in the time of Shakespeare. No blunder of the kind can be deemed a trifle, (even if it did not make the passage unintelligible,) where an editor professes to fix the genuine reading of such an author; and when in a subsequent scene of the same act (act iv. sc. 4), we meet with "all men's judgment,” misprinted for "all men's judgments," both substantives having been correctly and consistently written by Shakespeare in the plural, all lovers of our great dramatist ought to be offended. This system of blundering (for it may be said to amount almost to a system) is kept up to the very last scene of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," where Valentine, addressing the Duke, observes, as the lines appear in the folio of 1623,— “And as we walk along, I dare be bold, With our discourse, to make your grace to smile." In the copy of the play in the edition in 21 vols. 8vo, revised by Boswell and containing Malone's latest corrections, we find alone substituted for "along," just as if two people could walk alone, and as if the Duke and Valentine would not be surrounded by the other prominent characters in the drama, besides being attended by the ducal train. So far with regard to some of the errors in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona;" but the case of that play is by no means singular, and in others the mistakes are hardly to be accounted for, excepting the Shrew. by supposing culpable carelessness combined with remarkable ignorance (of which of course we do not, in the ordinary sense of the word, accuse the commentators), in order to disfigure the text of Shakespeare'. In one drama, "The Taming of the Shrew," a Taming of whole line has been omitted, and Boswell (who has been ostentatious of his collations, pointing them out in separate notes at the foot of the page) did not detect the deficiency. It cannot indeed be said that the sense is absolutely incomplete without this missing line, but still it is necessary to the full meaning of the author, as will be evident when we quote the passage as we find it in the folio of 1623, where the play 1 Now and then, changes are made which could not be accidental, and for which there is not the slightest warrant by supposing the meaning of the poet to have been misrepresented by the old printers. The alteration in the following lines from "The Winter's Tale," (act. v. sc. 1) seems merely wanton, and it runs through all the modern impressions. Paulina would not have Leontes marry again, and Dion, in reply, urges her to pity the State, and to call to mind the necessity of continuing the succession in the family of Leontes: "If you would not so, You pity not the State, nor the remembrance May drop upon his kingdom." Nothing can be plainer, but all the modern editions substitute dame for 66 name," (as it stands in the folio) and thus absolutely contradict the poet's meaning. Shakespeare would hardly have made Dion advert to the fate of Hermione, at the moment when he was urging another marriage upon the king. Moreover, in the folio of 1623, and in the three others, as if to prevent the possibility of mistake, "Name" is printed with a capital letter. This was therefore a wilful corruption of the text, without any notice that a variation had been made from the old and authentic reading of the play. (as well as the others we have noticed) was for the first time printed. It is in act iv. sc. 3, (as the divisions are commonly marked, though it is the beginning of the fourth act in the original copy,) where Katherine is intreating Grumio to give her something to eat : The line printed in Italic is the line omitted, and in what way it made its escape from the text we cannot conjecture; but the fact that it was omitted must put an end to confidence in such an edition, and proves that Boswell (to say nothing of Malone) performed his duty of collation with almost criminal inattention 1. 1 I do not complain of misprints in plays not assigned to Shakespeare, but included by Boswell in the 21 vols.; such for instance as "The True Tragedie of Richard the Third." (vol. xix.) Not only are lines left out, but exits and entrances are omitted, and other more or less important variations from the old copy are innumerable. It is but justice to state, that the passage in " The Taming of the Shrew" is correctly printed in Mr. Knight's "Pictorial Shakspere," and I add with pleasure my testimony to the improvements he has made in the text of previous editions, by restoring some of the readings of the first folio. I may take this opportunity, also, of expressing my sense of the obligations Mr. Knight has, in other respects, conferred upon the readers of Shakespeare, both by the originality of some of his views, and by the ingenuity and ability with which he has enforced and illustrated them. He has pointed out a line in "Hamlet," which was left out by Reed in 1803, but it is restored in Malone's Shakespeare by Boswell, vol. vii. p. 241. 3 We might produce various instances from the same comedy, where words have been foisted upon Shakespeare without notice, or omitted without reason; but one striking proof of extreme carelessness we cannot refrain from pointing out: it occurs at the close of act iv., where Hortensio says "Well, Petruchio, this has put me in heart. Have to my widow; and if she be froward, The three lines are given as above in the several folio editions, excepting that "be," in the second line, is omitted in the first edition, and supplied by the second; but in Malone's Shakespeare by Boswell, not only "has" is altered to hath, (a matter of comparatively small moment, though still an unjustifiable liberty,) but "froward" is made forward, the sense of which is directly opposite to that of Shakespeare, while it destroys the intended rhyme, which, without any other aid, ought to have led to the detection of the error. The point of infidelity to the text having been thus completely made out, by reference only to a few plays of which there are no quarto editions, it would be tedious, as well as useless, to dwell longer on that subject. tion. Nor is punctuation, in an undertaking of this Punctuakind, a matter merely trivial, especially when nonattention to it not only obscures, but sometimes entirely perverts, the sense of a passage. In this respect very flagrant errors have been committed; but it is a topic to which we shall advert very briefly, and only introduce one or two passages from the modern edition, in order to show the nature, rather than the extent of our complaint. Here, of course, we do not object that the ancient authorities have been deserted, because the matter seems usually to have been left to our old printers, and they were notoriously either heedless or incompetent. The consequence has been frequent blunders and confusion; but we must say that in some instances it would have rendered Shakespeare more intelligible, if the pointing in his day, or shortly afterwards, had been adopted. Of the correctness of this statement we may be permitted to bring forward a solitary example, out of many. It is from "The Winter's Tale," act i. sc. 2, where Polixenes and Camillo are conversing about the evil designs of Leontes, and the former says, as we find it in the first folio, "Camillo, As you are certainly a gentleman, thereto This very perspicuous quotation is rendered utter nonsense by the false punctuation employed in Malone's Shakespeare by Boswell, where it reads as follows: "Camillo, As you are certainly a gentleman thereto; |