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

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 :