty-four years old, and yet some of them are in the character of a man grey and advanced in years; even in 1609 he was only forty-five.

Along with the Sonnets was published a poem named A Lover's Complaint, of the genuineness of which I am rather dubious. There had already appeared, in 1599, under the name of Shakespeare, a catchpenny collection called The Passionate Pilgrim, in which are two of his manuscript sonnets, and three of those published the preceding year in Love's Labour's Lost, all of them with an altered text.

An account of the dates, &c., of Shakespeare's plays will follow this Life. Here, therefore, it need only be remarked that they extended over a space of less than twenty years (from 1592 to 1610?), during which time he had an active share in the management of the two theatres, and was also an actor for the whole or the greater part of it. He was, as we may well suppose, with Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, and others, a member of the club instituted by Sir Walter Raleigh, and which met at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street, in which street, it may be observed by the way, Milton was born during this period. Fuller has left us some account of the wit-combats that used to take place at the Mermaid between our poet and Ben Jonson.

The relations between Shakespeare and his family during this time are in a state of ambiguity, which no conjecture can fully clear up. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever was on ill terms with his wife; and surely we have no right to suppose that, like La Fontaine, he left her in the country while he himself lived in the metropolis; for Shakespeare was a householder, while La Fontaine lived usually in the hôtels of his patrons. The more natural supposition is that he would have removed his wife and children to London as soon as he had got a firm footing there. Certainly no entry of the birth of any child of his is to be found in the register of any London parish; but may not some physical change, with which we are unacquainted, have caused his wife to cease from childbearing after the birth of the twins? There is also no entry of this kind in the register of Stratford; and yet it can hardly be that he, any more than La Fontaine, abstained from the bed of his wife in the annual visits which, according to Aubrey's very probable account, he was in the habit of making to his native town. But the burial of his son Hamnet took place in Stratford on the 11th of August, 1596, whence it might appear that the family was living there at that time. To this, however, it may be replied that the family, though usually resident in London, may have been down at Stratford when Hamnet took ill, or that he may have taken ill in London and have been ordered by the physicians to try the effect of his native air, or that, finally, he may have died in London, and his body have been taken down to Stratford for interment with his family, an act quite in character with Shakespeare. The mist, therefore, remains so far undispelled. But we are also to remember that Shakespeare, as above stated, was a householder in London, which might seem to intimate that he had a family there. It is to me a matter of extreme difficulty to believe that he who created so many of the loveliest female characters that the world has ever witnessed, should have led, as, we may say, he otherwise must have done, an irregular life with regard to the sex; for the effect of such conduct is almost always a degrading view of female nature; and how pure on this subject his ideas must always have been is strongly indicated by the circumstance that three of his most lovely female characters—Perdita, Miranda, Imogen—occur in the very last plays he wrote. We may here note the difference between him and La Fontaine. On the whole, then, my opinion is that Shakespeare had his wife and children with him in London, and that his life there was as regular and domestic as his profession permitted.

It has been argued, from a passage in Twelfth Night, in which a man is advised always to marry a woman younger than himself, that Shakespeare had felt the evil consequences of the opposite course. But surely we should not press thus closely language resulting from the situation of a character in a drama. And if Shakespeare was so convinced of the ill consequences of such a procedure, how came it that only a few months before his death he gave an apparently cheerful consent to the marriage of his daughter Judith with Thomas Quiney, who was four years her junior? This objection, then, also may be dismissed, and we remain as uncertain as ever.

We may also venture to deal in a similar way with a passage in the Tempest (iv. 1.), condemnatory of the conduct which he and his wife had pursued before their marriage. Further, as the only mention of his wife in his will is an interlineation, bequeathing her his "second best bed, with the furniture," a want of due regard for her comfort and independence has been inferred. But this in reality is rather indicative of affection; for, as Mr. Knight was the first to observe, as his property was mostly freehold, the law provided for her by assigning her what it terms dower. Lastly, the desire which Mrs. Shakespeare is said to have expressed to be buried with her husband is surely some proof of mutual affection.

It would also seem to be a matter of which there can be little doubt, that Shakespeare must have been an indefatigable reader during the first years of his residence in London. It is strange how none of the commentators appear to have been aware of this fact; for it is the only way of accounting for the remarkable copiousness of his vocabulary. Max Müller, following Professor Marsh, in his Lectures on the Science of Language, having observed, on the authority of a country clergyman, that some of our peasantry have not more than 300 words in their vocabulary, proceeds as follows:—

"A well-educated person in England, who has been at a public school and at the university, who reads his Bible, his Shakespeare, the Times, and all the books of Mudie's Library, seldom uses more than about 3000 or 4000 words in actual conversation. Accurate thinkers and close reasoners, who avoid vague and general expressions, and wait till they find the word that exactly fits their meaning, employ a larger stock; and eloquent speakers may rise to a command of 10,000. Shakespeare, who displayed a greater variety of expression than probably any writer in any language, produced all his plays with about 15,000 words; Milton's works are built up with about 8000; and the Old Testament says all that it has to say with 5642 words."

Now how else but by reading could Shakespeare have got such a store of words? It could not be by conversation, and he surely did not invent more than a few of them. This also tends to prove that Venus and Adonis was not written at Stratford; for his rural vocabulary could hardly have sufficed for such a poem.

But further, I think I am justified in asserting that during the earlier years of his dramatic career Shakespeare acquired a competent knowledge of the French and Italian languages. As we shall see, some of his plays were founded on Italian tales and plays of which no translation has ever been discovered; and the natural inference then is, that he had read them in the original. As to the French, he must have been able to write as well as read it. As a proof, in his Henry V. there are scenes of mingled French and English, which scenes are, like all the prose scenes in our old dramatists, in what I have denominated metric prose; and this could only be caused by the whole scene having been the production of the one mind. The French, too, is incorrect, as it is also in the really prose French scene between Katherine and Alice. It seems therefore probable in the highest degree that Shakespeare was able to write French. In like manner Ben Jonson has shown in his Alchemist and elsewhere, that he was able to write Spanish and other languages.

Another curious question is, Was Shakespeare ever out of England? This, too, cannot be determined; but it is clear to me, from various passages of his plays, that he must have been familiar with the sea-shore; and, from his correct use of nautical terms, we might suspect that he had been at sea on board a ship once, if not oftener. I cannot see any equal proof of his having been familiar with mountain scenery; and from the comparative vagueness of his language respecting mountains in Cymbeline and elsewhere, I rather suspect that he had never gazed on a mountain-range.

In 1597, the year after he had lost his only son, Shakespeare began to carry into effect his long-cherished project of acquiring property in his native county. For the seemingly trifling sum of £60 he purchased from William Underhill one of the best houses in the town of Stratford, named New Place, built by Sir Hugh Clopton in the reign of Henry VII., consisting of one messuage, two barns, and two gardens, with their appurtenances. It was situated in Chapel-street Ward; and as, in a note taken of corn and malt during a dearth in the beginning of the following year, we find him set down as the holder of ten quarters, it would appear that his family, if not he himself, must have been residing at that time in this place.

For some years subsequent to this date we find a few notices of purchases &c. in which Shakespeare was engaged, but nothing that throws any light on his personal history. Neither can we ascertain at what time it was that he disposed of his theatric property; for that he did so is plain, as he says nothing of it in his will. It would seem, however, to have been subsequent to 1610. It would also appear that he lived in Stratford in very handsome style, probably exercising a generous hospitality; for we learn from the diary of the Rev. J. Ward, vicar of that town in 1662, that he had heard that Shakespeare "spent at the rate of £1000 a-year." This sum, however, though not by any means so large, relative to the present value of money, as is usually supposed, is utterly incredible; but still it proves the tradition of his housekeeping having been liberal.

On the 5th of June, 1607, Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susanna, was married to Dr. John Hall, a physician of some eminence, settled in Stratford. They had but one child, a daughter named Elizabeth, who was married first to Thomas Nash, and secondly to John (afterwards Sir John) Barnard, of Abington, in Northamptonshire. She died in 1649, having had no children by either husband; and with her ended the lineal descent from the great Shakespeare; for Judith, his other daughter, who married a couple of months before his death, though she had three sons, outlived them all, as none of them attained to the age of twenty years. Poetic genius seems fated never to found a family; it is above the vulgar distinctions of human life.

We know not the exact date of Shakespeare's final departure from London and settlement at Stratford; but it probably was not much later than the year 1610. His life after his retirement was not destined to be very long. We may picture him to ourselves as passing his days in tranquil enjoyment, interesting himself somewhat in the affairs of the borough, conversing with his neighbours, telling anecdotes of his life in London, reading his Bible and Chaucer, Spenser, and other poets, and no doubt his North's Plutarch, giving occasional play to his wit, in short, leading the life of a wise and sensible man, contented with the condition he had made his mature choice of as most productive of happiness.

It is probable that in his fifty-second year he felt a decline in his constitution which reminded him of the uncertainty of life; for on the 25th of January, 1615-16, he made his Will, which was executed exactly two months later; and on the 23rd of the following April he breathed his last. He was buried in the church of Stratford, where his grave and monument may still be seen. The disease of which he died is unknown. The vicar, Mr. Ward, already referred to, says, "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." This no doubt is not impossible, but it is not very probable. If we may judge from passages in his plays, Shakespeare was an enemy to deep drinking; and it is hardly likely that he should, so late in life too, have committed such excess (worthy only of a Burns) as is here supposed, even in the company of Ben Jonson, a visit from whom to Stratford, if he had made it, would with its consequences in all probability have formed part of his communications to Drummond two years later. We may then, I think, safely venture to reject this account of Shakespeare's death, and acknowledge that its cause is utterly unknown, and will probably always remain unknown.

It would appear from Shakespeare's Will that he had at the time of his death but very little money; for, excepting a few trifling legacies, the only sum mentioned is £300 which he left to his younger daughter Judith, making apparently a very unequal division of his property; for to his elder daughter Susanna he left all his lands, tenements, etc., in Stratford and elsewhere, the value of which must have been very far beyond that of the sum devised to Judith. In fact we might suppose that the property enumerated in a general way in his Will had cost more, and were of greater value than would seem to be indicated.

It might be supposed that the cause of this unequal division was displeasure at Judith's marriage; but, beside that we have no proof of any such feeling towards her, the real cause lies evidently far deeper. It was his passionate desire to be the founder of a family in his native county. This it was that animated all his theatric exertions, and he regarded the wonderful creations of his genius merely as means to this one great end. We might have presumed that the death of his only son in 1596 would have given a check to this passion; but, on the contrary, it was, as we have seen, in the very next year that he commenced purchasing property in Warwickshire; and we also find that in that year, or more certainly in 1599, a grant of arms was made to John Shakespeare by the Heralds' College, in which he was authorized to impale the bearings of the Ardens, his wife's family, with his own; and the probability would seem to be, that previously the Shakespeare family had had no coat of arms. By a statute, however, of the later Plantagenets every freeholder was to have his proper seal of arms; and that of the Shakespeares may have been the eagle and spear, whence the Heralds easily formed the coat of arms used by Shakespeare. In obtaining this, John Shakespeare must have acted under the influence and at the expense of his son William.

In his Will, Shakespeare leaves his lands, tenements, &c. to his daughter Susanna, and after her death to her eldest son and his heirs male, and, in default of heirs male of him, to her second son, and so on to the seventh son, and, in default of such issue, to his niece (i.e. granddaughter) Elizabeth Hall and her heirs male, and, in default of them, to his daughter Judith and her heirs male, and, in their default, to the right heirs of the testator.

Every precaution we see was here taken, but all in vain; for, as we have hinted, it seems to be the order of Providence that literary genius should not be the foundation of worldly rank and greatness. Most persons will here call to mind the parallel case of Sir Walter Scott, who, too, as fondly and as vainly yearned to be the founder of a part of the rural aristocracy of his native land, and in whose eyes it was greater to be Laird of Abbotsford than the author of Waverley. But the advantage was on the side of the bard of Avon; for he sought no literary fame, content with a life of peace and competence, while the Scottish baronet would fain have had literary fame as well as wealth and title. How different were the latter days of the two men!

From what precedes—few, very few, as the circumstances are—some faint idea may be formed of Shakespeare as a man. As a poet, his works present him to us, in all his fulness, as the most wonderful dramatic genius that ever the world has seen, ranging with equal ease from the lowest to the highest point of the whole scale of the drama, from the broad farce of the Comedy of Errors, through the enchanting light and graceful comedy of As You Like It, and similar pieces, up to the sublimest tragedy of Macbeth, Lear, Othello. Of him alone can this be asserted. We have no reason to suppose that the great tragic poets of Greece, any more than those of France, excelled also in comedy; while the dramatists of Spain notoriously failed in tragedy, and their comedy, gay, spritely and animated as it is, depends chiefly on plot and intrigue, and is greatly deficient in variety of character.

Mr. Dyce has justly observed how absurd it is to say that Shakespeare was, though the greatest, only one of a race of contemporary giants. The poetic greatness of Jonson, Fletcher, and Massinger was doubtless beyond that witnessed in most other ages of the world; but surely they were but as the stars to the sun when compared with Shakespeare. In like manner I apprehend few will agree with the following character of Shakespeare as a poet, drawn by Gifford in his Introduction to the Plays of Massinger.

"The claims of this great poet on the admiration of mankind are innumerable, but rhythmical modulation is not one of them; nor do I think it either wise or just to hold him forth as supereminent in every quality which constitutes genius. Beaumont is as sublime, Fletcher as pathetic, and Jonson as nervous. Nor let it be accounted poor or niggard praise to allow him only an equality with these extraordinary men in their peculiar excellencies, while he is admitted to possess many others, to which they made no approaches. Indeed if I were asked for the discriminating quality of Shakespeare's mind, that by which he is raised above all competition, above all prospect of rivalry, I should say it was WIT."

That Shakespeare possessed that aroma of humour which we denominate wit, beyond any of his contemporaries or successors, is a matter about which, I think, there cannot be two opinions. I will not deny that in nervousness Jonson may have equalled him, but I certainly know not where to look for the sublime in Beaumont which rivalled that of Macbeth and Lear; and unquestionably I should never even dream of putting the morbid softness of Fletcher in comparison with the genuine manly pathos of Shakespeare. There was however one thing in which I must confess they all exceeded him—perspicuity; for though in many, very many parts of his plays the language is most lucid and unconstrained, there are others—in Troilus and Cressida for instance—which task the intellect to understand them, and which never could have been intelligible to an ordinary audience. But the fact is, neither he nor any other of his brother dramatists ever seems to have asked himself the simple question, Will the audience understand this? I finally must assert, in opposition to Gifford, that, where Shakespeare's verse is uninjured, we have abundant proof that no poet ever excelled him in "rhythmical modulation," and that, when we would produce the most melodious verse in our language, it is in his plays that we shall find our best specimens. It seems to me quite idle to say with Coleridge that Shakespeare's verse is peculiar in rhythm and structure; for, from the nature of verse, it could not be so. It is just as idle to say with Johnson that the blank verse of Thomson is not that of Milton. The difference in such cases lies wholly in the language; and that of Shakespeare is peculiar. This is caused by an excess of figurative expression, in which his metaphors are often broken and confused and his similes imperfect, by inversions and transpositions, and by the use of words in unusual and even incorrect senses.

Shakespeare's power of observation must have been not merely extensive but marvellous:—

"He walk'd in every path of human life,

Felt every passion, and to all mankind

Doth now, will ever, that experience yield

Which his own genius only could acquire."

Nothing, in fact, high or low, seems to have escaped him; he discerned the nicest shades and varieties of looks, of manners, of language. He had also, in a remarkable degree, that power—that clairvoyance, as we may perhaps venture to term it—so requisite to the dramatist and the novelist, of developing from the faintest sketch, the merest outline, the entire of a character, with its appropriate sentiments, action, and language. In the number and variety of characters no writer ever equalled him, and all are fully and completely delineated, none are, as in other dramatists, mere sketches. Some, such as his Clowns, are peculiar to himself; we meet with no Clowns in the dramas of his contemporaries and successors,—the Gracioso of the Spanish drama, an independent creation, being the nearest approach to them. But of all his creations what has always most astonished me are his women. They are exclusively his own; Fletcher, Massinger, or any other, has nothing like them. Perhaps the nearest approach is made in Spain also, by Cervantes; in whom, however, as in the Spanish drama, they want variety. They would seem to have been produced, if I may so express it, by a projection of his own gentle and noble nature into female forms; for he surely never met his Rosalinds, Mirandas, and Perditas in real life, though he may have had some faint sketches of some of them in his own daughters. He seems to have shrunk almost instinctively from portraying bad women. Goneril and Regan alone are unredeemed; for Lady Macbeth is awful, not detestable, and even the Queen of Cymbeline is but an Agrippina, for like her she is criminal but not selfish.

In fine, though I will not, with Mr. Buckle, term Shakespeare "the greatest of the sons of men"—for I cannot give that preeminence to imagination, observation, and language over the other mental powers, so as to place him above Aristotle and Newton—I will say here of him, as I have said in my 'Life of Milton' that "he was the mightiest poetic mind that Nature has ever produced," and that, in his case, statues and other memorials are utterly needless and superfluous. If we are asked for his monument, we should simply point to his Plays and say,—Monumentum si quæris, inspice! and, in my opinion, he consults best for the poet's fame who seeks to restore his works to their pristine form.

The reader will see by this sketch how little is really known concerning Shakespeare. I have endeavoured, as will be seen, to rectify some points in his biography.

EDITIONS, DATES, AND ORIGINS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS.

In 1598 appeared a work, named Palladis Tamia, written by Francis Meres, in which among other passages respecting Shakespeare we meet with the following:—

"As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labour's Lost, his Love Labour's Won, his Midsummer's Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice; for tragedy his Richard II., Richard III., Henry IV., King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet."

Critics have hence inferred that these were Shakespeare's only plays written before 1598; but they have not observed that, moved probably by a love of symmetry and uniformity, Meres has given just half a dozen of each; and as in reality there were only five of our author's original tragedies then in being, he adds a play to which he could at most have only given a few touches, omitting the two Parts of Henry VI., for which he had done a vast deal more. In like manner he seems in his list of comedies to have omitted The Taming of the Shrew, which must be regarded as the least original of the comedies, and which the language and verse prove to belong to this period of his plays. It is generally agreed that Shakespeare never himself gave a play to the press; those, then, of which there are editions published during his lifetime, must have been printed from copies surreptitiously obtained, perhaps from the prompter. Hence their inaccuracies and imperfections. There is a theory indeed that they may have been taken down in short-hand during representation; but this theory seems only tenable in a single instance, Henry V., and the practice must have found a strong obstacle in the metre, to speak of no other difficulty. My opinion is that when once a copy of a play had been obtained and printed, it became the groundwork of all the subsequent editions which were printed from it, sometimes with corrections, made by the printer himself or by some man of letters employed by him for the purpose—except in such cases as Romeo and Juliet, or The Merry Wives, where the author had himself "corrected, augmented, and amended" his play. I may add that our forefathers, like the Orientals, had not our ideas about adhering strictly to the text of an author. If they thought they could improve it, they never hesitated to do so. I will now briefly state what is of most importance respecting the editions, the dates, and the origins of these immortal dramas.

COMEDIES.

The Comedy of Errors.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. As it is mentioned by Meres it must be anterior to 1598. It was probably Shakespeare's first original piece. From the plain allusion (III. 2) to the civil war in France, it must have been written before February 1594, in which year Henry IV. was crowned. I have shown above that it could not have been acted earlier than 1593.

Origin. It is manifestly founded on the Menæchmi of Plautus; but Shakespeare hardly went to the original. He may have merely got an account of that piece from some learned friend; and there was a piece named The Historie of Error, which was played at Hampton Court before the Queen, on New Year's day 1576-77, which may have been formed on the Menæchmi. The proper title of this play seems to have been simply Errors, and The Comedy of Errors is like The Tragedy of Macbeth, &c.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. Anterior to 1598 as it is in Meres's list. The critics have not observed that the resemblance is so strong between Act III. Sc. 1 of this play, and Act I. Sc. 2 of Lyly's Midas, that the one must have been taken from the other. In my opinion our poet was the borrower, as his scene is so superior to Lyly's. Now Midas was printed in 1592; but Shakespeare, it may be said, may have seen the play acted, or he may have written that scene, and added it to his play after he had read Lyly's; so the present comedy might have been written before 1592. This, however, I have shown to be at the least very unlikely. Though in my edition of the Plays I have given, as here, precedence to The Comedy of Errors, I do not feel at all certain upon the point, and would by no means assert that this is not rather "the first heir of his [dramatic] invention."

Origin. The plot seems to have been, in the main, of our poet's own invention; though what relates to Proteus and Julia may have been suggested, mediately or immediately, by the story of Felix and Felismena in the Diana of Montemayor. Indeed the points of resemblance are such that I feel confident the poet must have been acquainted with that part of the Diana; and yet it was not translated till 1598. Might he not have learned it from some one who had read the work in Spanish?

Love's Labour's Lost.

Editions. 4to, 1598; in the folio, 1623.

Date. We have no means of ascertaining the exact time of its composition; but from internal evidence we must regard it as one of our author's earliest pieces, yet, I think, later than those I have placed before it.

Origin. It is apparently wholly our poet's own invention, as no novel, play, or anything else at all resembling it has been discovered.

All's Well that Ends Well.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. Meres, as we have seen, terms one of Shakespeare's comedies "Love Labour's Won." Among our author's extant comedies there is none with that title, and we have no reason whatever for supposing any original play of his to be lost; while on the other hand the subject of the present play accords most accurately with that title. It has therefore been conjectured, with great probability, that this is one of Shakespeare's early plays, which he altered and improved at a later period, giving it at the same time a new title. We can certainly discern in it the style and mode of composition of two different periods—the riming scenes, for instance, belonging to the earlier one. It is to be observed of these riming scenes, that they only occur in the three preceding plays, and in Romeo and Juliet, in all which plays soliloquies, letters, &c. are in stanzas—like the sonnets in Spanish plays; and the very same is the case in the present play, and in it alone of the later ones; whence we may fairly conclude that it belonged to the early period. The second act seems to retain, both in the serious and the comic scenes, much of the original play unaltered; and every one must be struck with the resemblance of the style in it to that of Love's Labour's Lost.

Origin. The tale of Giletta di Narbona in Boccaccio's Decameron, which Shakespeare may have read in the original, or in the translation in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The comic scenes are, of course, our author's own, as usual.

A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

Editions. 4to (by Fisher), 1600; 4to (by Roberts), 1600; in the folio, 1623.

Date. Anterior to 1598, as it is mentioned by Meres. I do think that in Act II. Sc. 1 there is an allusion to the state of the weather in the summer of 1594, and that Shakespeare may have been writing this play at that very time. I therefore incline to give that year, or 1595, as the date of its composition.

Origin. Purely and absolutely the whole the poet's own invention. He was well read in Chaucer, in Golding's Ovid, and in North's Plutarch, where he got the names of his characters and some circumstances.

The Taming of the Shrew.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. We have no means of ascertaining the exact date of this play; but the style proves it to belong to Shakespeare's early period. The reason of its omission by Meres has been already given.

Origin. It is a rifacimento of an anonymous play, first printed in 1594, though perhaps written and acted some time earlier, and termed "The Taming of a Shrew," and it may be anterior to the Midsummer-Night's Dream; the date 1594 would seem to have some connexion with both plays. The incident of the Pedant personating Vincentio was taken from The Supposes, a translation by Gascoigne of Ariosto's I Suppositi.

The Merchant of Venice.

Editions. 4to (by Roberts), 1600; 4to (by Heyes), 1600; in the folio, 1623. The two 4tos are in effect the same; for Heyes's was printed by J. R., i.e. James Roberts, who probably had contrived to get a transcript from the copy in the theatre, and then may have made some arrangement with Heyes for the publication.

Date. It is in Meres's list, and it was entered by Roberts in the Stationers' Registers 22nd July 1598; so that it was probably first acted in that or the preceding year. It is, I think, certainly later than any of the preceding comedies.

Origin. The remote origin of the incidents both of the bond and of the caskets is the Gesta Romanorum portions of which had been translated and published by Robinson in 1577. The incident of the bond is also in Il Pecorone of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, first printed in 1558, and which Shakespeare may have read. There was also a ballad on the subject, in Percy's Reliques, with which he may have been acquainted.

As You Like It.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. It is posterior to 1598, as Meres does not mention it, and was entered in the Stationer's Registers, August 4, 1600, by the booksellers Wise and Aspley; but for some reason, which we cannot now discover, they did not print it.

Origin. It is founded on Lodge's novel of Rosalynde, of which the chief origin was The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, ascribed, but wrongly, to Chaucer. The characters of Jaques, Touchstone, and Audrey, and of course all the comic scenes, are Shakespeare's own.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Editions. 4to, 1600; in the folio, 1623.

Date. Not being mentioned by Meres, it is posterior to 1598; and as it is said, in the title-page of the 4to, that "it hath been sundry times publicly acted," it may have been written in 1598, and may be older than As You Like It; but we have no means of deciding.

Origin. The story of Ariodante and Ginevra in the Orlando Furioso, which Shakespeare may have read either in the original or in Sir John Harington's translation, published in 1591. The story had also been translated by Beverley and Turberville; and there was a play on it, performed before the Queen on Shrove Tuesday 1582-83; so that it was well known. Shakespeare's other authority was the novel of Timbreo di Cardona, &c., in Bandello, in which occur the names Pietro di Aragona, Messina, and Felicia Lionata, and with which therefore Shakespeare must have been acquainted. As there was no known translation of it, save a French one in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, I am of opinion that Shakespeare had read the original Italian. It need hardly be added that all the comic scenes and characters are our author's own.

The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Editions. 4to, 1602; 4to, 1619; in the folio, 1623.

Date. It was entered in the Stationers' Registers 18th January 1601-02, and was, consequently, written between 1597 (it is not in Meres's list) and that date; but we have no means of ascertaining the exact time. Mr. Dyce thinks it was written before 1600. It may be observed that, though some of the characters are the same as those in Henry IV. and Henry V., it is quite independent of these plays. I must here remark that the play is so brief, and, as it were, elementary, in the 4tos as compared with the folio, that it seems quite clear that the poet revised and augmented it some time after its first appearance; and this gives some probability to the tradition of its having been written at the command of the Queen, and in a few days, possibly in 1598 or 1599. Further, as in the 4tos there is no allusion whatever to the Lucy coat of arms, it is highly improbable that the poet showed in it any ill feeling towards that family. Lastly, the occurrence in the 4tos of numerous riming couplets which are not in the folio, completely upsets Mr. Collier's theory of that edition having been made up from memory, and from notes taken at the theatre. The expression "king's English" (I. 4) might seem to indicate that the enlargement of the play was not made till after the accession of James. The change, however, of queen to king may have been made by the Editors; but surely Shakespeare must have been aware that Falstaff lived in the time of the Henries.

Origin. Though some Italian and English tales are referred to as the possible sources of the plot, we may, I think, regard it as, at least in the greater part, Shakespeare's own invention. There is, however, a strong resemblance in part of it to a German play by Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick, who died in 1611. See on The Tempest.

Twelfth Night.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. We learn from the MS. diary of a barrister named Manningham, that this play was performed in the Middle Temple, on the 2nd of February 1601-02. It was therefore written between 1597 and that date; but the exact time is quite uncertain.

Origin. The more remote origin of this play is apparently one of the tales of Bandello, which Shakespeare may have read in the original, or in a French or English version of it; for there were such. But the Rev. Jos. Hunter directed attention to three Italian comedies, two named "Inganni"—one of which is noticed by Manningham—and a third named "Gl'Ingannati," or "Il Sacrificio;" and the resemblance between this last and Twelfth Night is so strong that it is hardly possible to suppose that Shakespeare was unacquainted with it. If so, as it was never translated, as far as we know, he must have read it in the original Italian, which was printed in 1537.

N.B. The reader will observe with respect to these last four comedies, that all that we know with certainty respecting their date is that they were written between 1597 and 1600 or 1602. The arranging of them is little more than guess-work. I have placed first those that we know to have been written before 1600.

Measure For Measure.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. In the Accounts of the Revels at Court, we are informed that this play was performed at Whitehall December 26, 1604. It was therefore probably written in that or the preceding year.

Origin. "The right excellent and famous History of Promos and Cassandra, a drama in Two Parts, by George Whetstone," published in 1578. Whetstone's drama was taken from one of the tales in the Hecatommithi of Cinthio, which Shakespeare may also have read. The comic scenes are of course all his own.

The Winter's Tale.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. It appears from the MS. diary of Dr. Forman, that he saw this play performed at the Globe, May 15, 1611; it was also performed at Whitehall on the 5th of November following. Its exact date cannot be assigned; but the great probability is that it could not have been written earlier than 1610. I am disposed to regard it as anterior to The Tempest, which was probably the last play that ever Shakespeare wrote. When we consider the probable date of this play, we see how utterly untenable is the theory of some writers that it was an indirect apology for Anne Boleyn, and a direct compliment to her royal daughter. I may here observe that those ingenious persons who find allusions (except in a very few plain instances) to public events and public persons in Shakespeare's plays merely waste their own and their readers' time. Thus Sir Philip Sidney died the very year the poet came to London; and yet we are told that he is figured in Hamlet, a play not written till many years afterwards!

Origin. With the exception of the comic scenes—which as usual are wholly Shakespeare's own—it was founded on Green's popular novel of Pandosto, The Triumph of Time.

The Tempest.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. As it (II. 1) copies a passage from Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays, published in 1603, we may assume that it is posterior to that year; and Malone has directed attention to the shipwreck of Sir George Somers on the island of Bermuda in July 1609, which may have suggested the scene of "The Tempest." We may therefore venture to assume that it may have been written not long after the account of that event reached England.

Origin. Collins, the poet, told Warton that he had seen a romance called "Aurelio and Isabella," printed in Italian, Spanish, French, and English in 1588, which was the original of the Tempest. But no such romance has ever been discovered, and it may justly be questioned if ever such a one existed. Still it is not improbable that Shakespeare may have heard or read some story of people cast away on a desert island. There is also a German play by Jacob Ayrer of Nuremberg, who died early in the seventeenth century, named "Die schöne Sidea," which in its plot and principal characters, bears so strong a resemblance to The Tempest that it is very difficult to avoid supposing a connexion between them; and it might thence appear that Collins was correct, for Shakespeare could hardly have had any knowledge of a German drama. It may, however, be said that he got his knowledge of the plot, &c., from one of the English actors who, as it is now well known, used to go over and perform in Germany.

HISTORIES.

The Life and Death of King John.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. Anterior to 1598, as it is in Meres's list.

Origin. It was founded on a play called "The First and Second Part of the Troublesome Reign of King John of England," published in 1591.

The Life and Death of King Richard II.

Editions. 4to, 1597; 4to, 1598; 4to, 1608; 4to, 1615; in the folio, 1623.

Date. The exact date cannot be ascertained; but from the style I should be inclined to regard it as one of Shakespeare's earliest plays.

Origin. Hollinshed's Chronicle, and an older play on the same subject.

The First Part of King Henry IV.

Editions. 4to, 1598; 4to, 1599; 4to, 1604; 4to, 1608; 4to, 1613; in the folio, 1623.

Date. All we can say is, that it was anterior to 1598, and was most probably written in 1597.

Origin. Hollinshed's Chronicle, and an anonymous play called "The Famous Victories of Henry V." The comic scenes are entirely Shakespeare's own, both in this and the two succeeding plays.

The Second Part of King Henry IV.

Editions. 4to, 1600; in the folio, 1623.

Date. Apparently in one of the years between 1597 and 1600. As has been already observed, it could hardly have been in existence when Meres wrote, or he would not have placed Titus Andronicus in his list. It is an objection that before 1597 Shakespeare had changed the name Oldcastle to Falstaff in the First Part, while in the 4to edition of this play a speech (I. 2) has the prefix Old. instead of Fal. But surely that may have been a slip of the copyist's memory, in consequence of Oldcastle having been the original title.

Origin. The same as of the First Part.

The Life of King Henry V.

Editions. 4to, 1600; 4to, 1602; 4to, 1608; in the folio, 1623.

Date. As in the chorus to Act V. there is an evident allusion to the expedition of the Earl of Essex to Ireland, whither he went in April 1599, and whence he returned in the following September, it would seem to be clear that the play was acted in the interval between those two months. The insertion of this passage seems to be inexplicable on any other hypothesis. This also proves that the choruses formed a part of the original play, though they are not to be found in the 4to editions, which, it is well known, are scandalously imperfect.

Origin. The same as that of the two preceding plays.

The Life and Death of King Richard III.

Editions. 4to, 1597; 4to, 1598; 4to, 1602; 4to, 1605; in the folio, 1623.

Date. Anterior, of course, to 1597. I incline to regard it as posterior to King John and to Richard II.; for it has no stanzas and no riming passages. It is also very free from quibbles and plays upon words, except in the unfortunate soliloquy of Richard in the last act—a wonderful instance of want of taste, and even of judgment. The same may be said of the scenes between Richard and Lady Anne and the Queen.

Origin. Hollinshed, and probably More.

The Life of King Henry VIII.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. The following memorandum is in the Stationers' Registers:—"12 Feb. 1604[-5]. Nath. Butter. Yf he get good allowance for the Interlude of K. Henry the 8th, before he begin to print it, &c." This has been supposed to be the present play; but the style militates against this supposition. I offer the following proof, which has never, that I am aware of, been observed. In his early plays Shakespeare very rarely puts the preposition or conjunction at the end of one line and the noun or verb at the beginning of the next; in his succeeding ones he does so more frequently, and in his latest he is rather profuse of the practice. Now this construction is as frequent in Henry VIII. as in Coriolanus, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and his other later ones, whence it might seem that it should be referred to the same epoch. We are told, indeed, that in 1613 the Globe Theatre was set on fire and burned down by the discharge of chambers in a new play called "Henry VIII.;" but it is hardly possible that it could be this play, as Shakespeare had retired before that year.

Origin. Hollinshed's Chronicle.

TRAGEDIES.

Romeo and Juliet.

Editions. 4to, 1597; 4to, 1599; 4to, 1609; in the folio, 1623. There is also an undated 4to issued by Smethwick, the publisher of that of 1609, in which many typographical errors are corrected.

Date. In Act I. Sc. 2, the Nurse says, "'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;" and, as Tyrwhitt justly observed, this could only have been the earthquake which was felt in England on the 6th of April 1580. It was quite in Shakespeare's way to make the allusion; and this would give 1591 as the year in which this play was first performed. This, then, may be the true date, though I greatly doubt of it; I should rather say, entirely reject it; for it surely can hardly be anterior to the first two comedies. The play, as appears from the 4to, 1597, was little more than a sketch of that which appeared, "corrected, augmented, and amended," in 1599.

Origin. The remote original is the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in Ovid's Metamorphoses, from which an Italian writer named Luigi da Porto made a tale, printed in 1535. A tale formed from this was given by Bandello in 1554; and in 1562 a poem of Romeus and Juliet, by Arthur Brookes, taken from Bandello's, or rather from the version of it in Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, was published in London; in 1567 the same tale, also from Bandello, appeared in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. Shakespeare chiefly followed Brooke; but he had also read the Palace of Pleasure, and probably Bandello's tale in the original.

Hamlet.

Editions. 4to, 1603; 4to, 1604; 4to, 1611; 4to undated (probably in 1607); in the folio, 1623.

Date. On the 26th of July 1602, an entry was made in the Stationers' Registers of "A Booke, The Revenge of Hamlett, prince of Denmarke, as yt was latelie acted, by the Lord Chambelayn his servantes." There can be little doubt that this was the present play. The text of the 4to, 1603, is in such a mangled, wretched condition, that it has not unreasonably been conjectured that it was formed from notes made during the representation. As in this the Polonius and Reynaldo of the present play are called Corambis and Montano, it is probable that the play received much addition and alteration; for the 4to, 1604, gives it "enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect coppie." This play being so popular, it is not unlikely that the author may have frequently retouched it. It is very remarkable that it is by many degrees the most faulty of his plays, abounding, we may say, in incongruities, contradictions, and improbabilities.

Origin. Apparently a novel called The Hystorie of Hamblet, translated from Belleforest. There seems also to have been an older play on the subject.

Othello.

Editions. 4to, 1622; in the folio, 1623. There is also a 4to, 1630; but it is of little value, as it was evidently made not from a MS., but from the two preceding editions with some conjectural emendations. To the 4to, 1622, is prefixed—as to Troilus and Cressida—an Epistle "from the Stationer [Thos. Walkley] to the Reader."

Date. From the Accounts of the Revels, we learn that this play was performed at Court, November 1st, 1604; and if the Egerton Papers, published by Mr. Collier, can be relied on, it had been performed before Queen Elizabeth. In them we meet as follows:—"6 August, 1602. Rewards to the vaulters, players, and dancers—of this x^li to Burbidge's players for Othello—lxiiii^li xviii^s x^d." "The part of the memorandum which relates to Othello," says Mr. Collier, "is interlined as if added afterwards." Mr. Halliwell asserts that Othello must have been written even before 1600; for in a MS. of that date, entitled The Newe Metamorphosis, &c., is a passage evidently, he thinks, imitated from "who steals my purse steals trash" in Othello. But, though Mr. Halliwell thinks otherwise, this passage may have been a later insertion; or it may be a mere coincidence, a thing much more common than is usually supposed. At all events Othello was written, at latest, in 1604. I know not if it has been observed that Voltaire evidently had Othello in his mind when writing his Zaïre.

Origin. The only known source of this play is a tale in the Hecatommithi of Cinthio; and as no English translation of it is known to have existed, the obvious and natural inference is that Shakespeare had read it in the original. There was, however, it seems, a French translation: Paris, 1584.

Julius Cæsar.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. The real date of this play is very uncertain, and I am very dubious whether I am right or not in giving it this position. Mr. Collier—with whom Mr. Dyce agrees—is positive that it appeared before 1603, for in that year Drayton published his Barons' Wars, in which is a passage so like the character of Brutus given in this play (v. 5), that one poet must have borrowed from the other; and it is inferred of course that Drayton was the borrower. But this is not by any means so certain, as the eagle did not always disdain to take a plume from the smaller birds (see above, The Two Gentlemen of Verona). It is very strange, however, that neither of these critics seems to have been aware that the very same ideas, and even expressions, are to be found in the character given of Crites in Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (ii. 1), which was performed in 1600, and which may therefore I think justly be regarded as the real immediate original of the passages in both poets; the germ, however, is to be found in Chaucer's Tale of the Doctor of Physik. All, then, that we can venture to affirm is, that Julius Cæsar is posterior to 1600. I incline to place it in point of time before Shakespeare's other plays on Roman subjects. It may be observed that his Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are as much Histories as those that are so entitled, the history being Roman instead of English.

Origin. North's Plutarch, from the French of Amyot.

Antony and Cleopatra.

Edition. Only in the folio 1623.

Date. From the language of this play I feel inclined to place its date near that of Julius Cæsar. It is true that "A Booke called Anthony and Cleopatra," which may have been this play, was entered in the Stationers' Registers, May 20th, 1608; but it seems never to have appeared, and that entry is no proof that the play may not have been acted some years before that date.

Origin. Life of Antonius in North's Plutarch.

King Lear.

Edition. 4to, 1608; 4to, 1608; 4to, 1608; in the folio, 1623.

Date. Certainly posterior to 1603, in which year appeared Harsnet's Discovery of Popish Impostures, from which Shakespeare evidently took the names of the fiends mentioned by Edgar. There is an entry of it in the Stationers' Registers, November 26th, 1607, in which it is stated that it had been played before the King on the night of St. Stephen's Day in the preceding year. The latest date of its composition, then, that we can suppose is 1606.

Origin. Hollinshed, Mirror of Magistrates, and an old play on the same subject. The episode of Gloster and his sons was taken from Sidney's Arcadia, ii. 10.

Macbeth.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. Dr. Forman states in his MS. Diary that he saw this play "at the Globe, 1610, the 20th of April, Saturday;" but it does not follow by any means that it was then a new play. I agree with Mr. Collier in thinking that the mention of "twofold balls and treble sceptres" should induce us to place it not very far from the accession of James I. (Oct. 24, 1604), and therefore in 1605 or 1606. Malone thought there was an allusion (in II. 3) to the state of the corn-market in 1606, and to the conduct of the Jesuit Garnet on his trial in that year; but this is little more than fancy.

Origin. Hollinshed's Chronicle.

Troilus and Cressida.

Editions. 4to, 1609; in the folio, 1623.

Date. It was entered in the Stationers' Registers, January 28, 1608-9. It had not been acted at that time; for the publishers state, in an Address to the Reader, that it had never been "staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar;" while in a reissue of it in the same year the Address was suppressed, and it was given "as it was acted by the King's Majesty's servants at the Globe." It is therefore evident that it was first acted in 1609; but it might have been written some years earlier. It is a very curious question, and one to which I am unable to give a satisfactory answer, how it came into the hands of the publisher. I entirely disagree with those critics who think they discern in it the hand of another poet; for there is not a play in the whole collection more thoroughly Shakespearian in every scene. The conclusion certainly is huddled up in a way not elsewhere to be met with in these plays; but that is no proof of this theory; for if Shakespeare had taken up the work of another, the conclusion is the very part he would have been most likely to develope. It is further very remarkable, that though this play was not exposed to the wear and tear of the property-room, it contains more imperfect lines than almost any other. This I can only attribute to the haste and carelessness of the transcriber, who, as working surreptitiously, was anxious to hurry through his task in as short a time as possible. I will observe, in fine, that, though it contains the death of Hector—which might perhaps better have been omitted—it is in reality a tragi-comedy, as much so as any of Beaumont and Fletcher's.

Origin. Chaucer's Troilus and Cresseida, Caxton's Recuyl of the Historyes of Troye, and Lydgate's Historye, Sege, and Destruccyon of Troye.

Timon of Athens.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. We have no means of ascertaining the exact date; but the language and the use of rimes in the dialogue induce me to think that it was near that of Troilus and Cressida.

Origin. The story of Timon in Painter's Palace of Pleasure, and life of Antony in North's Plutarch.

Coriolanus.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. A little later, I think, than the two preceding plays; for there is only one riming passage in it.

Origin. Life of Coriolanus in North's Plutarch.

Cymbeline.

Edition. Only in the folio, 1623.

Date. From the style and the family resemblance—as appears to me—between Imogen, Miranda, and Perdita, I should deem it to be contemporaneous with the Tempest and the Winter's Tale. We may place it, then, in or after 1610.

Origin. The tale of Bernabò da Genova in the Decamerone, which Shakespeare had probably read in the original. There was an imitation of it in a tract called Westward for Smelts, of which, however, no edition earlier than 1620 is known. For the historical part, he, of course, had resorted to Hollinshed.

In these plays we may, I think, distinguish four different phases of composition, in each of which the thoughts and the language of the poet present a peculiar appearance.

The first phase extends we may say from 1593 to 1598, and contains the plays in Meres's list—except 1 Henry IV., and The Merchant of Venice, and The Taming of the Shrew. It is distinguished by a continual play on words and by frequent rimes—both in couplets and in stanzas—while the blank verse, which is as yet unformed, is harmonious and almost always decasyllabic. Richard III. seems to form the connecting link between this and the next phase; for it is free from both rimes and play on words, while the blank verse has not yet acquired its appropriate form.

The second phase would seem to extend from 1598 to 1603. It contains The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, 1 and 2 Henry IV., Henry V., Hamlet, Othello, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra. Here the dramatic blank verse is perfect, trisyllabic feet being admitted, and the lines running into each other, rimes only appearing in final couplets. There rarely occurs a play on words, and the language is in general easy and natural.

The third phase may extend from 1603 to 1609. It contains Measure for Measure, Lear, Macbeth, Troilus and Cressida, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus. In this the poet returned to the practice of giving passages of several lines in rime, though not in stanzas, and his language is obscured by periphrases, inversions, and ellipses to such an extent that many places—the speeches of Ulysses, for instance, in Troilus and Cressida—must have been perfectly unintelligible to an ordinary audience. He had already, as in Antony and Cleopatra, begun to place more frequently the preposition or conjunction at the end of one line and the word connected with it at the beginning of the next, and he continues to do so here, chiefly in Coriolanus, though hardly at all in Troilus and Cressida, or in Timon of Athens.

The fourth and last phase contains The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII., Cymbeline. He here seems to have made a return to the simpler language of the second phase. In Henry VIII. and The Tempest, what has been said of prepositions and conjunctions goes on to a great extent.

The plays above noticed—thirty-two in number—are the genuine productions of the poet. Two of them, King John and The Taming of the Shrew, were founded on plays that are still extant, and we may see that he used them precisely as he did the tales and chronicles on which he founded so many of his other plays, taking the story, the incidents, the characters, and, when it suited his purpose, the language which they contained.

But beside these, we find in the folio four other plays of a different kind, of which the most that any critic ventures to assert is that they were retouched, improved, and enlarged by Shakespeare. Of two of these, namely The Second and Third Parts of Henry VI. this would seem to be the truth; for we have the two plays in their original form, and there can be little doubt that it was them chiefly that Green had in view in the passage quoted above from his Groat's Worth of Wit, &c.; and upon examination it appears that in the first of them Shakespeare's additions and improvements amount to a fifth, in the second to only an eighth part of the text. Of the other two, The First Part of Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus, after a very careful study of them, my decided opinion, and apparently that of Mr. Dyce also, is that, with an exception presently to be noticed, neither the one nor the other contains a single speech or even a single line from the pen of Shakespeare. How they got into the folio is a question not easy to answer. Heminge and Condell, no doubt, may not have been critics, and so may have fancied that he had had to do with The First Part of Henry VI. also; or they may have merely inserted it as being connected with the other Parts. As to Titus Andronicus, I have already given a reason for its appearance in Meres's list. He had probably heard that it was by Shakespeare, and he made no exact inquiry, and so ascribed it to him; and the editors of the folio may have taken it on his authority, or have followed the same tradition. I do not believe that it was at any time in Shakespeare's nature to write the horrors of one of these plays, or to treat the noble Maid of Orleans as she is treated in the other, or even to labour on and improve the pieces that contained them. Besides, there are nowhere to be found plays more entirely of one single cast than these are. There is also displayed in them an acquaintance with Horace and others of the ancient Classics which Shakespeare did not possess. They may have been written by either Kyd or Marlow, each of whom had this acquaintance, and also a taste for horrors, and abundant talent for their composition. At the same time I think it possible that, as there is a Clown in Titus Andronicus—the only instance I believe out of the plays of Shakespeare—the two short, trifling, and needless scenes in which he appears may be from our poet's pen, and that hence the play was hastily ascribed to him.

The following plays also were published during Shakespeare's life-time with his name, in full or in initials, on the title-pages: Locrine, 1595; The Life of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600—known to be by Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hathway; History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, 1602; The London Prodigal, 1605; The Puritan, or The Widow of Watling Street, 1607; A Yorkshire Tragedy, 1608. These, with Pericles, Prince of Tyre—also published under his name in 1609—were printed in the 3rd folio, 1664, and reprinted in the 4th, 1685, and finally by Rowe in his edition of Shakespeare's Plays. The Two Noble Kinsmen, by Fletcher and Shakespeare, was published in 1634.

Of the first six of these plays the opinion of the critics is tolerably unanimous that Shakespeare had nothing whatever to do with them. Yet, as in Locrine (printed so early as 1595) it is said, "newly set forth, overseen and corrected, by W. S." it is possible, though most unlikely, that it may be one of the plays on which he operated in the early part of his dramatic career; and the fame of his Poems lately printed, may have induced the publisher to place his initials in the title-page. As to Pericles, it was rejected, with Locrine, &c., by Pope, Theobald, and all the editors down to Malone, who printed all these pieces in 1780 in the Supplement to the edition of Johnson and Steevens; he did not, however, include any of them in his own edition of 1790. Steevens admitted Pericles into his edition of 1793 on the authority of Farmer, but marked with an asterisk, as being only in part Shakespeare's, to which opinion Malone, who at first thought it wholly his, acceded. It finally was included in Reed's and in the Boswell-Malone or Variorum edition, which succeeding editors have followed. From mine it has been excluded, as I am most firmly of opinion that it does not contain a single line of Shakespeare's, and that it is an insult to his memory to give it a place among his genuine works. In fact the deliberate rejection of it by Heminge and Condell from the folio ought to outweigh all conjectural proofs in its favour. These, we must recollect, were not ordinary players, they were Shakespeare's fellows or partners in the theatres; and it was therefore utterly impossible that any play could be acted there without their knowing who was the author. They must, then, have known that Shakespeare had had nothing to do with it; for their admission of 1 Hen. VI. and Titus Andronicus proves that evidence even of the slenderest kind would have turned the beam with them. His name at full length in the title-page proves nothing; for it is also in that of Sir John Oldcastle, 1600, which is known not to be his.

As to the Two Noble Kinsmen, it was published in 1634 as "written by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare"—putting the greater last—an evident bookseller's artifice; for surely Shakespeare at the zenith of his fame, and toward the close of his dramatic career, would not join with a young poet in the composition of a play, a thing that he never seems to have done, even when he was a young poet himself. Mr. Dyce, who had rejected, afterwards adopted the theory of its being in a certain sense a joint composition; and he makes some strange hypotheses upon the subject, which to me seem utterly devoid of probability. Surely, for example, it is not to be supposed that a man of Shakespeare's business-habits would, when winding-up, as we may term it, leave behind him, in the hands of the House, an unfinished drama, and that what he left should have been the beginning and the end of a play! It is pretty generally agreed that the entire play, except the first and fifth acts, is by Fletcher. To me it seems certain that the first act, though the work of a superior poet, is not Shakespeare's; and I feel quite confident that the first, as well as the second, scene of the last act is by Fletcher; while the concluding scenes are by some other poet, different from, and, I think, superior to, the writer of the first act. My theory is, that Fletcher either obtained the commencement of a play by some one else, or began to write in conjunction with some one, and, the play being unfinished at his death, it was concluded by another poet, possibly Massinger, who alone seems capable of writing such a noble termination of so fine a drama.

THE TEXT

CORRECTED AND ELUCIDATED.

INTRODUCTION.

I. THE TEXT. II. THE VERSE.

COMEDIES.

HISTORIES.

TRAGEDIES.

INTRODUCTION.

I. The Text.

1.

In reading and criticising the plays of Shakespeare, we must always bear in mind that they were written for the stage, not for the closet, to be acted, not to be read. Shakespeare, as it would appear, was utterly regardless of literary fame; he had, as we have seen, one sole object in view, to acquire as much money as would enable him to quit the hurry and bustle of London, and settle down in his native Stratford-on-Avon as a man of independent property, and be, if possible, the founder of a family. Pouring forth, therefore, his tragic and comic strains, with as little apparent effort as the songsters of the grove warble their native notes, he set no value on them but as they filled the Globe and the Blackfriars and thus tended to the realization of the great object of all his ambition; and he never gave a single one of them to the press, as was done by Jonson and others who sought for literary fame by their dramas. Hence, though the verse is always melodious, we must not look in them for the finish and perfection which we find in those of a Racine or a Molière; we must, on the contrary, be prepared to meet with all the marks of haste and carelessness, with contradictions and even with absurdities. It would really dismay one to think of their being submitted to the ordeal through which the pieces of the great Corneille have been made to pass by Voltaire. Corneille, by the way, like Shakespeare, valued his plays by the money they produced.

Copies of about one-half of his plays were surreptitiously obtained by the booksellers, who printed them with more or less of care; but of this he took no heed: and when he finally retired to Stratford, he left in the hands of his fellowplayers the manuscripts of his plays, published and unpublished. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever had any intention of collecting and publishing his dramatic writings—a thing of which there had as yet been no instance. In 1616, the very year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson, who, widely different from the great dramatist, set a high value, and a just one, on his plays as literary compositions, collected all he had written up to that date and published them, with his other poetical pieces, in a folio volume. It may have been this that induced Heminge and Condell, two members of the company to which Shakespeare had belonged, to make a collection of his pieces also, and give them to the world in a folio volume. For this purpose they used the 4to impressions of such plays as had been printed, making some corrections and alterations in them from the playhouse copies; and adding to these the manuscript plays which were in the possession of the theatre, they put the whole into the hands of the publishers, one of whom, Edward Blount, who was a man of some literary pretensions, is supposed, not without probability, to have undertaken the task of seeing the work through the press. Such was the origin of the celebrated folio of 1623, of which it was, in my opinion most justly, said by the late Mr. Hunter, that "perhaps in the whole annals of English typography there is no record of any book of any extent and any reputation having been dismissed from the press with less care and attention;" while Mr. Knight (who ought to have known a good deal about such matters) boldly declares that "perhaps, all things considered, there never was a book so correctly printed!" Such as it is, however, it and the previous 4to impressions are the only authority we have for the text of these marvellous creations of the human intellect.

2.

Few, I should hope, will refuse to assent to the two following postulates.

I. No eminent writer—however he might obscure his meaning by metaphor, ellipsis, or other figures of speech—has ever written pure nonsense.

II. No true poet ever wrote limping, imperfect, or inharmonious verses.

We may add to these the plain facts, that printers are not, and never were, infallible, and that those works of which the authors themselves read the proof-sheets are in general more correct than those of which those sheets were read by others.

3.

Now the plays of Shakespeare are, as is well known, full of passages of which it is nearly impossible to make any good sense, and they abound in imperfect and inharmonious verses. On the other hand, the poems of Venus and Adonis, and of Lucrece, which he himself probably saw through the press, are almost entirely free from error, and do not contain a single unmelodious verse. The natural inference, then, is, that the defects of the plays are all owing to the transcribers and printers, and that the correction of them and the restoration of sense and melody, when possible, is the legitimate office of sound emendatory criticism. The truth of this has been felt from the very beginning; for in the 2nd folio, published in 1632, only nine years after the first, there are numerous corrections, which must have been made by the editor solely on his own authority, for, many of them being very bad, he could not have derived them from any manuscripts. And the same is the case in the subsequent folios, of all of which there are many copies in existence, like that which Mr. Collier met with to his misfortune, and which has excited such a storm in a puddle,—of which, by the way, my own opinion is that the corrections in it were made between 1744, the date of Hanmer's, and 1765, that of Johnson's edition; whence I only cite it for the corrections later than the former date. These contain manuscript corrections, some, like that copy, anonymously, others by Southern and other men of repute. In the beginning of the last century Rowe gave the first example of an annotated edition of Shakespeare's works, and from that time to the present edition has succeeded edition bearing the names of critics of various degrees of ability and eminence, but all agreeing in the necessity of revising the text and rendering it as correct as may be possible.

Of the early editors, Rowe and Pope made little more than the most obvious corrections, Warburton, always ingenious and almost always wrong, made notwithstanding some that were very good, as also did Hanmer. But they were all eclipsed by Theobald, one of the acutest emendatory critics that this country has produced, whose merits, though long clouded through the malignity of Pope, are now fully acknowledged. Capell, the next in order of time, also rendered good service; but Johnson, Steevens, and Malone have done much less than might have been expected. Of these the last was a native of Ireland, the only emendatory critic that country has produced; and, in my opinion, he is not at all inferior to his English rival Steevens. That true critic Tyrwhitt should also be noticed as an emendator of a high order. It is surprising how little has really been done in the present century; and I was perfectly astonished to find what a number of passages still remained in a corrupt or imperfect state when I ventured on the task of emendation. It would seem as if critical sagacity, low in rank as it may be, is one of those talents most rarely bestowed; and besides, print appears to exercise almost a magic power over most persons; they seem to think that what is in print cannot be wrong: it is in fact only very few minds that can fully emancipate themselves from its influence. It must, however, be remembered that alteration and critical emendation are widely different. The former is in the power of almost any one; the latter, as I said, requires a peculiar faculty. It is a curious fact that in nothing does critical sagacity show itself more than in, as I may say, seeing what is before the eyes. For an instance see the first note on Henry V. Another curious fact is this, that poets (Coleridge for example) are rarely good emendators. It is, in fine, the merest folly, and a proof of the grossest ignorance, to sneer at such labours and represent them as needless, if not mischievous. Editors, however, ought to be very cautious about introducing their conjectures into the text, and should place them only in notes, unless when they are such as must almost command assent, and the place corrected had previously yielded no tolerable sense or metric melody. It is a good rule to let well alone, as we say, and not to alter what gives tolerable good sense. I have, I believe, transgressed this rule only in a couple of places.

4.

The following instance is a convincing proof of the evil consequences of the proof-sheets not having passed under the author's own eye. Sismondi, the celebrated historian of France, wrote an historic tale named Julia Severa, which was of course written in French, and it was printed at one of the best offices in Paris; but the author himself did not see the proofs, whence, though it makes only two rather slender duodecimo volumes, there are actually whole pages of errata! I know, by the way, no better mode of weaning oneself from what I shall presently describe as printer-worship than a habit of examining the errata in books printed in the two last centuries. Further, in good printing-offices, at least in this country, it is the practice that the proofs, after they come from the compositor, should be read in the office and corrected before they are sent to the author or editor; while, even at the present day, in the Royal printing-office in Copenhagen there are no readers, and the sheets are sent out just as they come from the compositor, and what that state is must be known to any one conversant with printing-offices. Now it is very possible, or rather highly probable, if not certain, that such was the case in England also in former times; and supposing that it was the editors, and not Blount, that read the proofs, as the wretched state of the punctuation might seem to indicate, we need not feel any surprise at the very unsatisfactory state of the text of the folio of 1623. In opposition, however, to this opinion, the Cambridge editors think that "there were no proof-sheets, in those days, sent either to author or editor," and that "after a MS. had been sent to press it was seen only by the printers, and one or more correctors of the press employed by the publishers for that purpose." But on this hypothesis how are we to account for the great correctness of our author's Poems, Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, the Works of Jonson, Drayton, and others? The following words on the title-page of Marston's Fawne, 2nd edition, offer decisive evidence that authors did read the proof-sheets of their works:—"Now corrected of many faults, which, by reason of the author's absence, were let slip in the first edition."

5.

Notwithstanding all this, there are editors of Shakespeare who, rejecting the evidence of sense, grammar, and logic, obstinately adhere to the printed text, terming that alone authority, and even holding the second and later folios to be such; and it is really pitiable to see them superstitiously retaining for instance 'tis or it's when the metre requires it is, and syncopated forms as lov'd, own'd, etc., when the verse has need of the complete word, and vice versâ. These I denominate Printer-worshipers; for it is in reality to the authority of the printer, not of the poet, that they bow. The most extraordinary instance of this propensity in existence is the retention of "strain at a gnat" in our authorized version of the New Testament, a most manifest printer's error; for no schoolboy could have made it in translating, and in all the previous English versions the word is out. Yet there it has stood uncorrected for two centuries and a half! Hardly inferior as a piece of printer-worship is the following. A stanza of a song in Fletcher's Spanish Curate (ii. 5) ends thus:

From that breath, whose native smell

Indian odours far excel,

thus expressing the very contrary of what was meant! Theobald, a true critic, therefore most properly added doth—in the wrong place, however, as it should begin the line; yet Mr. Dyce says, "the old text is doubtless what the poet wrote"!!

To conclude, then, if the printed text cannot be made to yield sense the fault must lie, not with the poet, but with the transcriber or the printer, and a correction, made in conformity with the language and mode of thinking of the poet and his time, as it may give what he wrote, or may have written, should be admitted into the text. I must here, en passant, impress it on the reader as a maxim, that no word should be used in correction that is not to be found in the poet himself, or in his contemporaries.

6.

A printer is a transcriber or copyist, with the only difference that he uses type instead of a pen. He looks at the copy, as it is termed, and takes up the whole or part of a sentence in his mind, and then goes on composing or setting up the type. Meanwhile he is very possibly engaged in conversation, or he is listening to that of others, or he is thinking of something else. His mind being thus distracted, errors will naturally arise in what he is composing. Besides, he has very often to contend with the difficulties caused by illegible writing in the manuscript. There is another source of error—and one in which the printer is perfectly blameless—which I have never seen noticed. It is this, that in speaking and reading we often slur over, elide or suppress the final consonant if the following word begin with a consonant; and this is not peculiar to the English, but is to be found in the French, German, and other languages, being in fact a law of nature, the result of our organization. The most usual case is when, as in the following example, the first word ends and the next begins with the same consonant. Thus in one of the Irish Melodies of Moore, a poet more devoted to euphony than to sense, we have

Thou wouldest still be adored as this moment thou art,

where it will be seen that the letters in italics are not, and cannot be pronounced, without making a pause between the words. In another song of the same poet we have

Mary, I believed thee true,

And I was blest in thus believing.

Here, if it were not for the second line, no one, on only hearing the first, could tell whether the word was believed or believe; for the sound is exactly the same: see on Much Ado, iv. 1; M. N. D. ii. 1. We surely then cannot blame the printer who makes a mistake in such cases, but we should not hesitate to correct it. We should also remember that this suppression or clipping is more frequent with the classes to which the printer probably belonged than with the educated.

It is chiefly the dentals t and d that are thus suppressed before words commencing with a mute consonant; and it is surprising what a number of words there are in common use that have been thus curtailed. Thus in and the d is rarely sounded, even before vowels; of is so generally pronounced o' that it were needless printing it so, as is usual in the dramatists, were it not that o' represents on as well as of; we all say "Who did you see?" though we should write it "Whom did you see?" Instances, in fine, are numberless; but we should keep the principle constantly in mind. See the note on sly-slow, Rich. II. i. 3; and on by peeping, Cymb. i. 7.

On the other hand, there is sometimes a transference of a consonant from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, which injures the sense,—ex. gr.,

Thence forth descending to that perilous porch

Those dreadful flames she also found delayed.

F. Q. iii. 12. 42.

Here the poet probably wrote allayed, and the printer transferred to it the d of found. See on Temp. iv. 1.

While treating of elision, it may not be useless to remark that when a word beginning with h is monosyllabic, or is not accented on its first syllable, the h is not sounded. Any one who will observe will find that his, for example, is usually pronounced is; so that there is no occasion for the 's of the dramatists. So we should write and pronounce a history, but write an historian and pronounce an 'istorian; for a historian, as it is too often written and pronounced, makes a most unpleasant hiatus. We may observe how constantly the aspirate is suppressed in the poetry of Greece and Rome.

The errors of transcribers and printers are Omission, Addition, Transposition, Substitution. Of these I will now give instances, chiefly from my own experience. I must, however, previously notice the rather curious fact, that these four sources of error, which I had traced out in our printed works, are all, and no other, acted upon by that, in my mind, most able of the German critics, J. Olshausen, in that chef d'œuvre of criticism, his Comment on the Book of Psalms, thus showing how universal they are.

7.

Omission.—If any one will examine a proof-sheet as it comes from the hands of a compositor, he will find abundant instances of this source of error. One would think that such could hardly escape the author's eye; and yet, in the edition of Ben Jonson's plays corrected by himself, almost the only errors detected by the editors have been those of omission; and a few more have, I think, escaped them. I may add that the words supplied by them seem to me to be almost invariably the very words which had been omitted. In Notes and Queries (3 S. vii.) there is a list of the principal errata in the reprint of the First Folio, in 1808; and the far larger portion of them are omissions which can easily be supplied. From my own experience in the case of reprints, I can further assert that corrections of this kind are by no means a matter of hap-hazard; for where I have supplied the words I supposed lost or altered I have almost invariably found, on referring to the original edition, that I had hit on the exact word. As an instance, in a late reprint of Akenside's Poems, the following line occurs in the Hymn to the Naiads:

Your sultry springs, through every urn.

Here I at once corrected salutary, and on looking at the original edition I found I was right. Yet, had this correction been made in Shakespeare, we know how it would have been disputed. As to omissions I can give the following instances. In a reprint (Lond. 1816) of Fletcher's Purple Island, we find (xii. 74, 85) the following lines:

Thus with glad sorrow did she plain her.

In th' own fair silver shines and borrow'd gold.

Each line being short, I read in the first "sweetly plain her," and in the second one and "fairer borrow'd gold," and on looking at the original 4to I found I had supplied the poet's very words. In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, the following line is in all the MSS. and editions,

She hadde a gay mirrour,

which is evidently a foot short. I read 'She had in hand,' and on looking at the original I found en sa main.

It is not often that proofs have been read more carefully than were those of my edition of Milton's Poems, both by myself and by others; and yet, in the reprint of the text, in one place (Par. Lost, x. 422) it will be found that the word to is missing, thus destroying the metre; and yet none of us perceived it.

A far stronger case is the following. Never apparently was a work edited with greater care than Mr. Panizzi's edition of Bojardo and Ariosto; and yet in the Orlando Innamorato, II. xxiv. 54, the concluding couplet of the stanza is printed thus:

Persa ho mia gioia, e'l mio bel Paradiso,

Per lui che tardo giunse a darmi.

Here a reader, who has even but the slightest knowledge of Italian, will see at once that the word avviso has been omitted at the end of the second line; and yet this escaped not merely the printer's reader, who, even if ignorant of the language, might be supposed to have missed the rime, but the lynx-eyed editor himself, not only in the proof, but in the fair sheets which he was evidently in the habit of examining most carefully. The more I think of this error the more I feel astonished at its occurrence, a thing for which I cannot in any manner account; the following, however, is nearly a parallel. In a most carefully edited Greek Testament (Lond. 1837), in 1 Cor. xi. 23, three important words are omitted! Need we, then, wonder at omissions in Shakespeare?

The omission is generally, as in these cases, of single words, from noun to interjection, all parts of speech included, and also of single letters or syllables. It is rather curious, too, that when a word has been repeated by the poet it is sometimes omitted by the printer. Thus "What wheels? what racks? what fires?" W. T. iii. 2, is printed, "What wheels? racks? fires?" There is another instance in the same play, and many in the other plays. In Chaucer the instances are numerous. Addresses, as sir, my lord, etc., are sometimes left out, as also are pray, now, only, and others which are not absolutely necessary for the sense—and even two or more words; in all which cases the omission is indicated by the defect of metre. This the reader will do well to keep constantly in mind. For an example see on Tam. of Shrew, i. 1. It is surprising how often the negative particle is wanting in these plays of Shakespeare's. I have discovered its absence in between twenty and thirty places, not one-half of which had been observed by preceding editors. But not merely single words have been left out by printers; want of rime or want of connexion shows that entire lines have been omitted. Mr. Collier observes that three lines are wanting in various places of the Variorum Shakespeare; and such being the case in the present century, we need not wonder at so many having been passed over by the original printers. The reader will find about two dozen such cases noticed in my Edition and in the following pages, not one-half of which had been observed by preceding editors. Shakespeare himself furnishes the following remarkable instance. In Com. of Err. ii. 2, the three last folios omit the two lines beginning with "Wear gold and no man," etc. Nares gives in his Glossary (v. Portingall) a curious instance of the omission of a line, which escaped the author's own notice in the proof-sheet. So also in Massinger's Unnatural Combat, lines are wanting in two places, though he himself must have read the proofs. In 2 Hen. VI. iv. 1, there is a line wanting in the folio, to recover which we are actually obliged to go to the original play of The Contention, etc.

Parts of lines, generally the latter part, are also often wanting, but not so often as it may seem; for short lines, and also over-long lines, generally are caused by malarrangement of the text. The main cause, however, of these losses is the ill-usage to which the manuscripts seem to have been subjected in the part of the theatre in which they were kept, and the careless treatment of them by those who had occasion to use them. Hence in some places the writing may have been obliterated by ink-blots, in others effaced by friction, or by damp or dust; while sometimes a part of a leaf may have been torn away. We must remember that a large number of Shakespeare's plays were lying thus exposed to ill-usage, probably in the property-room of the Globe or Blackfriars, for a space of from twenty to thirty years.

The parts most likely to have thus sustained injury must have been those nearest the edges of the page; and hence the part effaced would be the beginning of the line or the end of it; and as the lines run evenly at the beginning, while they are of irregular length, the effacement at the beginning would be in general of mere monosyllables, as I, in, with, and, &c., while that at the end might be of several words, at times even of half a line. In the beginning, too—as will be seen in the notes on Merchant of Venice, iv. 1, As You Like It, ii. 7, and elsewhere—more than one word has been sometimes effaced. In the case of entire lines or large parts of lines, the cause may have been their position at the top or bottom of the page, and their consequent proximity to the edge.

It is rather strange that I should have been—as I believe I am—the first to notice this very simple and natural mode of accounting for the losses in the text. The number of these losses which I have, or seem to have, detected in the beginnings is over seventy, those at the ends more than double that number. As they are all supplied in my Edition, and noted in the following pages, the reader will have ample occasion for ascertaining whether my theory is correct or not. I will here, however, give a couple of instances.

In faith, my lord, you are too wilful-blame.

1 Hen. IV. iii. 1.

Here the critics are perplexed with "wilful-blame," which is a compound without example; but let us suppose that the poet wrote "wilful-blameable," and that the final letters had been effaced, we get a compound term of which examples are numerous. The other is,

And made him stoop to the water. 'Tis wonderful.

Cymb. iv. 2.

In the following pages it will be seen that occasionally I attempt to supply the losses of lines and parts of lines. It will not, I hope, be supposed that I am so presumptuous as to expect my productions to be admitted into the text. My object has merely been, by showing how easily and naturally something could be supplied, to make the reader see more clearly that something had been lost. In three places, however (All's Well, i. 1, Tr. & Cr. ii. 1, Cor. ii. 3), I have ventured to place them in the text of my Edition.

I must, in fine, request the reader most earnestly not to pooh-pooh this principle of effacement, but to keep it steadily in mind in reading the other dramatists, as well as Shakespeare; for he will find it a most valuable aid. Among the instances of effacement at the end is to be noted that of compound words of which the last part has been lost. In five places I have thought myself justified in supplying the missing word, namely, Winter's Tale, i. 2, Rich. III. v. 3, Ham. iii. 4, Tim. i. 2, ii. 2; for it is almost only at the end of a line that we ever find reason to suspect this kind of effacement.

In editing the Plays, the additions made to the text should always be marked, so as not to mislead the reader. In my edition, and in this volume, they are always printed in italics.

8.

Addition.—Of this also we meet with instances; but, as might naturally be expected, they are not so numerous as those of omission. In the following pages I place between brackets such words as I regard as additions made by the compositor or transcriber. As proofs of such additions being made I give the following, from the reprint of the text in my own edition of Milton's Poems.

But swollen with [the] wind and the rank mist they draw.

Lyc. 126.

Which after [this] held the sun and moon in fee.

Son. xii.

To stand approved in [the] sight of God though worlds.

P. L. vi. 36.

From Heaven-gate not [distant] far, founded in view.

Ib. vii. 618.

With Hallelujahs; thus was [the] Sabbath kept.

Ib. vii. 634.

Nor [is] this unvoyageable gulf obscure.

Ib. x. 366.

Against a foe to doom express assigned [to] us.

Ib. x. 926.

To which I add the following:—

And out of sight escaped at the least;

Yet not [of sight] escaped from the due reward

Of his bad deeds.

F. Q. iii. 5. 14.

So it is printed in the edition of 1750.

I may here add that printers have a wonderful propensity to add or omit—the former much more frequently—the letter s at the end of words. I remember having one time had to strike out in a single page no less than five of these ss thus liberally bestowed upon me. So also—but whether owing to the poet or the printer is dubious—we meet in Shakespeare with whom used as a nominative. See on Winter's Tale, v. 3, ad fin. In making corrections relating to these finals, our only guides therefore must be grammar, logic, and poetic melody.

9.

Transposition.—Of all modes of restoring the melody, and at times the sense, of verses this is perhaps the most legitimate and the most certain. I have therefore had recourse to it without scruple; and it will be seen that in my Edition and in this volume I have thus restored the sense or the melody of about sixty lines, of which not quite a fourth had attracted the attention of preceding editors. In my Life of Milton (p. 286) will be found a very curious instance of transposition and omission combined in the poet's own reprint of Comus, neither of which he notices, though he made two corrections in one of the lines.

In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, the transpositions in the latter part are so numerous that it was necessary to have recourse to the original poem for the proper arrangement; and I suspect that this source of error will be found in most languages. Mr. Brandreth, in his very curious and interesting edition of the Ilias, has made many transpositions, and they are well deserving of attention. His note on Il. i. 18, is "Verborum transpositio tutissimum remedium est, cum saltem, quoad grammaticam, ita dixisse potuerit poeta. Recitatores sæpe verba retinent, dum ordinem obliviscuntur." This most exactly accords with what we find in Shakespeare. I think also that many might be, as some have been, made in the poetic and prophetic books of the Old Testament—ex. gr.,

"Ye mountains of Gilboa, no dew nor no rain be upon you, and fields of offerings; for there" &c.—2 Sam. i. 21.

Now surely the royal poet must have written,

Ye mountains of Gilboa, and fields of offering!

No dew and no rain be upon you:

and it appears still more certain when we look at the original Hebrew.

A chief cause of errors of this kind seems to have been the addition, by the author, of one or more lines to a place which he had previously deemed complete, and this addition, having been made in the margin, was taken in by the printer in the wrong place; as such I regard the transposition in M. N. D. ii. 1. Another cause was the omission of something by a transcriber, who, when he detected his error, wrote what he had left out in the margin, and the next transcriber or the printer carelessly inserted it in the wrong place. Of this we have very striking instances in the Chorus to Hen. V. ii., 2 Hen. VI. iii. 1, and Rom. & Jul. iii. 3. As in these cases, entire lines or even couplets get out of place, sometimes parts of lines (King John, iii. 3, Rich. II. v. 3), at other times single words. Thus adjectives change places (Temp. i. 1. iv. 1), and substantives do the same (All's Well, ii. 3, M. N. D. ii. 1, L. L. L. iv. 3). The following is a notable instance. In Massinger's Maid of Honour (i. 1), a play of which the proofs were probably read by the poet himself, we read, "A gentleman and yet no lord," where the context shows that the very opposite is meant. Gifford saw this, but he did not see the cause, namely, that a and no had changed places in the printer's mind.

I have remarked several errors of this kind in Chaucer, in whom, in fact, they are most numerous—ex. gr.,

And eke in his hert had compassioun.

And in his hert eke had compassioun.

And pitous and just and alway y-liche.

And just and pitous and alway y-liche.

That it was a blissful noise to here.

That it a blissful noise was to here.

In the Faerie Queene, we have

Was like enchantment, that through both his eyes

And both his ears, did steal his heart away.

vi. 2. 3.

Here, as the riming line ends in appears, we must transpose "eyes" and "ears." Again, in all editions of Parnell's poems, from the first (edited by Pope), we read in the Hermit,

Then with the sun a rising journey went,

where both the context and common sense show that "rising" properly belongs to "sun." The original printer, however, joined it with "journey," and he has been, of course, duteously followed by his successors, while editors never seem to have discerned the incongruity.

In the edition of Akenside above mentioned, I met with

Of triangle or circle, cube or cone,

where it is quite plain that the two first substantives had changed places in the printer's mind.

Surely Wordsworth did not write

I did not hunt after nor greatly prize.

Prelude, ed. 1858.

In a proof-sheet of my Edition, I found

And leave your brother speed to gos elsewhere.

3 Hen. VI. iv. 1.

In Troilus and Cressida, v. 2, there is a passage to which transposition, and it alone, gives sense. It is difficult to see how the printer could have made such a jumble; and yet it is manifest that he must have done so. There is, however, as I have shown in my note on the place, just such another in the play of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which the editors have made no attempt at correcting. In the following passage of Chaucer,

Tooke my horse and forthe I went,

Oute of my chaumbre; I never stent.

Book of the Duchesse.

I would read

Oute of my chaumbre forthe I went,

And tooke my hors; I never stent.

In the same poet's Romaunt of the Rose, we have the following passage, unnoticed by any editor,

Thine armys shalt thou sprede abrode

As man in warre were forweriede,

where in the first line we should read "abrode sprede," and in the second reject "were" as an addition of the copyist. An exactly similar transposition occurs in a later part of that poem.

10.

Substitution.—"He who has not repeatedly observed how a copyist, from inattention, sets down a word which his mind has presented to him instead of that which is before his eyes, must have seen little of copies of print or manuscript." These are the words of a Spanish writer, and they are of universal application. I remember myself once, with Herodotus before my eyes, writing Sestos for Abydos; and the changes I have made in copying passages for this work have amazed me. In Corneille's play of Rodogune (i. 1), we read enlever where the proper word is élever, and Voltaire justly suspected that it was an error of the original printer. Further on the reader will meet with a similar error in the original edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme.

The most ordinary case of substitution seems to be that of synonyms; at least there is none to which I have been so subject myself. In giving examples I will commence with Spenser.

A yearly solemn feast she wonts to make.

F. Q. ii. 2. 42.

Now, as the rimes are hold, told, the poet must have written, or have intended to write, hold.

That doth against the dead his hand uprear.

Ib. ii. 8. 29.

Here the word must have been upheave, the rimes being leave, cleave, bereave.

When walking through the garden them she spied.

Ib. iii. 6. 40.

As the rimes are law, draw, we must of course read saw.

Of finest gold. The fifth game was a great new standing bowl,

To set down both ways. These brought in, Achilles then stood up.

Chapman, Iliads, xxiii. 249.

The right word, it is quite plain, is cup.

Or painful to his slumbers; easy, sweet,

And as a purling stream, thou son of Night.

Fletch. Valentinian, v. 2.

Here, as it has been shown, the proper word is light; yet Mr. Dyce has not ventured to receive it.

Mi si scoperse; onde mi nacque un ghiaccio

Nel core, ed evvi ancora,

E sarà sempre, fin ch'io le sia in braccio.

My late friend Rossetti, in copying out this passage of Petrarca in his Amor Platonico, etc., wrote gelo for ghiaccio, and never saw the error, even in reading the proof; and so it is printed.

On the other hand, the adjacent or riming lines sometimes terminate in the same word. There are many instances in Shakespeare, and I have met with the following in Italian.

Ciascun de' cavalieri ebbe e sergenti

Ed al servizio suo donne e sergenti.

B. Tasso, Amadigi, xxii. 67.

where, as the rimes show, the first line should end with una stanza.

Bears in his boasted fan an Iris bright,

When her discoloured bow she spreads through heaven bright.

F. Q. iii. 11. 47.

We meet also with places where the sense or the metre, unaided by rime, must be our guide in correcting—ex. gr.,

The round earth, heaven's great queen and Pallas to whose bands.

Chapman, Iliads, i. 395.

Here the metre shows that the right word is Minerva, not Pallas.

There is one most remarkable case of substitution to which sufficient attention has never been given by the critics. It may be termed reaction or repetition, and arises from the impression made by some particular word on the mind of the transcriber or printer, or even of the writer himself.

Thus in a proof-sheet of my Milton I found

A furnace horrible on all sides round,

As one great furnace flamed.

Par. Lost, i. 61.

while the word before the compositor's eyes was dungeon.

To me most fatal, me most it concerns.

Par. Reg. iv. 205: Todd's 4th edit.

Here, again, the true reading is so; yet, as most makes good sense, if the error had been in the original edition it would in all probability never have been detected. Opening by chance Bloomfield's pretty poem of The Farmer's Boy (ed. 1857), I met with

Till when up-hill the destined hill he gains.

Winter, 173.

We may find in Chaucer—

What ladies fairest ben or best dauncing,

Or which of hem can daunce best or sing.

Knt's Tale.

Here for dauncing we should probably read loking.

Of his gladnesse he gladed her anone.

Tr. and Cr. i.

The poet probably wrote goodnesse.

For though a man forbide drunkenesse,

He not forbides that every creature

Be drunkeles for alway, as I gesse.

Ib. ii.

We should read commaundes in the second line.

Witness the daily libels almost ballads

In every place, almost in every province,

Are made upon your lust.

Thierry and Theodoret, i. 1.

We should for the first almost, which must be wrong, probably read and the. Mr. Dyce seems never to have seen this; for he had no conception of this source of error: yet I wonder common sense did not suggest that something must be wrong.

The things that grievous were to do or bear

Them to renew, I wote, breeds no delight;

Best music breeds delight in loathing ear.

F. Q. i. 8. 44.

For delight in the last line we might read dislike, but I think we should rather read annoy; for in these cases, as we may see, no resemblance in form or sound is to be sought. I therefore in Othel. iii. 3, reject the emendation of Pope and 4to 1630 of feels for keeps, because it was evidently suggested by the slight similarity of form, and does not perfectly suit the context. The reader will find an excellent instance in As You Like It, ii. 3.

My news shall be the news to that great feast.

Ham. ii. 2.

So the folio reads; the 4to has more correctly fruit.

Surely Shakespeare never wrote

To seek thy help, by beneficial help.

Com. of Err. i. 1.

He that they cannot help him,

They that they cannot help.

All's Well, i. 3.

As this error never occurs in Jonson and Massinger, and only, I believe, in the instance given above in Beaumont and Fletcher, and has no æsthetic advantage or beauty to recommend it, it seems quite absurd to suppose that Shakespeare, whose vocabulary was the largest of all, and whose ear was so fine and correct, should have found pleasure in it. Surely a just critic will sooner lay the blame on the printer and the careless editors, very different in this respect from those of Beaumont and Fletcher, who seem never to have hesitated to correct an error when they discovered it.

The resemblance in form above alluded to is of great importance, under the name of ductus literarum, in the eyes of Mr. Dyce, and it should always be attended to; for it is usually caused by the attempt of the printer to make out illegible writing. The following are striking instances:—

In Peele's Edward I. these lines occur.

To calm, to qualify, and to compound,

Thank England's strife of Scotland's climbing peers.

That the last line is nonsense was clear to every one; but no critic ever could emend it. The true reading, however, is doubtless The enkindled, which flashed suddenly on my mind one time when I was considering the passage. It was probably the resemblance of sound chiefly that misled the printer.

At the end of Marston's Insatiate Countess we meet the following unmeaning line,

Like Missermis cheating of the brack,

which Steevens corrected most happily thus—

Like Mycerinus cheating of the oracle,

having discerned the allusion to Herod. ii. 133.

It is very curious that the word substituted is often the very opposite of the right word. I myself once wrote—and so it is printed—diameter for circumference. In Mrs. C. Clarke's most valuable Concordance we have "humorous plebeian" for "humorous patrician." I have met with next for last and none for some; so in The Mer. of Ven., ii. 2, where the folio has "Is sum of nothing," the 4tos read "Is sum of something." In Lear v. 3, the folio reads

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us;

while the 4tos have "pleasant virtues."

In All's Well, iii. 2, and Taming of the Shrew, iii. 1, we have old for new. In a proof-sheet which I lately saw there was a quotation of

The paths of glory lead but to the grave;

and the printer had substituted life for "grave," though, as the entire stanza was given, he had the rime to guide him. Many instances of this practice will be found in Love's Labour's Lost. In La Giovanezza, a poem of the Italian poet Pindemonte, I have just met with brutte where the rime and the sense require belle.

It does not seem to have been observed that printers will actually insert words, for the sake of sense or metre, when they have made a mistake. In my Life of Milton, I had occasion to quote a passage from his prose works containing "with a conscience that would retch;" and of this the printer made "with a conscience that he would relish;" and so, I am sorry to say, it is printed. See on Mer. of Ven. iv. 1.

And stones did cast, yet he for nought would swerve.

F. Q. v. 12. 43.

As the rimes are deserved, preserved, observed, the poet must have written e'er swerved or nothing swerved.

In her right hand a fire-brand she did toss.

F. Q. iii. 12, 17.

The rimes are embost, lost, so that Spenser must have written tost, making, as usual, a dissyllable of fire. That it was not the poet himself that made the mistake is clear; for in

Till Arthur all that reckoning defrayed (ii. 10, 49)

the edition of 1750 has did defray.

A contrary error to this is where the printer has made one word of two, caused either by sound or by illegible writing. For instances, see on Com. of Err. iii. 1, Tw. Night, i. 1, Mer. Wives, v. 5, Ant. and Cleop. iv. 9, Macb. iii. 4.

The fact of effacement in the manuscript, on which I have laid such stress in the section on Omission, has also been a cause of substitution; for, the original word having become nearly or totally illegible, the transcriber or compositor, in order to make sense, used to give some term of his own. Thus we have yes for I will, Meas. for Meas. iii. 1, yea for even so, Rich. II. iii. 1, ay for I will, Ham. iv. 7, as is proved by the metre. These are all at the beginning of the line, and hence their liability to effacement. See also on All's Well, ii. 1, Twelfth Night, iv. 3, Rich. II. i. 3, and elsewhere.

Finally, substitutions are often quite capricious, making no sense whatever. For "he went circuit," where my manuscript was perfectly legible, I once got "the local circuit;" so also "the merits" for "there an echo;" "establishment" for "established government." In Alison's Life of Lord Castlereagh, one of the pall-bearers at the funeral of the Duke of Wellington was Sir Peregrine Pickle (Maitland); in all editions of Joseph Andrews we have in one place "Sir John" for "Sir Thomas" Booby.

It is to be observed that to unto, till until, on upon, though although, e'er ever, &c., were frequently confounded. It is therefore the merest printer-worship to hesitate at altering them when the metre requires it. A further observation is, that even down into the eighteenth century, it was the custom to write y for th in monosyllables beginning with this last (þ, A. S.), as y^e the, yⁿ then, y^t that, y^u thou; y^r your was another abridgment; and hence confusion has often arisen. In these plays we have that for then in four places (see on Tr. and Cr. i. 2); and in Paradise Regained (i. 137) we have then for thou, and also, I think, in Tw. Night, v. 1.

11.

Such, then, are the various sources of error in the original editions of Shakespeare's plays, the correction of which and restoration of the poet's real sense are, as I have said, the task of the genuine critic, and one in which, except in a very few instances, success is not to be by any means despaired of.

As a means of obtaining it, I would, as I have done, lay it down as a rule that no word or phrase should be employed in restoration which is not to be found in the poet's own works, or at least in those of his contemporaries. It is obvious that by so doing we shall greatly diminish the risk of failure. It is a curious fact, that not unfrequently two or even three corrections are so equally good, that it is exceedingly difficult to choose between them, and that the final choice thus becomes a matter of mere chance. In such cases I think the critic should select the one which is the most poetic and most worthy of the poet. The coincidence of two or more independent critics in a correction is, in general, a proof of its truth; yet even this is not infallible. See on Merry Wives, ii. 3.

For correction, then, the first requisite is a thorough knowledge of the poet's language, the acquisition of which is a work demanding both time and close attention. Shakespeare's vocabulary, as we have seen, is extremely copious, and from his not having had the advantage of a regular education his plays present more anomalies, and offer more difficulties to the modern reader than those of the contemporary dramatists.

In his early pieces there is an incessant play on words; and in his later the language is often very elliptical and the sentences greatly involved. These difficulties are enhanced by the ignorance of punctuation, or neglect of it, with which the editors are chargeable. Thus it is only in very plain cases that they notice the break in sense caused by the aposiopesis, the anacoluthon, or an interruption, of which the reader will find so many examples in my Edition and in the following pages, marked for the first time, and designated by the sign (...). I would particularly direct his attention to Temp. iii. 1, 2 Hen. IV. iv. 1, Ham. i. 2, i. 4.

12.

In the dramas and other works of those days we may observe the following peculiarities.

The infinitive mood is used with or without to differently from the present usage—prefixed where we omit, omitted where we prefix. It is also employed, like the Hebrew infinitive absolute, where we use the present participle active, sometimes with a preposition, ex. gr.,

Copious in words, and one that much time spent

To jest.

Lydgate, Book of Troy.

Even in Cowley we meet with

The sun himself, although all eye he be,

Can find in love more pleasure than to see.

The Gazers.

Here it is plain we should use the participle in seeing.

In "He is grown too proud to be so valiant," Cor. i. l, "to be" seems to be i. q. being; too being apparently used in the sense of trop, Fr., i.e. excessively.

The passive participle was continually used in the place of the present or past participle active or of the future. Chapman, for instance, is profuse in his use of it in his Homer. Of this, as of the former, we have some remains among us still, but few indeed compared with what our forefathers had. The perfect was also frequently used as a part. past, and of this also we have still some remains.

In imitation of the Latin and French, the writers of the sixteenth century—for we do not meet with it in Chaucer or Gower—used the verb as a noun, as dispose for disposal, suspect for suspicion.

A further peculiarity was the use of what grammarians call collectives, i.e., the singular noun used for the plural. We still retain this in sheep, swine, fowl, and partially in year, day; but in our older writers we meet with it in horse (Much Ado, i. 1, Hen. V. iv. 1, and in Chapman's Homer continually), pearl (Macb. ad fin.), tree, corpse, witness, business, subject, princess (Temp. i. 2), and other words.

Writers of those days—and Shakespeare more than any—were fond of using verbs in a causative sense, as fall for cause to fall, let fall, fear for make fear. In these plays we meet, in a causative sense, with cease, linger, neglect, silence, faint, perish, &c. Thus learn became teach, take give. It is only thus that "smiles his cheek in years" (L. L. L. v. 2) becomes sense.

13.

There was a peculiarity of the grammar of those days which is now confined to the vulgar, namely, that of joining a plural nominative with a singular verb, ex. gr.,

That in this spleen ridiculous appears,

To check their folly, passions solemn tears.

L. L. L. v. 2.

The rimes here and in several other places prove that this is no printer's error; and this construction is actually most frequent in Peele, Marston, and Fletcher—all University men! Editors, Mr. Dyce for example, are in the habit of taking the most unwarrantable liberty of altering this construction, except where restrained by the rimes. This practice is highly reprehensible and should be avoided; for we should give the text as it came from the poet's pen.

The origin of this structure is very simple. In the Anglo-Saxon the verbs made their plural in th, not in n, as afterwards became the usage. This plural of the verb occurs continually in the Vision of Piers Ploughman, and we find it not unfrequently even in the State Papers of the early Tudor period, in its later form; for, as in the singular, the th was gradually changed to s.

In the more artistic compositions of Chaucer and Gower, however, it is very rare. The following line in Chaucer,

As flakès fallès in grete snowes,

House of Fame.

shows that even in his time the th had been converted into s. The present practice, then, we may see is merely a change of fashion, and our ancestors' mode of forming the plural was perfectly correct and grammatical, with one exception—of which we still meet instances—that of using is and was as a plural. In my Edition of our poet's plays, I have therefore very generally preserved this structure; for we may alter orthography and punctuation, but not grammar.

On the other hand, I must maintain, in opposition to Mr. Dyce, that the union of a single noun with a plural verb was never a rule of the language, but always an error of the copyist, or a slip of the writer. Of this I can give positive instances.

I one day met in my own History of England the following words, "The blood of Catesby and two others alone were shed;" and on looking at the first edition I found of course that my word had been was. In Mr. Lloyd's Critical Remarks on Measure for Measure, in Singer's Shakespeare, we may read "the five acts of the first part of Promos and Cassandra concludes the iniquity of the deputy." Nor is this confined to English; in the Gerusalemme Liberata, and unnoticed by any editor, we find

Non si conviene a te, cui fatto il corso

Delle cose e de' tempi han si prudente.—x. 41.

In all cases it will be found to be the consequence of a noun of a different number having intervened between the nominative and the verb. Mr. Dyce, however, tries to make a rule of it by saying that "our early writers" did it when a genitive plural intervened; but that will not apply to passages like these—

Whose youth, like wanton boys through bonfires,

Have skipt thy flame.—Two Noble Kinsmen, v. 1.

The sea,

With his proud mountain-waters envying heaven,

When I say 'still!' run into crystal mirrors.

Valentinian, iv. 1.

Of others' voices, that my adder's sense,

To critic and to flatterer stopped are.

Shakespeare, Son. cxii.

This last is the error of the poet, who probably had ears in his mind; yet sense may be a collective: all the others are perhaps to be ascribed to the original printers.

The intensive particle be was prefixed to verbs much more frequently than at present. There was also a frequent ellipsis of the first personal pronoun before such verbs as cry, beseech, beshrew, &c.; and finally the habit—still retained by the vulgar—of cutting away the first syllable of a word prevailed to some extent.

14.

The pronunciation of Shakespeare's time of course differed in many points from that of the present day. Thus aspect and many other words were accented, and properly, on the last syllable; we also have obdúrate, árchbishop, cónfessor, &c. In words such as case, pace, lace, the French sound of the a seems to have been partially retained—Chaucer writes these words cas, caas, paas, laas—along with the ordinary English sound. Chaucer also writes 'made' maad, Raleigh 'safe' sauf; and as the Master of the Revels wrote Shakespeare's name Shaxberd, we may suppose that shake and terms of a similar form were pronounced shak, &c. If we do not pronounce lac'd as last in "lac'd mutton" (Two Gent. i. 2), we lose the humour of the passage. When Spenser therefore makes prepar'd, for example, rime with hard, he was probably doing nothing very unusual; for these double sounds—as we may see by the example of shew show, shrew shrow, lese lose—were by no means uncommon. I suspect that sea may have been one of these, and that besides riming with see, as indeed Chaucer always writes it, it retained the sound of the Anglo-Saxon ɼæ; for F. Beaumont in his Poems almost invariably makes it rime with such words as day, lay, ray. Waller, followed by Pope, Gay, and other poets, most improperly made ea rime with ai, ay, as tea with obey, &c. As haste, chaste, waist, &c., constantly rime with fast, last, &c., they were probably, I think certainly, pronounced as they were written, like them; or they may have had a double pronunciation like the words just quoted. As the more usual orthography was chaunge, raunge, &c., these words would seem to have been pronounced as in French, and as we still pronounce daunt, haunt, avaunt. In words chiefly from the French, terminating in ci, si, ti followed by a vowel, as in nation, fashion, passion, &c.—to which we may add ocean—the usual sound was s, not sh as at present. On the whole, the language seems to have been more euphonious than that of the present day.

While on the subject of euphony, I must direct attention to one point. Our ancestors probably pronounced my, thy (mín, þín, A.-S.), mee, thee, with a short sound also, when not emphatic, as in by, to, &c. Owing to its falling out of familiar use, and its employment in the Bible and Liturgy, thy has long—except by the Quakers and the peasantry—been pronounced so as to rime with fly, try; but my retained its proper sound till within the last few years; Walker, for instance, knew nothing of a change. But now our ears are constantly dinned with an egotistic my like thy. I mention this because this new-fangled pronunciation is ruinous to both euphony and humour in our elder writers.

I shall conclude with some remarks upon its, a word of which Shakespeare may almost be regarded as the originator; though Spenser, no doubt, had used it once (F. Q. vi. 11. 34) before him. Singer says it "occurs but twice or thrice" in Shakespeare; and Archbishop Trench and others say "three or four times;" while the fact is that its occurs twelve, and it, as a genitive, no less than fifteen times. We meet its only nine times in the numerous plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and but half a dozen times in those of Jonson or Massinger.

The Chinese language makes the genitive by merely prefixing the substantive; thus houe jin (houe kingdom) is "man of the kingdom." The same is the structure of the Teutonic and Scandinavian languages, ex. gr., day light, &c.; but while all the others make the two substantives form one word, the English sometimes keeps them separate, sometimes unites them by a hyphen, and at other times makes them into one word. Hence we may observe, by the way, that it is needless, as well as cacophonous, to add an 's to a substantive ending in that letter; even the simple turned comma is superfluous, the position alone indicating its genitive sense.

It appears that not only nouns but pronouns were so employed. In the first page of the Canterbury Tales we have—

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertue engendred is the flour.

Here which is a genitive, for which we should now use whose (the genitive of who), a pronoun that our forefathers used of things as well as persons.

In like manner, though his was the usual genitive of it as well as of he, it was not uncommon to make the genitive by simply prefixing it, as in

Lord, how it could so prettily have prated with it tongue!

Romeus and Juliet, 1562.

and other passages. I do not think it ever occurs in Chaucer, Gower, or Piers Ploughman.

I am therefore of opinion that Shakespeare may be regarded as the chief agent in introducing its into the language. It is to be noticed that it never occurs in the Bible, only thrice, or rather only twice, in Milton, and but once in Waller. Chatterton used it twice in the very first page of his Poems of Rowley; yet the critics of the time did not discern this plain proof of forgery!

On the disputed question of the use of his for the genitive, I will only observe that the fact is that the preceding noun is used absolutely. Thus, as we have "The king, he is hunting the deer," so we have "the king, his palace." The same structure precisely is to be met with in Dutch and German—we meet with it, for instance, in Schiller's Wallenstein; and Captain Burton informs us that in the Kariri language of Eastern Africa, "The Kazi's brother," for example, is Kazi-ih-zo, literally "The Kazi, his brother."

II. THE VERSE.

15.

Chaucer introduced into English poetry the iambic verse of five feet, formed by the Provençals in imitation of the Classic Phaleucian and Sapphic hendecasyllables, and adopted from them by the Italian poets. These last, however, though they held the principle of admitting but five ictus in a line, did not limit themselves to eleven syllables, as the following examples will show:—

Che passa i monti, e rompe i muri e l'armi.

Dante, Inf. xvii. 2.

L'oro, e le perle, e i fior vermigli, e i bianchi.

Petr. Son. xxxi.

Non danno i colpi, or finti, or pieni, or scarsi.

Tasso, Ger. Lib. xii. 55.

So the Greeks in their dramatic iambics admitted trisyllabic feet, Æschylus admitting one foot, Sophocles two, Euripides three; while the comic poets, both Greek and Latin, used these feet still more freely, not, however, exceeding the limit of three.

Chaucer did not allow himself the same licence as his masters. He sometimes admits one such foot, rarely two, and three, I believe, only once. He also uses at times the Alexandrine or verse of six feet.

The first who used this verse for the drama in England was Bishop Bale, who in 1538 published three Interludes, as he termed them, or dramatic pieces on Scriptural subjects. Here are a few lines from the one named God's Promises:—

In the begynnynge, before the heavens were create,

In me and of me was my sonne sempyternall,

With the Holy Ghost, in one degre or estate

Of the hygh godhed, to make the Father coequall,

And thys my Sonne was with me one God essencyall,

Without separacyon at any tyme from me,

True God he is of equall dignytè.

The feet, it will be seen, are here of two or three syllables indifferently; and the same is the case in the couplets which occur also in these plays.

About the same time Nicholas Udall wrote his comedy of Ralph Roister Doister—not printed till 1566—in which we have the earliest specimen of the verse afterwards chiefly used for comedy, namely, one of four feet, the foot of two, three, and even four syllables. It commences thus:—

As long lyveth the mery man (they say)

As doth the sory man, and longer by a day,

Yet the Grassehopper for all his Sommer pipyng

Sterveth in Winter wyth hungrie gripyng.

This measure may be seen in Damon and Pitheas, New Custom, Gammer Gurton's Needle, and other plays, in which we shall find it admitting lines of five and even six and seven feet,—ex. gr.,

That state is most miserable. Thrise happy are we

Whom true love hath joined in perfect amity.

Which amity first sprung, without vaunting be it spoken that is true,

Of likeliness of manners, took root by company, and now is conserved by virtue.—Damon and Pitheas.

Contemporary with Bale and Udall, the illustrious Earl of Surrey had introduced into English a new species of verse—blank verse. This was a five-foot iambic measure without rime, and admitting of verses of six feet. His version of two books of the Æneis in this measure was printed in 1557; and five years later, Jan. 18, 1561-2, a play written in it and named Gordebuc, by Norton and Sackville, was performed before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall, and it was given to the press in 1566. But more than twenty years elapsed before blank verse made its first appearance on the public stage in the Tamburlain of Marlow. From its inherent superiority, it at once became the established form for the drama, still mingled, however, with riming couplets and stanzas.

16.

I have already expressed my opinion that the earliest among the extant dramas of Shakespeare may have been The Comedy of Errors. This is in blank verse, in general strictly decasyllabic, mingled with the riming measures above noticed. His next play would seem to have been The Two Gentlemen of Verona, much of the same form, but differing from it, and from its immediate successors, by admitting in its blank verse trisyllabic feet, as in

A virtuous gentlewoman, mild and beautiful.—iv. 4.

It might seem as if the poet were hesitating about the adoption of a freer kind of verse such as came afterwards into use. Love's Labour's Lost, and the other plays in Meres' list—to which, as may be seen, The Taming of the Shrew is to be added—are all of the same kind. As he advanced in his career, he gradually discarded rime, and admitted the trisyllabic foot more frequently. He also learned to run his verses into each other, thus forming a system; the preposition, for instance, ending one line, and the word it governed beginning the next line.

The blank verse of Surrey and of the authors of Gordebuc—admitting, as we have seen, verses of six feet—may be regarded as strictly decasyllabic. But when it became the standard verse of the theatres it gradually relaxed from its strictness, and admitted trisyllabic feet more and more as it advanced, so that in Fletcher we actually meet with lines containing fifteen syllables, though of no more than five feet. It is most strange that, with these facts staring them, as I may say, in the face, editors, almost without exception, seem to have been haunted by a spectre of five decasyllabic feet. "How often," says Gifford, "will it be necessary to observe that our old dramatists never counted their syllables on their fingers!" They also seem to be unaware of the existence of Alexandrines, or verses of six feet. The play of Othello, for instance, is as full of them as Dryden's riming couplet verse; and yet Mr. Dyce—whom I generally notice as being usually regarded as a leading critic—writes frequently as if such a line were not admissible in dramatic verse.

Again, there are critics who regard a verse as good if it contains ten syllables, no matter how made or how arranged.

Thus Malone gives as good verses,

What wheels, racks, fires, flaying, boiling.—W. T. iii. 2.

Curs'd be I that did so. All the chärms.—Temp. i. 2.

Poürs into captains' wounds? banishment.—Timon, iii. 5.

Mr. Collier regards as a good verse,

To yond generation you shall find.—M. for M. iv. 3.

"Doth comfort thee in thy sleep. Live and flourish" is the usual reading in Rich. III. v. 5; mine is at least more euphonious.

It has never to my knowledge been sufficiently noticed that Shakespeare makes occasional use of the seven-foot verse of Golding's Ovid and Phaer's Virgil, works in which it is evident he was extremely well-read. Such are the following lines:—

For often have you writ to her, and she in modesty,

Or else for want of idle time, could not again reply;

Or fearing else some messenger, that might her mind discover,

Herself hath taught her love himself to write unto her lover.—Two Gent. ii. 1.

A cherry-lip, a bonny eye, a passing-pleasing tongue.

Rich. III. i. 1.

My visor is Philemon's roof; within the house is Jove.—

Why then your visor should be thatch'd.—

Speak low, if you speak love.—Much Ado, ii. 1.

Convey the wise it call: steal! foh! a fico for the phrase!—

Well, sirs, I am almost out at heels.—

Why, then, let kibes ensue.—Mer. Wives, i. 3.

As many devils entertain, and To her, boy! say I.—Ib.

Thou art the Mars of malcontents. I follow thee, troop on.

Ib.

Die men like dogs; give crowns like pins; have we not Hiren here?—2 Hen. IV. ii. 4.

Rouse up Revenge from ebon den, with fell Alecto's snake.

Ib. v. 5.

A damned death! Let gallows gape for dogs, let man go free.—Hen. V. iii. 6.

These last six, we may see, all belong to Ancient Pistol. We possibly might add:

He's ta'en, and, hark! they shout for joy.—

Come down, behold no more.—Jul. Cæs. v. 3.

17.

I will now make a few general observations on the dramatic verse of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In the first place, as observed above, we may lay it down as a general rule that their verse—I may perhaps include even that of Marston—is never rugged or inharmonious, but that when it appears to be so it is owing to the copyist or the printer, or to the fact of the manuscript having been damaged, and not unfrequently to want of skill in the reader.

An apparent cause of imperfection in lines is the reader's ignorance of the poet's mode of pronunciation. Thus it was then the custom—one not quite lost yet—in prose as well as in verse, if two words came together, one ending, the other beginning, with an accented syllable to throw back the former accent: hence Shakespeare said, for example, "the dívine Desdemona." If critics kept this fact in mind, they would not reject Tieck's excellent emendation of "the précise Angelo" for "the prenzic Angelo" in Measure for Measure, on account of the accent, when in the very same play we have "a cómplete bosom," i. 4; "O just, but sévere law!" ii. 2; "Will bélieve this," ib.; "Our cómpell'd sins," ib. 4, &c.; we have actually "précise villains," ii. 1. How would they read

Might córrupt minds procure knaves as corrupt

(Hen. VIII. v. 1)?

In fine, it must be remembered that ion, ien, and other double vowels were pronounced dissyllabically, as oceän, &c.

Again, neither editors nor readers are in general aware that poets like Shakespeare, who were born in those parts of England where the r at the end of words or syllables has the light sound peculiar to the English language, frequently pronounce as dissyllables those monosyllables, such as fire, hour, more, where, &c., ending in r after a long vowel or diphthong, as in

I know a bank, where the wild thyme blows.—M. N. D. ii. 1.

Here "where" is to be pronounced nearly wheaa; for so the English really do pronounce it, though they may fancy such not to be the case. Malone, as being an Irishman, seems to have been the first to notice it. Of these monosyllables there are upwards of thirty in Shakespeare, and as many in Fletcher; while in the learned Jonson we only meet with fire, hour, our, your, wear. In my Edition, and in this work, I have marked them with a diæresis, as whëre, heär, &c. It is rather remarkable that it is almost solely to his higher characters, such as Hamlet and Coriolanus, that Shakespeare gives this pronunciation. We also find this dissyllabic pronunciation in such words as born, morn, horn, &c.

As in French poetry the e muet in words forms a distinct syllable, ennemi, for example, being read as a trisyllable; so we find angry, entrance, children, mistress (often written misteris), country, witness, juggler, wondrous, &c., forming three, remembrance four syllables. Captain was sometimes capitain, as in French. Many of these cases, we may observe, are mere solutions of contractions, angry, for example, being simply angery contracted.

18.

In opposition to the commonly received theory, I will venture to lay it down as a fixed principle that the dramatic poets rarely, if ever, used short lines, except in speeches of a single line, or in the first or the last line of a speech. This will be apparent to any one who examines the pages of Jonson and Massinger, who printed their plays themselves, or those plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others which are the most correctly printed. Wherever a line of less than five feet occurs, it will be found to have been produced by omission of words or by malarrangement of the text. In plays such as Timon, Troilus and Cressida, or Fletcher's Sea Voyage, of which the original copy was in bad condition, lines of this kind are of course most numerous. I may here observe that in this last-named play, the metre of which Mr. Dyce has pronounced to be "incurably defective," I have, by simple rearrangement of the text, rendered it as correct as in any other of Fletcher's plays.

Even in this also Shakespeare took liberties in which his brethren did not venture to indulge. He began and ended not only speeches, but paragraphs of speeches, with short lines. Nay, he even made the concluding short line of one paragraph and the incipient short line of the next form a single line, thus—

It hath the primal eldest curse upon it:

A brother's murder.—Pray can I not?—Ham. iii. 3.

Of greatest justice.—Write, write, Rinaldo.

All's Well, iii. 4.

Splitted the heart.—This is the sword.

Ant. and Cleop. v. 1.

In the case of final riming couplets the first line may be short, but never the second.

19.

Nothing is more common in the works of our old dramatists than malarrangement of the text, some lines being too long, some too short; but among them they are sure to contain the requisite number of feet. Editors have often taken the most justifiable liberty of rearranging the text; but on other occasions they have exclaimed against those who have followed their example. In this case, however, the only limit to the discretion of an editor is that of not putting—except in the cases above mentioned—more or less than five or six feet in a line. I must not omit to observe that editors have done injury to many passages, by the decasyllabic superstition which I have already noticed.

I will give one instance of a place where a most slight rearrangement gives perfect harmony to what has been a stumblingblock to editors:—

And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him

Bootless home, and weather-beaten back.

1 Hen. IV. iii. 1.

The last line, it will be seen, is the merest prose, but transfer "him" to it from the preceding line, and we at once get harmonious verse.

The following passages are thus arranged in the original editions:—

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling; doth glance

From heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things

Unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes,

And gives to airy nothing a local habitation

And a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, &c.

Mids. Night's Dream, v. 1.

It seldom visits Sorrow; when it doth, it is a comforter.

We two, my lord, will guard your person,

While you take your rest, and watch your safety.—

Thank you. Wondrous heavy.

Temp. ii. 1.

Those, then, who would refuse an editor the right of rearrangement are bound, if they would be consistent, to retain such passages as these unaltered. I may here make the boast that mine is the only edition of these plays in which the text is strictly metrical throughout.

20.

Beside all those forms of verse, the plays of our old dramatists contain a large quantity of prose. But it is only prose to the eye; for it is in reality as metrical as what is printed in separate metric lines, consisting of lines of five or six feet, each of two or three syllables, but printed continuously like prose. I therefore denominate it "Metric Prose" as being metric in substance, prose in form, and as, moreover, it is termed prose both by Chaucer and Shakespeare, probably from its less elevated character and from its being written continuously and without rime or alliteration. I am disposed to regard the former as being its inventor; and perhaps his reason for writing it continuously may have been merely the wish to save paper. We know, from M. de Maucroix's letter to Boileau, that the French poet Racan, whose poems were of course in rime, also wrote them continuously, and, as it would appear, for the same reason, though paper must have been less valuable in his time. As, however, the Anglo-Saxon and early English alliterative verse was written continuously, Chaucer may have been only following an established mode. It may be remarked that the poetry of the Hebrew Scriptures is also written and printed continuously.

Surely it is no egotism to state a plain truth! I therefore say that, as far as I know, I am myself the very first who, for the last century or more, has discerned the existence of this metric prose. My discovery was very gradual. I first recognized it in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, and, advancing step by step, I at length arrived at the certainty that for three centuries and a half, from Chaucer and Wickliffe to Dryden and Tillotson, almost every work claiming to be regarded as a literary composition is in this form. Such are histories from Sir T. More to Clarendon, translations, controversial and philosophical works, as those of Hooker, Brown, Taylor, and Cudworth, versions of the Scriptures from Wickliffe to the authorized one inclusive, sermons, inclusive of those of Barrow, South, and Tillotson, the Liturgy, except the Creeds, Te Deum, and Catechism, all prefaces, dedications and letters of compliment, &c. The chief exceptions were Hall and the other chroniclers, Purchas, Hakluyt, Fuller, Bunyan, Ludlow, L'Estrange, and Mrs. Hutchinson. The Ecclesiastical Policy, The Liberty of Prophesying, and The Areopagitica, for example, are as decidedly metrical as The Paradise Lost, only admitting more trisyllabic feet, and being printed continuously. Hence, too, in a great measure, arises the charm which we find in the prose of our old writers, and of which we have been ignorant of the secret source; as when Cowper styles Sidney "warbler of poetic prose."

I do not, however, say that this prose was read as verse, with a slight elevation of tone at the end of each metric line. It was, I think, read as prose, as Cowper of course read the Arcadia; but the metre diffused a secret charm through it, which could be felt even by those who were ignorant of the cause. How easy, by the way, must this mode of writing prose have made verse-making to the writers of those days! and how rapidly that prose could be written is proved by the assertion of Sir Kenelm Digby, who says that in the space of twenty-four hours he sent out and bought the Religio Medici, read it through, and wrote his Observations on it, which fill upwards of seventy printed pages, and are metrical—a fact almost inconceivable.

The only writer of the last century who, as far as I am aware, used this metric prose—for we seek it in vain in Addison, Pope, Johnson, Gibbon, &c.—is the historian Robertson, of which fact Mr. Buckle seems to have had a dim conception; for he speaks of his "measured style." It is a question where Robertson got it; for he could hardly have invented it, and I think it must have been in Knox, Spottiswoode, and the Scottish writers of the two preceding centuries, who all wrote like their English contemporaries. At the same period, however, his countryman Macpherson invented a new kind of metric prose for his 'Poems of Ossian.' Even the present century presents us with an instance in Mr. Lecky's eloquent 'History of Rationalism,' which is as metrical as the Areopagitica of Milton. Possibly my own remarks on the subject in 'Notes and Queries' may have directed his attention to it.

Gascoigne's comedy of The Supposes, performed in 1566, a translation from the Italian of Ariosto, appears to have been the first play written in this metric prose; Lyly also, somewhat later, wrote in it his courtly comedies; and it gradually, combined with blank verse, got entire possession of the scene. The last, I believe, to use it was Dryden. Ordinary prose—probably in imitation of the French and Italian comic drama—seems to have been first used after the Restoration, in the comedies of Killigrew, Shadwell, Wycherley, Etheridge, Sedley, and other dramatists of that period.

It is rather remarkable that a union of verse and prose, similar to this union of regular and irregular verse of our drama, occurs also in that of India. Sir William Jones tells us, in his preface to Sacontala, that the Hindoo plays "are all in verse where the dialogue is elevated, and in prose where it is familiar." Coleridge, who had not the slightest suspicion of the existence of metre in the dramatic prose, makes the following just remarks in a note on Fletcher's Custom of the Country:—"In all comic metres the gulping of short syllables and the abbreviation of syllables ordinarily long, by the rapid pronunciation of eagerness and vehemence, are not so much a licence as a law—a faithful copy of nature." This I think completely justifies the frequent use of the syncope and synæresis in metric prose.

The same critic again says of Milton's noble conclusion of his treatise 'Of Reformation in England,' "Written in the fervour of his youthful imagination, in a high poetic strain that wanted metre only to become a lyrical poem." He felt, but did not see, that the metre actually was there.

The fact of this prose being metric causes us sometimes to doubt whether a passage should be printed as verse or as prose; and sometimes what is verse in one edition is prose in another. Thus Mercutio's celebrated account of Queen Mab, in Romeo and Juliet, which is most perfect decasyllabic verse, is properly printed as such in the 4to, 1597, while in all the subsequent early editions it is made prose; and prose it would probably have been at this day had no copy of that edition remained. On the other hand, most modern editors have most improperly printed the Nurse's speeches in the preceding scene as verse, while they are, and rightly, prose in all the original editions. An editor is, I think, at perfect liberty to use his judgement in this matter.

The following extracts, in which the termination of each line is marked, will enable the reader to judge of the truth of my theory. I must at the same time remind him that such contractions as I'll, I've, are rare in these prose scenes, such being left to the knowledge and skill of the actor or reader.

"As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion. | He bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns; | and, as thou sayest, charged my brother on his blessing | to breed me well; and there begins my sadness. | My brother Jacques he keeps at school, and report | speaks goldenly of his profit; for my part he keeps me | rustically at home, or, to speak more properly, | stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping | for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling | of an ox? His horses are bred better; for besides that | they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, | and to that end riders dearly hired; but I, his brother,| gain nothing under him but growth, for the which | his animals on his dunghills are as much | bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he | so plentifully gives me, the something that Nature gave me | his countenance seems to take from me. He lets me feed | with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and as much as | in him lies mines my gentility with my education. | This it is, Adam, that grieves me; and the spirit of my father, | which I think is within me, begins to mutiny | against this servitude. I will no longer endure it, | though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it."—As You Like It, i. 1.

"I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation | prevent your discovery, and your secresy | to the king and queen moult no feather. I have of late |—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, | foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed | it goes so heavily with my disposition, | that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile | promontory, this most excellent canopy, | the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, | this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire, | why, it appeareth nothing to me but | a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. | What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! | how infinite in faculties! in form and moving | how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! | in apprehension how like a god! | the beauty of the world! the paragon | of animals! And yet to me what is | this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; | no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."—Hamlet, ii. 2.

"Here comes Romeo, here comes Romeo.—Without his roe, | like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! | Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in; | Laura to his lady was a kitchen-wench; | marry, she had a better love to be-rime her; | Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gypsy; | Helen and Hero hildings and harlots; Thisby | a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. | Signior Romeo, bon jour. There's a French salutation | to your French slop. You gave us the counterfeit | fairly last night."—Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4.

"Nay, sure, | he's not in hell. He's in Arthur's bosom, if ever | man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, | and went away as it had been any christom child. | 'A parted even just between twelve and one, | even at the turning of the tide. For after I saw him | fumble with the sheets, and play with flowers, and smile | upon his finger's end, I knew there was but one way; | for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and 'a babbled of green fields. | How now, Sir John! quoth I. What, man! be of good cheer! | So 'a cried out God, God, God! three or four times. | Now I, to comfort him, bid him he should not think of God; | I hoped there was no need to trouble himself | with any such thoughts yet. So 'a bade me lay | more clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed, | and felt them, and they were as cold as any stone. | Then I felt to his knees, and so upward and upward, and all was | as cold as any stone."—King Henry V. ii. 3.

COMEDIES.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

Act I.

Sc. 1.

"Yet that the world may witness that my end

Was wrought by Nature, not by vile offence."

It was surely wrought by Fortune rather than by Nature, and so the poet may have written it. Collier's folio makes the same correction.

"And by me, had not oür hope been bad."

The editor of 2nd folio read 'me too,' not being aware of the dissyllabic form of 'our.'

"A poor mean woman was delivered."

The editor of 2nd folio added poor, which was probably the poet's word.

"Unwilling I agreed. Alas! too soon

We came aboard * * * * * *

A league from Epidamnum had we sail'd."

We might supply 'our ship. Somewhat more than.'

"Which being violently borne upon,

Our helpful ship was splitted in the midst."

It was the mast, not the ship; but the text is probably as the poet wrote it.

"At length another ship had seiz'd on us."

We should surely read 'the other.'

"That by misfortune was my life prolong'd."

It might be better to read Thus for 'That.'

"That his attendant—for his case was like."

For 'for,' the judicious correction of 2nd folio, the 1st has so.—See on L. L. L. i. 1; 1 Hen. IV. i. 3.

"To seek thy help by beneficial help."

See Introd. p. [61]. For the first 'help,' Pope read life; I read ransom, a word already used by the Duke. If the error should be in the second 'help,' we might, with Malone, read means; which, however, is rather feeble.

"And live, if no thou then art doom'd to die."

For 'no' we should surely, with Rowe, read not.

Sc. 2.

"Who falling there to find his fellow forth."

Mr. Barron Field proposed failing, which may be right.

"Methinks your maw, like mine, should be your clock,

And strike you home without a messenger."

'Clock' is Pope's correction for cook of the folio, which, however, may be right after all; for the cook used to strike on the dresser to give notice that the dinner was ready.

Act II.

Sc. 1.

"Will you come home? quoth I."

Hanmer properly added home, which was plainly omitted.

"I see the jewel best enamelled

Will lose his beauty, yet the gold bides still,

That others touch.—And often touching will

Where gold; and no man that hath a name

By falsehood and corruption doth it shame."

To give sense to this passage I read in the second line bide; in the fourth, with Warburton, wear, with Heath so a for 'no'; in which two I had thus been anticipated. The punctuation given here is my own. I am dubious of 'others' in the third line, for which we might read fingers, or some other word.

Sc. 2.

"Your sauciness will jest upon."

For 'jest' Mr. Dyce reads jet, referring to Rich. III. ii. 4, Tit. Andron. ii. 1; and "It is hard when Englishmen's patience must be thus jetted upon by strangers."—Play of Sir T. More, p. 2.

"And what he hath scanted them in hair he hath given them in wit."

For the first 'them' Theobald properly read men.

"The one to save the money that he spends in trying."

For 'trying' Pope read tyring by simply transposing, Rowe trimming. I rather prefer the former, as tyring is attiring, and 'attire' is head-dress; but whether used of a man or not I am not certain.—See my note on Milton's On Time, v. 21.

"I live distain'd, thou undishonoured."

Quite the contrary; for she would rather "live an unstain'd life." R. and J. iv. 1. Theobald read unstain'd, but I prefer undistain'd. The printer was more likely to omit un (see on Cymb. i. 7) than to change it to di. There is also an agreeable effect on the ear produced by the accents falling on un in both words. In all these plays lines frequently begin with an anapæst.

"I'll entertain the freed fallacy."

For 'freed,' which can hardly be right, Pope read favour'd, Capell, much better, offer'd.

"We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites."

To complete the measure, the editor of 2nd folio inserted elves, and before 'sprites'; from which Rowe made elvish 'sprites.' For 'owls' Theobald read ouphes; but that term occurs only in The Merry Wives. I read—

"For here we talk with goblins, elves, and sprites."

"I am transformed, master, am not I?"

Theobald also made this obvious and necessary transposition of 'I not.'

Act III.

Sc. 1.

"By the wrongs that I suffer, and the blows that I bear."

"Ay, to a niggardly host, and a more sparing guest."

"I thought to have ask'd you * * * *

* * * * * and you said, No."

Malone also saw that something was lost. We might read—

"I thought to have ask'd you, had you brought a rope.—

I ask'd you to let us in, and you said, No."

"Once this. Your long experience of her wisdom."

'Her' is Rowe's correction of your of the folio.

"And in despite of mirth mean to be merry."

To be merry in spite of mirth is like laughing in spite of laughter, dying in spite of death, living in spite of life—pure nonsense. With great confidence I therefore made the correction my wife, and so gave it in my Edition. Meeting, however, in the Cambridge Edition with Theobald's correction wrath—for Editors had ignored it—I saw at once that the poet must have written my wrath (see Introd. p. [67]), which resembles 'mirth' both in form and sound, and I have therefore adopted it without hesitation. Like a similar correction in Twelfth Night, i. 1, I regard it as absolutely certain.

Sc. 2.

"Shall love in building grow so ruinous?"

So Theobald, in accordance with the rime, read for ruinate of the folio.

"Alas, poor women! make us but believe."

Here again we have Theobald's correction of 'but' for not.

"Spread o'er the silver-waves thy golden hears,

And as a bed I'll take them and there lie."

I have printed 'hears' for the 'hairs' of the folio, as it rimes with 'tears,' and was the constant pronunciation of Chaucer, and frequently of Spenser; and in his early plays Shakespeare indulged in riming archaisms of this kind occasionally. We are to recollect that this play was not printed till thirty years after it had been written, and by that time hair had been established as the sole orthography. The matter is, however, put out of dispute by the Poems, in which Shakespeare himself spells it hear when riming with tear and ear. 'Bed' is the correction of 2nd folio for bud. Mr. Dyce proposed bride.

"Call thyself sister, sweet, for I am thee."

For 'am' Capell read, I think rightly, aim, and Singer quotes "I make my changes aim one certain end."—Drayton Leg. of Rob. Duke of Normandy.

"Well, sir, but her name and three quarters."

The folio has is for 'and'; the correction is Thirlby's.

Act IV.

Sc. 1.

"Belike you thought our love would last too long

If it were chain'd together."

For 'it' I think we should read we.

Sc. 2.

"First she denied you had in him no right."

This structure seems strange, but it was in use:—

"You may deny that God was not the cause."

Rich. III. i. 3.

"Fortune forbid my outside have not charm'd her."

Twelfth Night, ii. 2.

"Here go. The desk! the purse! Sweet, now make haste."

For 'Sweet,' which is rather free in the mouth of Dromio, Collier's folio reads Swift; we might also conjecture Speed. The truth, however, seems to be that mistress has been omitted after 'Sweet.'

"A devil in an everlasting garment hath him."

There is something evidently lost here, riming with 'steel.' It may have been by the heels, or laid by the heels, alluding to 'Tartar Limbo'; but still, or at his will, seems preferable.

"A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough."

For 'fairy' Theobald proposed fury, and we have "O, my good lord, deliver me from these furies" (i.e. bailiffs).—Massinger, Fatal Dowry, v. 1. "Fiends, fairies, hags that fight in beds of steel."—Peel, Battle of Aleazar, where Mr. Dyce reads furies. In Jonson's Poetaster (iii. 1) the Lictors are termed furies.

Sc. 3.

"Master, if you do, expect spoon-meat, or bespeak a long spoon."

For 'or' we should read and, as usual. Mr. Dyce reads so.

Sc. 4.

"In verity you did; my bones bear witness

That since have felt the vigour of his rage."

The change of pronouns is so frequent that I think it would be simpler to read your for 'his' than as is usually done make 'my bones,' etc. an aside.

Act V.

Sc. 1.

"And much different from the man he was before."

"In company I often glanced at it."

"But only moody and dull melancholy."

See Introd. p. [55]. In my Edit. only is at the end.

"And at her heels a huge infectious troop."

We should probably read his for 'her,' as kinsman is the antecedent.

"Hath scar'd thy husband from the use of his wits."

As 'his' was probably written 's, it escaped the printer's eye.

"The place of death and sorry execution."

I would read sore or sour for 'sorry'; Collier's folio proposes solemn. The 1st folio has depth for 'death.' The correction was made in the 3rd.

"To scorch your face and to disfigure you."

Mr. Dyce properly reads scotch; for, as he observes, the very same misprint occurs in Macb. iii. 2, and Knt. of Burning Pestle, iii. 4.

"On the way we met * * * as we were going along"(?)

"These left me and my man, both bound together."

For 'These' we should perhaps read They.

"Besides her urging of her wreck at sea...."

"And thereupon these Errors are arose."

Editors ought to be ashamed of themselves for not seeing that 'arose' is the same as 'arisen.' See Introd. p. [70].

"Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail,

Of you, my sons; and till the present hour

My heavy burthen are delivered.

The Duke, my husband, and my children both,

And you, the calendars of their nativity,

Go to a gossip's feast, and go with me,

After so long grief such nativity!"

I read this passage thus:

"Thirty-three years have I been gone in travail

Of you, my sons, until the present hour.

My heavy burthen here delivered,

The Duke, my husband, and my children both,

And you, the calendars of their nativity,

Come to a gossip's feast, and go with me.—

After so long grief such felicity!"

All the corrections here made are my own; and yet in all but one I had been anticipated! in been by 2nd folio; in until by Boaden; in here by Grant White; in felicity by Hanmer. In my Edition of these plays I have printed "Go ... come with me." The difference is unimportant. In the first line Theobald, followed by succeeding editors, read twenty-five; but such alterations are not to be allowed.

"Master, shall I fetch your stuff from ship-board now?"

THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.

Act I.

Sc. 1.

"I leave myself, my friends, and all for love."

The folio has 'I love.' Pope made the obvious correction.

"But what said she? did she nod?"

These last words are an addition by Theobald, and the context shows they had been lost.

Sc. 2.

"Yet he of all the rest I think best loves ye."

'Lov'd ye' would rime better with 'mov'd me.'

"That I might sing it, madam, to a tune."

As time and 'tune' were synonymous, perhaps the poet used the former, which would accord with 'rime.'

"Let's see your song. Why, how now, minion!"

"You do not like it!—No, madam, it is too sharp."

"I see you have a month's mind to them."

A syllable is wanting. Some read moneth, but that is not a Shakespearian form. We might also read 'unto' for 'to' but I prefer 'I see that you'; as I have given it in my Edition.

Sc. 3.

"And be in the eye of every exercise."

Act II.

Sc. 1.

"And now you are so metamorphosed with a mistress."

A just and necessary addition of Collier's folio.

"And you, being in love, cannot see to put on your hose."

For 'hose,' apparently suggested by what went before, I should incline to read, with the Cambridge editors, shoes; or clothes might be better.

"Nay, take them again—Madam, they are for you."

Sc. 3.

"Oh, that she could speak now like a wood woman!"

For 'she' Blackstone proposed shoe; better the shoe, as I have given it.

Sc. 4.

"Come, go with me. Once more, new servant, welcome."

"She is alone.—Then let her be alone."

"So the remembrance of my former love

Is, by a newer object, quite forgotten."

It seems to me that the best way to give sense to this passage is to take 'by' in the sense of beside, near. See [Index] s. v.

"It is mine or Valentine's praise?"

So it stands in the original. It need hardly be observed that the two first words must be transposed. It is also plain to me that a substantive has been lost after 'mine,' and none seems so likely to be the right word as eye, the conjecture of Warburton, and which seems to be omitted in the same manner in the last line of Son. cxiii.

"As love is full of unbefitting strains

* * * * *

Form'd by the eye, and therefore like the eye."

L. L. L. v. 2.

"I know there is no beauty,

Till our eyes give it 'em, and make 'em handsome."

Fletch. Maid in Mill, i. 2.

See also his Love's Pilgrimage, ii. 3. Steevens and others read 'her mine,' taking the latter as mien, a term not Shakespearian. (See on Mer. Wives, i. 3.) As there is still a syllable wanting, I would read 'Valentinès,' a mode of forming the genitive not unusual in our author's early plays.

Sc. 5.

"Launee, by mine honesty, welcome to Padua."

That 'Padua' was the poet's word is proved by the metre, and the editors had no right to change it to Milan. 'By mine honesty' occurs in exactly the same manner in the play of Damon and Pitheas, with which Shakespeare was familiar.

"If thou wilt go with me to the ale-house, so; if not."

The 2nd folio added so, which is required both by sense and metre.

Sc. 7.

"And instances of infinite of love."

The 2nd folio reads 'as infinite,' which may be right, but 'infinite' seems to be made a substantive here.

Act III.

Sc. 1.

"There is a lady in Verona here."

Here again 'Verona,' the poet's word, has been altered by the editors. Pope, who is usually followed, read 'sir, in Milan,' and Mr. Dyce adopts the unheard-of term Milano of Collier's folio! We have no right to make such changes.

"For 'get you gone,' she doth not mean 'away.'"

Perhaps the poet's word was By not 'For'; or there may be an omission of by after 'For.'

"I fly not Death, to fly his deadly doom."

For 'his' Singer read is.

"As ending anthem of my endless dolour."

For 'anthem' Singer very plausibly read amen.

"Item, She is not to be kissed fasting on account of her breath."

Rowe added kissed, which, though generally received, is not absolutely necessary.

"Nor does your nostril

Take in the scent of strong perfumes, to stifle

The sourness of our breaths as we are fasting."

Massinger, Very Woman, i. 1.

"Now will he be swinged for reading of my letter."

Sc. 2.

"But say this weed her love from Valentine."

The context seems to require wind for 'weed,' and I have so given it.

"That may discover such integrity."

Though in my edition I have made here an aposiopesis, I think it more probable that a line has been lost.

Act IV.

Sc. 1.

"O sir, we are undone; these are the villains."

So Capell read also.

"An heir, and near-allied unto the Duke."

The folio has "And heir and niece." Theobald made the corrections.

"Come, go with us; we'll bring thee to our crews."

As in v.1 we have

"Come, I must bring thee to our captain's cave,"

we should probably read here cave or caves for 'crews.'

Sc. 3.

"Vain Thurio whom my very soul abhorred."

'Abhorreth' is probably what the poet wrote.

"Madam, I pity much your grievances,

Which since I know they virtuously are placed."

This is mere nonsense; 'grievance' never had any meaning but that which it has at present. A line has evidently been lost; something like this:—"And sympathize with your affections." The corrector of Collier's folio, who first saw the loss, added—"And the most true affections that you bear," which seems wanting in ease and simplicity.