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which, as we see, meets and accounts for other facts and peculiar appearances, while it is also so probable in itself, that the remarkable collection of emendations in Mr. Collier's copy of the Second Folio can, apparently, be satisfactorily explained. The volume came into Mr. Collier's hands in 1849, and was some time afterwards discovered by him to contain a vast number of alterations of the printed text inserted by the pen, in a handwriting certainly of the seventeenth century, and possibly of not much later date than the volume. They extend over all the thirty-six Plays, and are calculated to amount in all to at least 20,000. Here is, then, a most elaborate revision-an expenditure of time and painstaking which surely could only have been prompted and sustained by a strong feeling in the annotator of admiration for his author, and the most anxious and scrupulous regard for the integrity of his text. Such motives would be very inconsistent with the substitution generally for the old words of anything that might merely strike him as being possibly a preferable reading. The much more probable presumption is that he followed some guide. Such a labour is only to be naturally accounted for by regarding it as that of the possessor of a valued but very inaccurately printed book who had obtained the means of collating it with and correcting it by a trustworthy manuscript. And, when we come to examine the new readings, we find everything in sufficient correspondence with this hypothesis; some things almost, we may say, demonstrating it. Some of the alterations are of a kind altogether transcending the compass of conjectural emendation, unless it had taken the character of pure invention and fabrication. Such in particular

are the entire lines inserted in various passages of which we have not a trace in the printed text. The number, too, of the new readings which cannot but be allowed to be either indisputable, or, at the least, in the highest degree ingenious and plausible, is of itself almost conclusive against our attributing them to nothing better than conjecture. Upon this supposition this unknown annotator would have outdone all that has been accomplished in the way of brilliant and felicitous conjecture by all other labourers upon the Shakespearian text taken together. On the other hand, some of his alterations are in all probability mistaken, some of his new readings apparently inadmissible;* and many passages which there can hardly be a doubt are corrupt are passed over by him without correction. All this becomes intelligible upon our hypothesis. Working possibly upon the same manuscripts (whether those of the author or no) from

* Among such must be reckoned undoubtedly the alteration in Lady Macbeth's passionate rejoinder (Macbeth, i. 7),— "What beast was't, then,

That made you break this enterprise to me ?"

of beast into boast. This is to convert the forcible and characteristic not merely into tameness but into no-meaning; for there is no possible sense of the word boast which will answer here. But in this case the corrector was probably left to mere conjecture in making his selection between the two words; for in the handwriting of the earlier part of the seventeenth century the e and o are frequently absolutely undistinguishable. In the specimen of the annotator's own handwriting which Mr. Collier gives the two e's of the word briefely are as like o's as e's, and what Mr. Collier reads bleeding might be equally read blooding, if that were a word.

There cannot, I conceive, be a question that a celebrated pas

which the printed text had been set up, he would with more deliberation, or by greater attention and skill, succeed in deciphering correctly much of the difficult or faded writing which had baffled or been misread by the printer. In other places, again, he was able to make nothing of it, or it deceived him. In some cases, he may have ventured upon a conjecture, and when he does that he may be as often wrong as right. The manuscripts of which he had the use, whether the author's original papers or only transcripts from them,-probably belonged to the theatre; and they might now be in a much worse condition in some parts than when they were in the hands of Heminge and Condell in 1623. The annotator would seem to have been connected with the stage. The numerous and minute stage directions which he has inserted look as if it might have been for the use of some theatrical Company, and mainly with a view to the proper representation of the Plays, that his laborious task was undertaken.*

sage in another Play has been seriously injured by the same mistake which the annotator has made in the instance under consideration. Is it not self-evident that the speech of Polixenes in the Third Scene of the Fourth Act of the Winter's Tale should run as follows ?

"Nature is made better by no mean

But nature makes that mean. So ever that art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes.

The art itself is nature."

The "o'er that art" of the modern editions is " the old copies.

over that art" in

* I do not remember having seen it noticed that the theatres claimed a property in the Plays of Shakespeare, and affected to be in possession of the authentic copies, down to a comparatively

At the same time, it must be admitted that we have hardly yet been put sufficiently in possession of the facts of the case for coming to a definitive judgment upon it. His annotated Folio has supplied Mr. Collier with materials for two large volumes, and yet we are still without precise information of what it really contains. His supplemental volume of “Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays, from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632," was published in 1852; his edition of “The recent date. The following Advertisement stands prefixed to an edition of Pericles, in 12mo, published in 1734, and professing to be "printed for J. Tonson, and the rest of the Proprietors :""Whereas R. Walker, and his Accomplices, have printed and published several of Shakespeare's Plays, and, to screen their innumerable errors, advertise that they are printed as they are acted; and industriously report that the said Plays are printed from copies made use of at the Theatres; I therefore declare, in justice to the Proprietors, whose right is basely invaded, as well as in defence of my self, that no person ever had, directly or indirectly, from me any such copy or copies; neither would I be accessary, on any account, to the imposing on the public such useless, pirated, and maimed editions, as are published by the said R. Walker, W. CHETWOOD, Prompter to His Majesty's Company of Comedians at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane.” On the subject of this Chetwood see Malone's Inquiry into the Shakspeare Papers, pp. 350-352. In Tonson's similar editions of The History of Sir John Oldcastle and The Tragedy of Locrine (both declared on the title-page to be "By Mr. William Shakespear”), he speaks in like manner of himself “ and the other Proprietors of the Copies of Shakespear's Plays," and complains that “ one Walker has proposed to pirate all Shakespear's Plays, but, through ignorance of what Plays were Shakespear's, did in several Advertisements propose to print Edipus King of Thebes as one of Shakespear's Plays, and has since printed Tate's King Lear instead of Shakespear's, and in that and Hamlet has omitted almost one half of the genuine editions printed by J. Tonson and the Proprietors."

Plays of Shakespeare: the Text regulated by the Old Copies, and by the recently discovered Folio of 1632, containing early Manuscript Emendations," in 1853. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory and in every way unhappy (except only for the purpose of spreading the matter to be communicated over a large extent of paper) than the plan followed in the first of these publications. The volume extends to above 500 pages, and four-fifths of it may be said to be filled with the reiteration of the same thing five hundred times. The one solitary explanation of everything is stated again and again incessantly, sometimes with an attempt to vary the expression, sometimes not. And the statement is one which no reader can need or care to see more than once. The new edition of the Plays is equally unsatisfactory, though not equally wearisome. The text does not profess to be that of the annotator. It is described as "regulated" partly by his alterations, partly by the old copies. In point of fact, it appears to contain only a selection from his readings. Yet it presents many important deviations from the common text not noticed in the Notes and Emendations. From neither volume, then, nor from both together, is it possible to ascertain either what the manuscript annotator has really done or what he has left undone. We have only picked specimens of his alterations, such of them as seem to Mr. Collier to be deserving of adoption or at least of consideration. Of what other new readings he may have proposed we know nothing. There may be many of such a character as would go far to convict him of utter incompetency as a restorer of the text of Shakespeare in so far as he might be in any

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