The Press. — London, England, 1856-03-29 00:00:00

7: - ' MARCH 29, 1856. yittraturt. . x 7 The Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare. The Text carefully Revised, with Notes, by Samuel Weller Singer, F.S.A. The Life of the Poet, and Critical Essays on the Plays, by William Watkiss Lloyd, M.R.S.L. To be Completed in Ten Vols. Vols. I. 11. 111. London : Bell and Daldy. The Stratford Slutkspere. Edited by Charles Knight. Ten Vols. London : Hodgson. THESE editions of Shakespeare are both pro duced under competent superintendence, and both are of the kind known as " pocket " editions; they are correctly printed, and they are published at a moderate price. The demand must be great which can thus take up two separate editions of a work, not very distinct from each other, at the same time. The edition of Mr. Singer is from the Whit tingham Press, still justly celebrated for the beauty of its typography. The paper and print are luxurious ; for their size, the volumes are the most convenient to read that could be desired. The notes are in general sufficient to elucidate without encumbering the text, and contain notices of the latest emendations which have been suggested, including those in " Mr. Collier's folio." The " Critical Essays "by William Watkiss Lloyd, M.R.5.L.," are carefully written, but we should have preferred more illustrative matter of a practical, and less of a didactic and speculative kind. The merit of Mr. Singer as an editor is of a twofold kind. He has shown great discre tion in selecting notes to clear the text from the bulk of those already in existence, and he has distinguished himself by some very in genious emendations. We were at first dis• posed to underrate his capacity for the ori ginal and most important duties of an editor, but a closer examination of his volumes has convinced us that he is well entitled to take rank with those editors of Shakespeare who have done valuable service by purifying the text from the corruptions of the early editions. In preparing this edition he has, he tells us, gone through the early copies and diligently revised the text. He is therefore, as regards this issue, the latest of those editors who s'nce the first folio of 1623 have occupied t iemseives with attempts to perfect the text; yet looking at it, as it stands in Mr. Singer's page, and acknowledging how much has been done to clear it, we must yet think that it re mains in a very unsatisfactory state. We have no hesitation in asserting that there is still, within the legitimate bounds of editorial skill, great room for improvement. The first folio must be considered the base of Shakespeare's text, but assuredly it is not ti be approached in a scrupulous spirit It is so disfigured by gross errors that where the sense appears imperfect there is no kind of presumption that the print is right. In works which have undergone the revision of their author, we may, when we feel perplexed, more reasonably doubt the clearness of his capacity, or of our own, than the correctness of the type ; but in the case of Shakespeare's text there is no kind of presumption for such cor rectness On the contrary, there is a strong presumption that the text is incorrect, and hence no one can be qualified as an editor of Shakespeare who does not come to the exami nation of his text in an heretical spirit, or at least in such suspense of mind as in all cases of doubt to admit the probability that the print is incorrect. Mr. Collier, before the discovery of his folio with its MS. corrections, was accustomed to answer all proposed emendations by saying, " I see no necessity for the change ; the " original is as Shakespeare wrote it." Herein he assumed the whole question. We desire to_ know wh a t i t was which Shakespeare wrote, being tolerably certain that he never wrote nonsense, and th a t h e was not o b scure b y design.' We cannot tell from what manu -B?ripts Hemi nge an d C ondell took their text. There is one passage in their preface which inclines us to suppose that they had some at least of the MSS. of Shakespeare in their hands. They say of their author : THE PRESS. His mind and hand went together ; and what he thought he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarse received from him a blot in his papers. It is, however, doubtful what extent of •' his papers " Heminge and Condell received. When we recollect that the first folio was not published till seven years after the poet's death, and that his plays were produced through a period of certainly more than twenty years previously, it appears most unlikely that any considerable part of the original MSS. should have been preserved. Those MSS. must first have been placed in the players' hands, and must have had several copies of them taken for the use of the stage. To judge from the style of his signature, Shakespeare could not have written a very legible hand, and, in the act of copying, numerous errors must inevitably have crept in,—errors arising from mistake of the author's hand, as well as from the inadvertence of the transcriber. Let any one compare a " frrst•proof "—as an im pression from the type is technically called, when first from the compositor's hand—with a proof when it has been read, corrected, and revised, and he will understand the blunders which the copyists of Shakespeare's MSS. might be likely to make. The more peculiar or illegible the MS. the greater would, of course, be the liability to error. It is the less likely that the MSS. of those early plays, written twenty or thirty years pre vious to the publication of lletninge's and Condell's folio, would be preserved, as the reputation of the poet was at that time of no great account. We may very well imagine that in many cases the MSS. would have been cast aside as utterly worthless when fair copies were made ; that in other cases they would have been worn to tatters ; and that in others, again, they would have been destroyed by fire or other accident. The first editors in timate, indeed, that Shakespeare, had he lived, might probably have published his works him self : It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have 'bene wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth and overseeu his owne writings ; but since it bath been ortlain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you doe not envie his friends the office 'f their care and pains to have collected and publish'd them. In this there is no pretence that Shakespeare gave over to Heminge and Condell his papers for publication ; on the contrary, they say ex pressly that they had " collected " his writings ; and in another place they say it was their pro vince to " gather " his works—phrases incon sistent with the supposition that they existed in any collected shape at Shakespeare's death ; a supposition disproved also by the time which elapsed between his decease and the publication of the folio. As, therefore, Hem inge and Condell did "collect" and "gather" his writings as they best could, it is surely most irrational to assume that in all instances they possessed themselves of the original MSS. It is probable that, as a rule, they had to content themselves with copies. —and, in most cases, with copies from copies, many times removed from the original. Hero would be one fertile source of error. Another source would be the mistakes of the compositors, owing to the carelessness of those who overlooked the press. Even the original MSS. would, no doubt, exhibit some of those slips to which every author is liable in the heat of composition. Words would sometimes be repeated. as at the end of one line and beginning of another; and the characters traced by the hand would not always be faithful to the intent of the mind. In such eases, though we had the MS. of Shakespeare before us. we should not hesitate to make the obvious changes required by - the sense. In The Comedy of Errors, for example, net i., scene 1 , the Duke. who hail declared the law, that lEgeon must find means to pay a thousand marks or die, relents so far on hearing his sad story, that he says : But though thou art adjudged to the death, • And passed sentence may not be recall'd But to our honour's great disparagement, Yet will I favour thee in what I can ; Therefore, merchant, I'll limit thee this day To seek thy help by beneficial help : Try all the ft lends thou bust in Ephesus, Beg thou or borrow to make up the P nm, And live ; if not, then thou tit duow'd to ShakeFpearo might probably have written the line : To seek thy help by beneficial help, as it stands in the first folio, but we may be quite sure he did•nat so intend , to write it ; and in all such cases we have to judge from inherent probability what his meaning was. Mr. Singer suggests a likely word : To seek thy fine by beneficial help. We doubt, however, if " fine " was the word Shakespeare intended. We are inclined to think " hap," in the sense of chance or fortune, would be more appropriate. To seek thy hap by beneficial help, seems to us more Shaliesperian in sense than the word suggested by Mr. Singer, and with the advantage of coming nearer to the word of the folio—a consideration which, though no great stress should be laid on it, ought yet to decide the point when in other respects sug gestions seem of equal value. Corruptions of the true text may then have crept in through three sourcr>s :—l. The in advertence of the author. 2. The mistakes of the copyist. 3. The blunders of the prim; ter. Were Shakespeare's MS. before us, a competent editor ought not to hesitate to make those literal corrections which Shake speare himself would certainly have made had he had the opportunity of seeing his text before him. This point is rather hypothetical than real, as we cannot distinguish, though we may enumerate, the sources of corruption. All that the best editor can do is to trust to his own judgment, and endeavour to restore the text as he has good reason to believe it originally issued fresh from the poet's brain. Further than this is beyond his province. If he endeavours to improve upon Shakespeare, as Mr. Collier's folio corrector has done, he will expose himself to ridicule. What Shake speare might himself have done by deliberate revision must never enter into the mind of an editor. His part is only to present us with a true transcript of what Shakespeare wrote, freed from literal inadvertencies, not of what he might have written. To make lines rhyme which there is not the slightest evidence to show Shakespeare intended to rhyme, is to fall into the error of " slashing Bentley" in his amended " Milton." To restore, not to amend, must he the one principle to animate the editor of our greatest poet. Shakespeare was subject to slips of memory; but such slips, except as it is lawful to point them out, are not subject to editorial revision. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a Sir. Egla mour figures among the suitors of Julia, at Verona, and is described by her maid, as— a knight well-spoken, neat, and fine. Subsequently, we meet at Milan with a Sir Eglamour, vowed to pure chastity, upon the grave of his " lady and true love." Here is a slip of memory on the poet's part, but no editor ought to think of correcting it. It is an intellectual slip, not a mere mechanical slip, and distinguished therefore from those literal errors which, even could we suppose them to exist in Shakespeare's MS., it would still be the duty of an editor to correct. If with these principles we approach the text of Shakespeare—if we view the folio as disfigured by innumerable errors, but never theless as our only basis of a correct text, to he improved by reference to the earlier edi tions and by conjectural emendation—we must admit that a very wide field is still open to critical sagacity. Considering the names of previous editors—as Rowe, Theohald, Pope, Johnson, Hsnmer, Stevens, Malone, and, in our day, Halliwell, Collier, Hunter, and Knight (and these names are far from ex hausting the list), it is surprising that so much yet remains to he done. The fact may be explained by previous editors having attached more authority to the text of the folio than it was entitled to Mr. Singer shows us, in his preface, bow in the ease of a play so universally popular as Hamlet a gross corruption may remain un corrected—though assuredly it could 'not have been unsuspected—to this day...ln Hamlet, act. v., se. 2., the Prince relates to Horatio the purport of that commission which the treacherous King had sent with hial to England : A