The age-herald., 1898-01-07
SHORTHAND AND SHAKESPEARE.


 precision Dr. Eduard Engel recently ex- plotted in Berlin the excellent work of a young servant who has sprung at one leap into the ranks of our best Shakespearean scholars" He averred that Herr Kurt Dewischeit "has proved beyond the shadow of doubt that the quarto editions of Shakespeare's plays were piratical editions printed from stenographie notes taken in the theater. that the stenographfc system used was that of Timothy Bright, who was born in 1850, and that innumerable mistakes in the quartos, innumerable contradictions between them and the first authorized folio edition, can be at once and most simply ex- plained by the defects of that stenographic system and the indexterity of the steno- graphers of that tfme." The learned doctor also declared Herr Dewischeit lis at pres ent the only person who possesses all the requisite qualifications for this quite new text investigation"
 Herr Dewischeit may have made remark able progress in this interesting study, but he is by no means a pathfinder. What Shakespeare suffered at the hands of short hand writers formed the subject of much erudite discussion among the earliest of his critics. Indeed, it was a common complaint of the dramatists of the sixteenth century that the stenographers, who were regular attendants at the playhouses, woefully mis- represented their productions. They were unable to take down verbatim the winged words of the authors, and filled in the gaps in their notes with phrases of their own. Those substitutions failed to please the au- thors, because the scribes often made solemn passages ludcrous and not infre- quently turned carefully planned mirth into sad-eyed melancholy. Many scholars hold that we are 'indebted' to shorthand for the earliest known edition of Hamlet. Up to 1925 the quarto of 1894 was supposed to be the earliest text of Hamlet in existence. In that year there was found in the Duke of Devonshiee's library a single edition dated 1863. This differed materially from the quarto of 1S04 Some of the quidnuncs believed that it contained the crude and un- digested thoughts of Shakespeare, which he afterward worked over and elaborated; but the majority, after careful comparison of the two editions. decided that the De- vonshire quarto was the work of some piratical stenographer. Collier gave it as his opinion that "where the mechanical skill of the shorthand writer failed he filled in the blanks from memory" Dyce said: "The quarto of 1903 exhibits 8 text most strangely mangled and corrupted through out and was manifestly formed on the notes of some shorthand writer who had imperfectly taken 1t down during a repre- sentation of the play
 Some of the scenes were transposed and others omitted; the names of characters were not the same, and there was a wide variance in certain speeches and soliloqu1eS. The lines ended abruptly and little regard was paid to the rhythm. The compiler of the 1893 edition got the sense of most of the noted passages, but he played havoc with ShaSespeare's poetic language, and made many of the thoughts hazy if not ob- scure. Here is the way he rendered the famous soliloquy:
 To be or not to be- ay there's the point; To die, to sleep: Is that all? Ay, au
 No; to sleep, to dream; ay, marry there For in that dream of death, when we
 awake,
 And borne before an everlasting judge. From whence no passenger ever return'd, The undiscovered country, at whose sight The happy smile and the aecurs'd damned But for this, the joyful hope of this,
 Who'd bear the scorns and fattery Of the
 world,
 Scornd by the right rich, the rich curs'd of
 the poor
 The widow being oppressd, the orphan The taste of hunger, or a tyrant's reign, And thousand more calamities besides; To grunt and sweat under this weary life, When that he may his full quietus make With a bare bodkin. Who would thus But for the hope of something after death? Which puzzles the brain, and doth con- Which make us rather bear those evils we Than fly to others that we know not of, Ay that o, this conscience makes cow
 ards of us all,
 Lady. in thy prisons, be all my sins re-
 member'd.
 Here, of course, we have the framework of that wonderful speech. The leading ideas are there, but the lines are abrupt and halting, the expression is mechanical, and the poetry takes no aerial flight, but hugs the common earth with prossaic tenacity It does not require a knowledge of Brights stenography to render verdict in this in- stance. Any modern shorthand writer can detect where the pirate "fell down. and patched up his notes from memory; and where he left out whole lines because of his inability to decipher characters that ob- stinately refused to be translated into com mon sense English. But the writer of Bright's "characterie'' had more difficulties to contend with than the photographer Of today. Brights system was conspicuous by its lack of system. It had no alphabet. The doctor merely invented symbols to represent words. He prepared a table of words with characters annexed which the student was ito get by heart" For the sun he used a small circle with a dot in the center, sim- liar to the mark which newspaper copy readers use for period. The moon was semi-circle, and "heart' was sign in the shape of that organ, which 1t would take almost as long to draw as to write the word itself. Then he had signs for synonyms and appellative words Under the heading 'book" he placed almanac, commentary, dialogue, treatise, volume, pamphlet" A distinguishing mark was to be added to the generic symbol so as to denote which of the words was meant. The writer was to omit superfiuous words when he was un- able to write as fast as the speaker talked. John Willis, the inventor of another short hand system in Shakespeare's time, said of Dr. Bright's stenography: ''It requires such understanding and memory that few of the ordinary sort of people could attain to the knowledge thereof.'
 
 Under such conditions it is easy to under stand that not only verbatim reporting impossible with Bright's characterize" but that the claim that this young German savant has "raised the purifcaton of the text from arbitrary fantasticality to. the rank of @ strict science" is rather extrava- gant. Where so much depended upon mem ory, as well as manual dexterity, there could be no uniform rule of writing One Bright stenographer would omit words which another would struggle to place upon paper, and while both were tleing to de- wise symbol for one of Shakespeares yer bal inventions much of the language as well as the sense would be missed. The unhappy reporters would be in the same