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The Modern Language Association of America GENERAL SERIES

No. U

SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS, 1632-1685

Approved for puhlicatioji in the General Series of the Modern Language

A ssociation of A tnerica

Ronald S. Crane Joseph E. Gillet George L. Hamilton Eduard Prokosch Hyder Rollins Karl Young

Committee on Research Activities

Published under a grant awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies from a fund provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York

SHAKESPEARE'S

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY

EDITORS

1632-1685

BY MATTHEW W. BLACK

AND

MATTHIAS A. SHAABER

Department of English, University of Pennsylvania

NEW YORK: MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA LONDON: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1937

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Copyright, 1937 , by The Modern Language Association of America

t ! \ 1 / \ / ' PRINTED BY THE GEORGE BANTA PUBLISHING COMPANY, MENASHA, WISCONSIN

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To

FELIX E. SCHELLING with gratitude and affection

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PREFACE

THE GERM of this study was an impression, formed independently by the authors during the collation of the early texts of certain of Shakespeare's plays, that the second, third, and fourth folios con- tained more strikingly good emendations than we would have ex- pected in mere publisher's reprints. In the hope of admitting more light upon the matter, we consulted the available authorities, only to find the more or less contradictory array of opinions regarding the second folio which is reviewed in the introduction to our study and little or nothing regarding the third and the fourth. Curiosity spurred us to examine the folio texts somewhat further, and, as we found more and more evidence of changes which looked certainly deliberate, we began to wonder whether a more exact statement of what hap- pened to the text of Shakespeare in the seventeenth century was not desirable. As a consequence, we decided to collect and study all the variants in the folio texts which we could find, with the results stated below.

These results are but a small contribution to the history of the text of Shakespeare, but we hope we may claim for them that they are sufficiently comprehensive and exact to obviate the necessity of ever again collecting the data on which they are based. That the labor this work has cost us is out of all proportion to either its hu- mane or its scholarly value no one knows better- than we. But, start- ing as we did with an impressive forewarning of the contradictions to which glib surmise and hasty assumption lead, we felt bound to take into account every scrap of evidence available, since no other method would yield a final result. We therefore make no apology for chronicling what may seem at times to be very small beer.

On the other hand, we venture to hope that, apart from its use in determining the real nature of the three later folios, this study may be of some use in that search for certitude regarding the primary texts of Shakespeare which is a much more important end of Shake- speare scholarship. If our principles of discrimination between edi- torial corrections and non-literal typographical errors (principles which, though not original with us, have seldom, if ever, been tested by application to so large a body of data) are sound, they might reasonably be applied to the variants in the earlier and more authori- tative texts — specifically, to those between successive editions of a quarto text or between a quarto text and the first folio text set up

viii PREFACE

from it. Here, to know what is a deliberate correction and what an accident in the printing-house is a matter of first importance in es- tablishing the texts of the plays. But while editors and textual stu- dents have often adjudged individual variants in the primary texts according to the criteria we use in this study, it is only rarely that they have been applied systematically and on a comprehensive scale. The application of them to the variants in the text of Shakespeare up to 1623 might, we believe, yield some useful results, might even dispel or confirm that fear that has so long haunted textual study: the possibility that variants in the reprinted editions of the plays may have some authority after all. If the opportunity is afforded us, we should like to follow up this idea ourselves.

In the course of our work we have been greatly assisted by various grants from the Committee on Research of the University of Penn- sylvania which have facilitated the preparation of the manuscript. We are deeply indebted to the American Council of Learned Societies for a grant in aid of publication and to the officials of the Modern Language Association of America through whose good offices this grant was obtained.

To Professor Felix E. Schelling, of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Joseph Q. Adams, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, Professor Albert C. Baugh, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Robert M. Smith, of Lehigh University, we wish to express our appreciation of their kindness in reading our manuscript and our gratitude for their encouragement. We are like- wise grateful to Henry N. Paul, Esq., for introducing us to the an- thologies of Cotgrave and Poole, and to Professor Josiah H. Penni- man. Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, for his advice, and for the loan of valuable books.

Our amanuensis. Miss Elizabeth M. Barton, has deserved our thanks for her skill and faithfulness.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface vii

Part I INTRODUCTION

§1. Historical Sketch i

§2. Editor and Printer 5

§3. Classification and Method of Procedure 22

§4. Changes in the Second Folio 32

§5. Changes in the Third Folio 50

§6. Changes in the Fourth Folio 58

§7, Editorial Changes Affecting the Punctuation Alone 66

§8. Contribution to the Standard Text 75

§9. Conclusions 95

Part II

EDITORIAL CHANGES IN THE SECOND, THIRD, AND FOURTH FOLIOS

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO (1632)

Changes Adopted by Many or All Modern Editors 99

I. Thought 99

1 1 . Action 112

III, Meter 114

IV. Grammar 122

V. Style 135

VI. Punctuation 147

Changes Which Restore the Reading of an Earlier Text 154

I. Thought 154

II. Action 161

HI. Meter 161

IV. Grammar 165

V. Style 170

Superseded Changes 172

I. Thought 172

II. Action 178

HI. Meter 179

IV. Grammar 187

V. Style 189

X - CONTENTS

Intelligible Changes Not Adopted by Most Modern

Editors 191

I. Thought 191

II. Action 197

III. Meter 197

IV. Grammar 200

V. Style 207

Mistaken and Arbitrary Changes 215

I . Thought 215

II. Action 224

III. Meter 225

IV. Grammar 236

V. Style 242

CHANGES IN THE THIRD FOLIO (1664)

Changes Adopted by Many or All Modern Editors 247

I. Thought 247

II. Action 251

III. Meter 251

IV. Grammar 253

V. Style 256

VI. Punctuation 259

Changes Which Restore the Reading of an Earlier Text 264

I, Thought 264

II. Action 273

III. Meter 275

IV. Grammar 277

V. Style 282

Superseded Changes 284

I. Thought 284

II. Action 289

III. Meter 290

IV. Grammar 291

V. Style 293

Intelligible Changes Not Adopted by Most Modern

Editors 294

I. Thought 294

II. Action 295

III. Meter 295

IV. Grammar 296

V. Style 299

CONTENTS xi

Mistaken and Arbitrary Changes 304

I. Thought 304

II. Action 311

III. Meter 311

IV. Grammar 313

V. Style 317

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH FOLIO (1685)

Changes Adopted by Many or All Modern Editors 320

I . Thought 320

II. Action 323

III. Meter 323

IV. Grammar 324

V. Style 327

VI. Punctuation 330

Changes which Restore the Reading of an Earlier Text 337

I. Thought 337

II. Action 344

III. Meter 344

IV. Grammar 345

V. Style 347

Superseded Changes 348

I. Thought 348

II. Action 352

III. Meter 352

IV. Grammar 353

V. Style 354

Intelligible Changes Not Adopted by Most Modern Edi- tors 355

I. Thought 355

II. Meter 358

III. Grammar 359

IV. Style 364

Mistaken and Arbitrary Changes 370

I. Thought 370

II. Action 374

III. Meter 374

IV. Grammar 375

V. Style 376

Appendix 379

Index 397

SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY

EDITORS

Part I: Introduction

Historical Sketch

THE TRUTH IS," said Dr. Johnson, speaking of Theobald's opinion of the relative authority of the four seventeenth-century folios of Shakespeare's plays, "that the first is equivalent to all others, and that the rest only deviate from it by the printer's negligence. Who- ever has any of the folios has all, excepting those diversities which mere reiteration of editions will produce."^ This opinion has been a long time a-dying. To be sure, Steevens, in the edition of 1778, revised it so far as it concerns the second folio, which, he said,

is not without value; for though it be in some places more incorrectly printed than the preceding one, it has likewise the advantage of various readings, which are not merely such as reiteration of copies will naturally produce. ... As to the third and fourth impressions . . . they are little better than waste paper, for they differ only from the preceding ones by a larger accumulation of errors. I had inadvertently given a similar character of the folio 1632;- but take this opportunity of confessing a mis- take into which I was led by too implicit a reliance on the assertions of others.^

This opinion of Steevens's, however, was soon challenged by Malone, who undertook, in the preface to his edition of 1790, to arbitrate the difference between the views of Johnson and Steevens. Malone set forth a list of variant readings in F2, from which he concluded that

The second folio does indeed very frequently differ from the first by negligence or chance; but much more frequently by the editor's profound ignorance of our poet's phraseology and metre, in consequence of which there is scarce a page of the book which is not disfigured by the capricious alterations introduced by the person to whom the care of that impression was entrusted (p. xix).

Accordingly, he said,

no person who wishes to peruse the plays of Shakspeare should ever open the Second Folio, or either of the subsequent copies, in which all these capricious alterations were adopted, with many additional errors and innovations (p. xliii).

^ The Plays of William Shakespeare, . . . Notes by Sam. Johnson (1765), vol. i, p. 1 (Tonson-Woodfall ed.), vol. i, sig. [Dl]^ (Tonson-Corbet ed.). ^ See the Johnson-Steevens edition of 1773, preface, sig. [N8]. 3 P. 237.

2 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

Malone was at once contradicted by Ritson, who flew to the other extreme in declaring that "for one instance of an alteration for the worse it will be easy to produce ten instances of alterations for the better,"^ and by Steevens, who brought forward the damaging asser- tion that Malone himself had adopted i86 corrections from F2 in his own edition.^ But Malone's notion of the inconsequence of F2 seems to have prevailed over that of Steevens. It is to be feared indeed that more recent remarks on the subject of the interrelations of the folios have often but echoed Johnson and Malone. At any rate, it was still possible for Miss Bartlett to say, in 1922, that F2 "has no new read- ings which are of interest to the scholar,"^ and for Sidney Lee, in 1925, to maintain that "The Second Folio was reprinted from the First ; a few corrections were made in the text, but most of the changes were arbitrary and needless, and prove the editor's incompetence," that F3 is "mainly a reprint of the Second," and that "the Fourth Folio . . . reprints the folio of 1664 without change except in the way of modernising the spelling, and of increasing the number of initial capitals within the sentence."''

The collection of material which has modified such views in every particular began as early as 1859, when Mommsen carefully exam- ined all the early texts of Romeo and Juliet and brought in a some- what different report :

Die Correcturen in B [F2] treffen ebenso oft das Falsche als das Richtige, obwohl sie fast immer an sich recht gescheidt sind.

In addition, he said, F2 corrects some of the typographical errors of Fi, takes special pains to correct the meter, with results by no means always unhappy, and inserts some conjectural emendations in the text — once more "nicht immer ungliicklich."* Mommsen even found the third and fourth folios a little better than waste paper. The third, he declared, is insignificant (p. 84), but the fourth is the most correct of all the folios (p. 88).

By 1863 the Cambridge editors had completed their pioneer colla- tion of all the early texts and summed up their impressions as follows :

The second Folio (F2) is a reprint of the first, preserving the same pagination. It differs, however, from the first in many passages, sometimes widely, sometimes

* Cursory criticisms on the edition of Shakspeare published by Edmond Malone ( 1 792),

P- 2.

^ Fourth edition (1793), p. xxviii.

8 Mr. William Shakespeare, p. 51.

' A Life of William Shakespeare, 4th revised ed., pp. 570-2.

^ Shakespeare's Romeo und Julia. Eine kritische Ansgabe . . . von Tycho Mommsen (1859), pp. 72-4.

HISTORICAL SKETCH 3

slightly, sometimes by accident, sometimes by design. The emendations are evidently conjectural, and though occasionally right, appear more frequently to be wrong. They deserve no more respect than those of other guessers, except such as is due to their author's familiar acquaintance with the language and customs of Shakespeare's day, and possible knowledge of the acted plays. . . .

The third Folio ... is on the whole a tolerably faithful reprint of the second, correcting, however, some obvious errors, making now and then an uncalled-for alteration, and occasionally modernizing the spelling of a word. The printer of course has committed some errors of his own.

The fourth Folio (F4) was printed from the third, but with a different pagination, in 1685. The spelling is very much modernized, but we have not been able to detect any other evidence of editorial care.

Again, in 1902, Professor C. Alphonso Smith published a list of cor- rections in grammar which he had found in F2, from which he drew the surprising conclusion that in 1632 "a new edition was called for, in which the chief burden of the endeavor should be to make the language conform to the needs of written style rather than to the demands of oral delivery."^

By gradual stages, therefore, scholars have come to the opinion that, barring obvious typographical errors, the changes found in F2 were made deliberately for the purpose of improving the text and that some of them do not deserve the contempt with which Malone, for example, speaks of them. This opinion is expressed by Lounsbury as follows:

[In F2] occurred the first essay in the direction of attempting anything in the shape of emendation . . . The alterations found in it, though not numerous comparatively speaking, were too numerous, and their character was too marked, to permit them as a whole to be regarded as the result of accident, whatever might be true of in- dividual instances. About the value of the changes then made, . . . there is now a substantial agreement that if some of the alterations of the folio of 1632 are for the better, the majority of them are for the worse. ^°

More recent writers have spoken more boldly. Professor Pollard says:

We have to recognize that the Second Folio ... in a real sense began the work of lawful and necessary emendation. It is obvious that the emendation was done at haphazard and that numerous glaring misprints and blunders in punctuation passed unnoticed. Nevertheless, it was in 1632 that a start was made in re-editing the First Folio, and thus no survey of the history of Shakespeare's text can be complete which does not take into account the work of these anonymous compositors and correctors.^^

The fullest summary is that of Mr. Allardyce Nicoll, who says:

I feel that not one, but several, correctors were at work. The printer, evidently, had his finger in this particular pie; changes in spelling may be attributed to him; and it

' "The Chief Difference between the First and Second Folios of Shakespeare," Englische Studien xxx. 4.

1° The Text of Shakespeare (1906), p. 68.

" Shakespeare Folios and Quartos (1909), p. 158.

4 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

may have been the printer who was offended at Shakespeare's bad grammar. . . . Syntactical changes . . . run right through the volume . . . Plural subjects are given plural verbs; 'thous' are provided with the proper 'st' inflexions; 'whom' is substi- tuted for 'who,' and 'who' for 'whom'; stage-directions in Latin are given their proper endings, so that several characters, when leaving the stage, 'Exeunt' not 'Exit,' just as they 'Manent' not 'Manet.' . . . Metrical alterations also run through a good part of this Folio, several of them being exceedingly felicitous, but here they seem to be patchier than the alterations in syntax. Romeo and Juliet has over seventeen changes of this type, Titus Androiiicus seven, Henry VI, Part I, twenty-two. Part //eleven, Part III eight. The Winter's Tale seven; none of the others that I have examined possess more than one or two. Apparently, there has here been some one working concernedly at certain plays, not confined to any one section of the volume. But neither metrical nor syntactical changes exhaust the many alterations in this Second Folio. Changes made for the purpose of elucidating the sense, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, and for the purpose of making clearer the actions of the characters on the stage, are over four times as many as those made for metrical and syntactical reasons taken together. In the Second Folio we do first come upon an attempt to 'edit' Shakespeare. This attempt, however, was not a uniform one. It may be well here to summarize the changes made in the three sections of the volume. Among the comedies Much Ado, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer- Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night have been left practically untouched; all the rest have been fairly carefully worked over, and we note a tendency to pay particular attention to stage-directions and to classical names and references. ... In all the comedies which have been touched, moreover, there is a plentiful sprinkling of fresh stage-directions, evidently from their form the additions of a spectator rather than of a prompter. Among the histories, only two plays have been seriously considered, Richard II and Henry V; there are no stage-directions added here, but we recognize the learned corrector of the comedies in the alterations made in the French scenes of Henry V. Coming to the tragedies, we find that five plays have been most carefully worked over, Troilus and Cressida, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. The number of definite alterations rises to seventy-two in Romeo and is not less than thirty-four in Troilus. Here, again, there is to be traced the hand of the classical scholar. Hardly a single change is made in the stage- directions, badly as some cried out for alteration; but all through, Roman and Greek names are conjured out of the often meaningless collections of consonants and vowels as the First Folio presented them. . . .

My solution of the question of the Second Folio is, therefore, that, besides the meddling printer, there were three separate men who went over part of the text: one who altered five plays for metrical reasons, one who boldly attacked the comedies in order to improve their stage-directions but got no further than the comedies, and one who chose certain of the most popular plays for careful examination. This last man was a student of both Latin and Greek, a man moreover with a considerable sense of the fitness of things. As Mr. Dover Wilson has shown us that Heminge and Condell probably had no influence on the text of the First Folio, this man, anony- mous as he is, must be regarded as Shakespeare's first editor.

The third and fourth folios Mr. Nicoll dismisses briefly: "There are alterations in them, but for the most part these alterations are confined to changes in spelling and to a few simple elucidations."^^

'2 Studies in the First Folio (Shakespeare Association, 1924), p. 164-6.

EDITOR AND PRINTER 5

As we think there can be no disagreeing with Professor Pollard's opinion that "no survey of the history of Shakespeare's text can be complete which does not take into account the work of these anony- mous compositors and correctors" of the second, third, and fourth folios, and since whatever doubts or differences of opinion there may still be can be settled only by an examination of the evidence in full, we have undertaken a detailed comparison of the folio texts. Thus we hope primarily to determine whether or not the later folios may ac- curately be described as texts which have undergone editorial revi- sion, and incidentally to show the extent and variety of the diver- gences between each folio and its successor, to account for their presence in the text, to evaluate them, and to show what part, if any, they have played in forming the received text which we read to-day.

§2

Editor and Printer

A casual comparison of the text of any two successive folios quickly shows that divergences are very numerous. Even if obvious typo- graphical errors, insignificant variations in orthography, and changes in punctuation are neglected, many alterations still remain to be accounted for. There can be no doubt — there should never have been any doubt — that none of the folios is a literal reprint of the one before it and that Johnson's statement that "the first is equivalent to all others" is greatly overdrawn.

A careful examination of these divergences, however, is at first somewhat puzzling. One soon discovers intelligent, even acute, emen- dations, corrections which have been adopted in all subsequent edi- tions down to the present day. These give one a good opinion of the competence of the person responsible for them and create at once the presumption that he was more than a compositor or printing-house factotum. But at the same time one notices just as many changes, perhaps even more, that can only be described as arbitrary and finicking or mistaken and absurd. They are so ill-judged that it is difficult to reconcile them with the intelligence evinced in the good changes that appear side by side with them, or they are so unneces- sary that one wonders why the mind that overlooked (or at least did not alter) many undoubtedly corrupt passages should ever have bothered to make them.

After a while, however, a light begins to dawn upon one's per- plexity. Many of these apparently irresponsible and wrong-headed changes are typographical errors. This is not to say that the revisers

6 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

who inserted intelligent new readings in the text were incapable of error, but that many of the deplorable changes are just the kind of mistake that a compositor will unconsciously make in setting up type. They are not, of course, gross typographical errors which any- body would recognize as printer's blunders. They do not obviously deface the words which they alter: in fact, they usually result in a series of recognizable English words and most of them make sense, or a kind of sense, at least. Yet they are not editorial revisions at all, but the results of slips of the compositor's eye or mind.^

This distinction between obvious or literal typographical errors and typographical errors which make a kind of sense — unobtrusive typographical errors, as we shall call them for the sake of distinction — is an important key to the understanding of the later folio texts. An obvious typographical error is a mistake like worth for worth or nohlijh Ejiglijh for nohleft Englifli, which anybody would recognize as a typographical error at once. But few readers of the F2 version of Antony 111.xiii.13, "Is this his anfwer," would suspect it also of containing a typographical error, though, as a matter of fact, we are convinced that it does. Not until one compares it with the reading of Fi, "Is that his anfwer?," is one aware of any disturbance of the text at all. A change like this is not an editorial alteration: it is an unobtrusive typographical error of a fairly common kind often en- countered in the folio texts. It is only when one recognizes these un- obtrusive typographical errors that one begins to understand the apparent confusion and contradictoriness of a text like F2 and to reconcile its defects with its merits. We must begin by studying the compositor's habits and noting the consequent errors to which he is prone.

When a hand-compositor goes to work, he reads a line or two of his copy carefully enough to fix it in his mind and then picks out the appropriate types from the case before him and arranges them prop- erly in his composing-stick. Four facts characteristic of him at this work should be borne in mind, (i) After he has committed a bit of his copy to memory, he is likely not to look at the copy again, unless he is conscious of forgetting, until he has set up all of that bit. (2) As he concentrates his attention upon the setting up of a particular word, he is, for the moment, oblivious of the rest of the passage, which, however, lurks just below the level of consciousness in his mind. (3) After he has set up a line of type, he cannot be depended

^ "[Of] all the diversities which the copies [of the folios] exhibit, . . . near two thirds of them are typographical mistakes, or ... a change of insignificant particles." — Steevens, ed. 1773, sig. E3^

EDITOR AND PRINTER 7

on to read it over and compare it with the copy. (4) His concentra- tion upon the details of his technique, such as the justification of each line of type, as well as a certain monotony in the routine of his work, tends to lull him into obliviousness of the sense, the whole meaning of what he sets up and even, perhaps, to induce a more than ordinarily suggestible state of mind. In the course of this process, then, defects in his mechanical equipment, his vision, his mind, in- deed his whole muscular-nervous system will sometimes betray him into setting up something different from the copy before him or from the precise sequence of words which he tried to commit to memory when he read it. The same errors of vision and mental confusions can be observed in copying, in typing, in composing one's thoughts on paper, and in memorizing a poem or a speech : most people are prob- ably more familiar with such lapses in one or another of these forms. If the compositor is reading bad copy, working in bad light, is hur- ried, or tired, he is all the more likely to err unconsciously. Obviously his lapses which make some kind of sense and those which are in- stantly recognizable as typographical errors proceed, for the most part, from the same causes and in an analysis of textual changes must be classed together. It is therefore necessary to recognize the kinds of accident, mistake, and unconscious mental vagary that produce unobtrusive variants in the text. To these the kinds of ob- vious typographical error furnish the necessary clues. ^

For example, the compositor's eye, looking at the copy before him, will sometimes see a word or phrase different from that which really stands there, just as anybody, glancing at a piece of printing or writ- ing, will sometimes misread it. To be sure, a compositor, because he reads his copy rather carefully, is less liable to visual error than the man who glances at a newspaper over his neighbor's shoulder, but even so the compositor will sometimes see wrongly, especially when the mistake is fostered by association of ideas or when it occurs as he rapidly glances at his copy to refresh his memory rather than as he reads it for the first time.

Obviously a letter can be read as another which looks like it, as e and 0, / and /, i and I, r and / or n, and when the change thus pro- duced is either mistaken and nonsensical or so unnecessary and fini- cal that it is hard to imagine a reasonably intelligent human being's bothering to make it, it may be most plausibly explained as a typo-

2 The varieties of typographical error are discussed by R. B. McKerrow: Intro- duction to Bibliography (1927), pp. 252-8, E. K. Chambers: William Shakespeare (1930), i. 176-84, W. W. Greg: "Principles of Emendation in Shakespeare" {Aspects of Shakespeare, British Academy Lectures, 1933).

8 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

graphical error due to misreading.^ It is always possible, and often likely, that there were complicating factors: for instance, the letter which the compositor misread may have been blurred or broken or faintly inked in his copy.^ Furthermore, in reading, the eye, catching the beginning and the end of a word, will sometimes infer the rest without really looking at it, and infer it wrongly. Thus inhibited, Armes, and reforme may become inhabited, Armies, and redeeme} Therefore, if such a change is hard to explain on any reasonable grounds, it is more likely to be a typographical error. In the same way, a word can be misread as another word exactly like it at either the beginning or the end, but not both, such as this for his, quejlion for quejlant, frequence ior fequence.^ That all, or perhaps even many, of these unconscious substitutions are purely and simply the result of imperfect vision is not likely; doubtless associations of ideas and

' For examples of this error in F2 see: vngently > urgently Tempest i.ii.444, euen > ever GentlemeniY. n.Sg, tightly >rightly Merry H7i;e5 i.iii.76, thefe>thofe Much Ado i.i.40 (also All's Well 1v.iii.36, i Henry IV i.iii.133, Romeo i.i.84, Cymbeline iv.iiit3i), charg'd >chang'd As You Like It n1.ii.131, cleane>cleare As You Like It n1.ii.387, know > knew As You Like It iv.iii.8, lowd>lewd Shrew i.i.125, knew > know Shrew n.i.115, loue>Iove All's Well 11.iii.73, fo>of All's Well 11.iii.119, Mettle>Nettle Twelfth Night n.v.12, ftores>ftones Twelfth Night 1v.ii.37, his>hir John v.vii.i6, daube>dambe i Henry 7Fi.i.6, deere>heere / Henry /F v.iii.7, Dagonet >Dagenet 2 Henry IV n1.ii.272, Anthonie>Anthonio Henry V 1v.viii.94, chop>crop 2 Hejiry F/v.i.135, wild>mild Troilus i.i. 101, hot>not Troihis n.n. 6, pertly >partly Troilus IV.V.219, teft>rert Troilus v.ii.120, fweate>fweare Troihis v.x.54, Tenip'ring >Temp'ting Romeo l1.Prol.14, Sit>Sir Tinion in.vi.68, Conceptions > Conceptions Timon iv.iii.i86, want > wont Timon 1v.iii.414, danke>darke Caesar n.i.263, worthies >worthies Caes'.r v.i.6i, Pons>Pans Hamlet 11.ii.414, tent>rent Hamlet n.ii.593, glofre>groffe Othello i.iii.227, grow>grew Antofiy in.xiii. in. (References are to the Cambridge edition of 189 1-3.)

^ As we are concerned only with Fj, F3, and F4, each of which was set up from a copy of the previous folio, with some alterations written in, we are not obliged to take much account of errors due to the misreading of MS. See p. 36 ff.

* All's Well I.i. 137, 2 Henry VI 1v.ix.29, 2 Henry /F v.v.69. For further examples in Fo see: healthfull >helpefull Errors i.i. 11 5, trees >teares Merchant v.i.8o, within >wherein All's Well ii.i.175, cars>cares Twelfth Night 11. v. 59, waters >warres John v.ii.56, helpefull >hopefull Richard II 111.iii.132, forgiuen > forgotten 2 Henry IV Ep. 20, earthy >earthly 2 Henry VI 111.ii.147, dar'rt>durft 2 Henry VI v.i.95, figheft >fitteft Troilus 1v.iv.15-6, purpore>propore Coriolaniis i.vi.$o, difproper- tied >dirproportioned Coriolanus 11. i. 238, fticke>rtrike Coriolani/s v.iii.73. Cour- tiers > Countries Romeo i.iv.72, hurtled > hurried Caesar 11.ii.22, Horfe>houfe Macbeth 11.iii.142, Stept>Spent Macbeth 111.iv.137, rmacking>fmoaking Macbeth 1v.iii.59, Charter > Character Othello i.iii.245, ftale>fteale Antony 11.ii.239, Afpickes >Afpects Antony v.ii.348.

^Gentlemen 11.iv.97 (also Twelfth Night 11.iii.163, v. i.i, Troilus 11.iii.254, iii.i.73). All's Well Ii.i.i6, Titnon v.i.206. For further examples in Fo see: wooe>move Gentle- men v.iv.57, life >relfe Richard // v.vi.26, vnto>upon Henry F1.ii.90, Twin > Twine Coriolanus 1v.iv.15, ay>ah Romeo iii.v.43, when>whom Timon iv.iii.io8, roares >teares Caesar i.iii.74, Wing > Wine Macbeth i.iv.17, lated>lateft Macbeth iii.iii.6, well-tooke>well-look't Hamlet 11.ii.83, idle>wilde Othello i.iii.140, Fortreffe> For- tune Antony 111.ii.31.

EDITOR AND PRINTER 9

other circumstances now irrecoverable played a part. It is probably significant, for instance, that the substitution in F2 of "Forgetting any other name but this" for "Forgetting any other home but this" {Romeo Ii.ii.176), which we regard as prim.arily an error of vision, occurs at the end of the scene in which Juliet soliloquizes on Romeo's name. Likewise, the reading of F3 at Richard II ii.i.296, "Away with me in hafte to RavenfpurgJi," instead of "in pofte" (F2), which we are inclined to call a visual error, may very well have been due in part to the similarity in sense of the words exchanged.^

Errors of execution, due to faulty memory, failing attention, and suggestions of sound and idea, are still more common. The simplest kind is an omission. An unimportant or inessential word may simply fail to fasten itself in the memory; any word or phrase may be lost through a slackening of the attention much like the phenomenon of losing one's place in reading. Likewise a letter or several letters may be omitted — a prefix, a suffix, or a medial syllable. When such an omission leaves out a significant word, the damage done thereby is evident, though just what word has dropped out may not be. But the omission of an inessential word might easily escape detection except upon careful collation of the reprint with the copy, e.g.:

Fi: Make me not lighted like the Bafilifque.

I haue look'd on thoufands, who haue fped the better

By my regard, but kill'd none fo: F2: Make me not lighted Hke the Bafilifque.

I look'd on thoufands, who have fped the better

By my regard, but kill'd none fo:

Winter's Tale i.ii.389

Fi: He is not yet arriu'd, nor know I ought

But that he's well, and will be fhortly heere. F2: He is not arriv'd, nor know I ought

But that he's well, and will be fhortly heere.

Othello ii.i.89

Fi: Take thou no care, it fhall be heeded. F2: Take no care, it fhall be heeded.

Antony v.ii.266

Fi: I haue | your commendation, for my more free entertainment. F2: I have I your commendation, for my more entertainment.

Cymbeline i.iv.149

Since there is no conceivable reason for the deliberate omission of

^ For examples (in F2) of the substitution of a word or phrase which the com- positor's eye evidently picked from the context see: foes >death 2 Henry VI in.ii. 182, Andren>Arde Henry VIII 1.1.7, Corio. >Com. Coriolanus ni.i.242, I haue>I have: 'tis ready Coriolanus m.iii.ii, you fpeake>what noyfe is that? Hamlet iv.v.144.

10 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

such words as these, the change is best explained as an error of the printer.^ A predisposing cause for the omission of a word is the pres- ence of it near by in the text: if he has but recently set it up the compositor may be just a little more likely to forget to repeat it. On this account, "let him partake in the glory of action" (F2: Antony 111.V.9) for "let him partake in the glory of the action" (Fi) may be explained as a typographical error. ^

Prefixes and suffixes, syllables, and letters may be unconsciously omitted in similar ways. A letter dropped out of the F2 version of Tempest iv.i.182, which reads "Fth' filthy mantled pooIe beyond you Cell" instead of the "your Cell" of Fi. This would be obvious to anybody. But the similar omission of a letter will sometimes make no apparent difference in the meaning and go quite unsuspected ex- cept for careful collation of the texts. Take, for example, one of the commonest kinds of omission of this sort, that of the plural ending -s, as in the F4 version of Richard III 1v.iv.512, "by fuddain Flood, and fall of Waters," where F3 reads "Floods." As it is very difficult to imagine a motive for making such a change deliberately and as the possibility of the compositor's accidentally leaving off such a letter, on the evidence of the Tempest passage and others like it, is undoubted, the latter is surely the better explanation.^"

* For further examples of such omissions in F2 see: fo Tempest i.ii.91, at once Gentlemen i.i.124, fmall Merry Wives i.i.44, owne Errors ni.i.14, away Labour's iv.iii.i88, once Dream 11. i. 149, a Merchant i.ii.51, and Merchant iv.i.ii6, the As You Like It i.ii.129, in As You Like It i.ii.153, the As You Like It 111.ii.162, the All's Well i.i.170, yet All's Well ni.iii.4, not Twelfth Night ii.v.145, am Winter's Tale i.ii.412, and Winter's Tale n.i.141, go Winter's Tale in.iii.7, fhall i Henry 7F'i.ii.i66, heere 2 Henry IV i.'i.i, come 2 Henry /F'i.ii.126, fhall 2 Henry F/i.iv.26, the Henry VIII n.iv.42, els Henry VIII 11.iv.140, O Henry VIII ni.1.42, doe Troilus i.i.29, into Troilus 1v.iv.45, how Titus ii.i.45, in it Titus 1v.iii.77, is Romeo ni.v.133, in Timo?i ni.v.97, Lord Timon v.i.125, is this Caesar i.iii.137, a Macbeth i.ii.47, I meane Mac- beth 1v.ii.33, then Hamlet I.i.i6i, I doe Hafitlet i.v.184, and held me hard; Hamlet n.i.87, me Hamlet v.ii.27, them Hamlet v.ii.251, haue Hamlet v.ii.383, it Lear v.iii.224, Valiant Othello i.iii.47, to Othello i.iii.324, more Othello in.i.13, \eait Othello 1v.ii.37, enchanting Antony i.ii.125, not Antony I.iv.i6, thou Antony v.ii.266, euer Cymbeline ii.iii.2.

° For further examples in F2 see: his Labour's n.i.69, I Merchant n1.ii.232, to I Hetiry IV ii.i.86, he Henry V iv.iv.6o, vnto i Henry VI 11. v. 19, I j Henry VI i.i. 273, away Troilus v.iii.88, for Hamlet 111.ii.298, to Antony v.ii.224.

1° For further examples in F2 of the omission of letters at the end of a word see: mak'rt>makes Tempest i.ii.470, One>On Tempest ii.i.15, Cuckoldly> Cuckold Merry Wives n.'n.24s< richly >rich Much Ado v.i. 2^4, thereto >thereI,aioz<r'5V.ii. 446, feeke>fee As You Like It ni.i.3, brings>bring As You Like It 1v.iii.79, there>the Shrew iv.i.115 (also Timon i.i.162, Cymbeline n.ii.22), goes>goe Twelfth Night v.i.231, banil'ht >banifh Twelfth Niglit \. '1.274, leffer>leffe John 1v.ii.42, fprightfully >fprightfull Richard II i.iii.3, their >the Richard II i.iii.220 (also Richard II ni.iii. 76, Timon 1v.iii.32), into>in i Henry /Fi.iii.266, ftands>rtand Henry Fn.ii.103, fairely >faire Henry Fv.ii.io, Winters >Winter j/fewrj F/v.vii.17, nobler > Noble

EDITOR AND PRINTER 11

Another kind of evident typographical error is transposition. The unconscious transposition of adjoining words ("That chaine I will beftow" for "That chaine will I beflow" or "to be but Duke of Lancafter" for "but to be Duke of Lancafter")^^ is a phenomenon which anybody who has ever tried to memorize either verse or prose will have no difficulty believing in. Letters and syllables within a word can also be transposed, quite obviously in Tarjfell (F2: Merchant i.ii.54), where the compositor intended to set up TraJJell (Fi) ; less obviously in

It is no matter, let on Images

Be hung with the Cxfars Trophees: (Fo)

for "no Images" (Fi: Caesar i.i.69); and still less obviously in

Imagin'd wroth Holds in his bloud fuch fwolne and hot difcourfe,

(Fi: Troilus Ii.iii.167) for "imagin'd worth" (Q).^' Furthermore, as any connoisseur of Spoonerisms will testify, syllables in adjoining words can be transposed in the same way and thus bring about sub- stitutions like u'heeles become for wheele becomes (Hamlet iv.v.169). The unconscious repetition of a letter, syllable, or word usually makes an obvious typographical error, but sometimes a repeated word slips readily into the sense of the passage or produces an in-

Henry VIII i.ii.i 75 (also Troilus i.iii.37), You'ld >You'l Henry VIII 11.iii.47, Arch- bifhops (possessive) >Archbifhop Henry VIII iv.i.104, comes>come Troilus v.ii.6, how>ho Troiltcs v.iii.83, boafting>boart Coriolantis ii.i.18, yvart>was Romeo n.iv. 73, Ile>I Romeo ii.v.43 (also Lear n.iv.285), comforts > comfort Timon v.i.129, liues>live Hamlet i.ii.72, wretched > wretch Lear v.i.42, Carract >Carrac Othello i.ii.50, and>a Othello iv.i.185, you'l>you Antony li.n. $6, wherein >where Antony iv.vi.38, makes>make Cymbeline 1n.vi.20, not>no Cymheline 1v.ii.388.

For examples in F2 of the omission of a prefix or initial letter(s) see: your>our I Henry VI ii.i.63 (also Romeo i.v. 135), thence >hence 2 Henry VI 111.ii.359, vpon>on Romeo v.i.71 (also Macbeth i.ii.39), a making >making Macbeth 111.iv.34, fhe>hee Lear 11.iv.121, thither >hither Antony iv.xv.9, flight>light Cymbeline m.v.3S.

For examples in F2 of the omission of a medial letter or letters (where visual error may well be a factor too) see: meet>met As You Like It iii.v.29, thoroughly > throughly Shrew i.i.138, furely>furly Shrew 1v.ii.65, extracting > exacting Twelfth Night v.i.273, Cantherizing>Catherizing Timon v.i.131, Noble Gentlemen > Noble- man Lear i.i.23, Louers>Loves Othello 1n.iv.175, ftrangler >ftranger Antony ll.vi. 118, leart>laft Cymbeline n1.iv.147, wager'd>wag'd Cymbeline v.v,i82.

^^ Errors in. i. 117, / Henry IV iv.iii.6i. See also (in Fj): Sir my doublet>my doublet Sir Tempest ii.i.96, poore a>a poore As You Like It i.i.2, (no doubt) vs>us (no doubt) Richard III 111.vii.170, Is it>It is Romeo n.iv. 107, Gracious my>My Gracious Macbeth v.v.30, fhalbe to him fhortly>fhall to him fhortly bee Othello l.iii.346-7. At Caesar iv.iii. 254-5 parts of two successive lines are transposed.

"See also (in F2): is't>it's John iv.i.23, tis>it's Henry VIII Ep. 5, 'ift>'tis Romeo i.v.81.

12 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

telligible, though sometimes a different, reading. Thus "I would that I might thanke you, as, as, you call me" (Fi: Richard III iii.i.123) for "I would that I might thanke you, as you call me" (Qq) is the result of exactly the same process of error as "Gainft my Captivity: Haile: haile brave friend" (F2: j\Iacbeth i.ii.5) for '"Gainft my Captiuitie: Haile braue friend" (Fi), but the latter makes perfectly good sense and could even be regarded as a deliberate metrical cor- rection which adds a tenth syllable to a nine-syllable line. In view, however, of other examples of the same kind of repetition, it is more simply and credibly explained as unconscious.^^ In both of these examples the mistake occurs in the second half of the line. We have so often noticed typographical errors of various kinds in this position, near, but not at, the end of the line, that we are inclined to regard it as the point at which the compositor's memory is most fallible and more readily to call puzzling changes which occur there typographi- cal errors.

Certain other substitutions may be explained as due to various kinds of suggestion operating in the compositor's mind upon a word or phrase on which his memory, so to speak, has lost its hold. If the compositor, without, of course, being aware of the fact, has retained but a faint or imperfect recollection of the word that stands in his copy, it may, through the operation of unpredictable associations of ideas, be supplanted by another word which resembles it in either sound or sense, or even, through a curious process of the attraction of opposites, by a word of contrasted meaning.

For example, at Tempest 11.ii.122 F2 reads "thou art made life a Goofe." This is nonsense: the correct reading is, of course, that of Fi and F3, "thou art made like a Goofe." As an explanation of such a manifest typographical error, visual error or foul case is possible, but as / does not look like k or lie near it in the compositor's case, it seems more likely that the compositor's memory rather than his eye was at fault. All unknown to him, his memory retained but an imperfect recollection of the sound of the word in the copy so that when he came to set it up he recalled, instead of like, another word resembling it in sound. Errors of this kind have sometimes been ex- plained as the compositor's mishearing some one who dictated to him from the copy, but as there is no external evidence of such a practice of dictation in seventeenth-century printing offices, the assumption of inaccurate auditory memory, which is a quite suffi-

'^ See also (in F2): be Labour's i.ii.148, and Richard II Ii.i.i6i, to Henry V v.ii.300, all are [all is repeated; are interpolated] Timon ni.iii.6, too Lear i.i.291, dead Othello v.ii.284.

EDITOR AND PRINTER 13

cient explanation, is more satisfactory. In the same way we should explain the reading of F3 at Romeo i.iv.91, "and bakes the Elf-locks in foul fluttifh haires, which once entangled, much misfortune bodes," where F2 reads "once untangled" ; the interchange in the compositor's mind of two words almost identical in sound has reversed the sense of the clause. The same kind of error is responsible for the absurd reading of F3 at Antony 1v.viii.39:

That heaven and earth may ftrike their founds together, Applauding our reproach.

instead of "'Applauding our approach" (F2). It is as if the sound of approach faded in the compositor's mind and when he called on his memory to furnish him with the word it served up a counterfeit or makeshift, a word of quite different meaning which, however, sounded just like it except for one unaccented syllable. ^^ Obviously he could not have been thinking of the sense of the passage when he set up reproach, but then a compositor or copyist, working half- automatically, can never be depended upon to keep fully alive to the sense of what he sets up or copies.

The words thus confused by the compositor are sometimes much alike in meaning too, and even when they introduce a drastic change of meaning, they usually belong, at least, to the same part of speech, as m.y and thy, would and could, or bear some resemblance to each other in meaning, as Godfathers and Grandfathers}^ These changes are all either irresponsible or very, very wrong and they are so un- necessary that it is difficult to account for them as deliberate cor- rections even on the most fanciful grounds.

The substitution of a word similar in sense to that which it re- places is due to imperfect memory: the compositor remembers, ex- actly or approximately, the idea that stands in his copy but not the language in which it is expressed. Such a substitution rather seldom

1* "Every compositor when at work reads over a few words of his copy, and retains them in his mind until his fingers have picked up the various types belonging to them. While the memory is thus repeating to itself a phrase, it is by no means unnatural, nor in practice is it uncommon, for some word or words to become unwittingly sup- planted in the mind by others which are similar in sound." — Blades: Shakspere and Typography (1872), p. 72.

1^ My and thy are confounded at Richard II v.i.47, Richard III ii.ii.6i, Coriolanns iv.v.70, Romeo n.i.2, Othello 11. i. 206, Antony 1v.xiv.69; could and would at Timon in.iv.51; Godfathers and Grandfathers at Richard III i.i.48. See also (in F2): Solinus >Salinus Errors i.i.i, work's >workes Coriolanus i.i.53, fore>for Coriolanus iv.iv.3, fhould'ft >could'rt Coriolanus iv.v.73, my>me Romeo i.v.16, Lards >Lords Timon 1v.iii.12, pittious>hideous Hamlet n.i.94, o'reway >o'rerway Hamlet 111.ii.27, light > Vike Antony i.ii.170, How>Oh Antony m.ii.ii, righes>rides Cymbeline i.vi.66, ftrait >ftraight Cymbeline v.iii.7.

14 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

makes an obvious typographical error. It usually results in an in- telligible reading and quite often does not materially alter the sense of the passage, so that it would not be suspected except upon colla- tion of the texts. The word substituted is usually, but not always, the weaker, more familiar, less emphatic. Many such changes are very trifling — the indefinite for the definite article, an article for a demonstrative or possessive pronoun, which for that, a plural for a singular, one preposition for another, will for jhall, can for could, Jaieth f or faies , farther ior further, and the like. Sometimes a synonym is substituted, such as onely for alone, hardly for fcarfely, reniaines for remnants}^ The frequency of such substitutions seems to warrant the assumption that less exact equivalents, such as "much ignoble ftooping" for "moft ignoble ftooping," truely ior freely, "more will- ingly" for "too willingly," "fweet love" for "fweet foule," can be confused in the same way.^'^

The substitution of a word of opposite or contrasting meaning is difficult to explain, but there seems to be no doubt of its occasional occurrence. For instance, Imogen's speech to Belarius at Cymbeline v.v.400, "You are my Father too, and did releeue me," turns up in F2 as "You are my Mother too." It is very difficult to regard this as a deliberate correction: Imogen's meaning is plain, while the pro- priety of calling Belarius her mother is extremely dubious. In conse- quence, this change can be explained only as a typographical error. It is not, of course, a common kind of error, but there are enough examples of it to establish a presumption that, when the compositor's memory fails him, without his knowing it, a word opposed in mean- ing to that which eludes him can usurp its place. ^^

Another kind of typographical error occurs when a word in the text makes such a strong impression on the compositor's subconscious mind that it subjugates, or casts a spell over, his memory of some neighboring word. As a result, either one of two things may happen: the outstanding word may usurp the place of the other and thus repeat itself, or it may attract the weaker word into a form more

1^ All's Well 11.iii.35, Richard III ii.iii.2, Much Ado 11.iii.215. See also (in F2): and >or Twelfth Night v.i.330, are>be Winter's Tale n.i.13, Cloakes>Cloathes Caesar ii.i.74, impeides thee>thee hinders Macbeth i.v.25, yongeft >yonger Lear i.i.45.

1' Tempest I.ii.ii6, Measure i.iv.82, Much Ado i.i.87, Merchant v.i.49. See also (in F2): grieuoufly> heavily Gentlemen 111.ii.14, blunts >blots Errors ii.i.93, ftraines >ftrings As You Like 7/iv.iii.68, tell truth >tell trueyl//'5 Well i.iii.211, more>much Winter's Tale n.iii.177, to>and Richard 7/ v.vi.46, fights>rignes Macbeth Iii.iv.ii6, indued > deduced Hamlet iv.vii.i8o, to>the Othello 111.iv.77, great >good Antony 11.vi.92.

" See also (in F2): head>heart Tempest ni.ii.8, headis>handis Richard II ii.i. loi, n1.ii.126, our>their Richard \ll 1n.ii.34.

EDITOR AND PRINTER 15

like its own, "Few come within few compaffe of my curfe" ^^Fi: Titus v.i.126) for "within the compass" is an obvious example of the first;

This hand of thine hath writ in thy behalfe,

And therefore Ihall it charme thy riotous tongue.

(F2: 2 Henry VI iv.i.63)

for "This hand of mine" (Fi), in a passage bristling with th's, of the second. This attraction can also be exercised by a word which follows rather than precedes the word attracted, as in "Kneel'd and my feet, and bid me be aduis'd?" (Fi: Richard III 11. i. 107) for "Kneel'd at my feet," or in "thou you come" (F2: 2 Henry /Fiv.iii.27) for "then you come" (Fi), or in "while he'll anfwer nobody" (F4: Troilus iii. iii.266) for "why hee'l anfwer" (F3), or in "fhe fhouldft be aduan'ft" (Fi: Romeo iv.v.72) for "she should be advanced." Sometimes the first letter or syllable of a word attaches itself to the end of the pre- ceding word or the last letter or syllable to the word following, as in "If followes" (F2: Richard III i.i.59) for "It followes" (Fi) ; "His fword upon you" (F3: Henry VIII 111.ii.156) for "His word" (F2) ; "To get this place" (F2: Othello i. iii. 387) for "his Place" (Fi) ; "My heart was to thy Rudder tyed by'th' firings, | And thou fhould'ft ftowe me after" (Fi: Antony 111.xi.58) for "shouldst tow me" (Rowe). This error, however, is by no means always obvious; an ordinary reader might pass over "If fhe be in your Chamber, or your houfe" (F2: Othello i.i.139) for "in her Chamber" (Fi) or "Some other Miftreffe hath fome fweet afpects" (F2: Errors ii.ii.iio) for "hath thy fweet afpects" (Fi) or "Laugh at this Challenge" (F2: Antony IV. i. 6) for "his Challenge" or "By all the operations of the Orbes" (F2: Lear i.i.iio) for "operation. "^^

1' For further examples in F2 of the substitution of a word which stands near by in the text see: my>thy Gentlemen i.i.19, buried >loft Gentlemen ii.i.21, rare>all Gentlemen V.iv.i6i, And>I Measure v.i.482, he>it Much Ado i.i.74, this>the Much Ado II. iii. 100, out>not Merchant 11.ii.73, moft>no As You Like It 111.ii.264, faults> fault Shrew i.ii.86, as>what Shrew ii.i.66, ray>faid All's Well 11. iii. 37, this>the All's Well II. iii. 176, the>that All's Well 1v.iv.3s, |for>of All's Well v.iii.210, from a > no I Henry VI i.'ii. lo^,, your >my i Henry VI iw.i. 6s, not>no 2 Henry F/v.i.93, thy>my Richard III i.ii.203, of>and Henry VIII 11.iv.46, as>are Henry VIII lll.i.22, we>he Coriolanus v.vi.57, teene>teeth Romeo i. iii. 14, you>your Romeo III. ii. 104, when>then Timon il.i.17, our>or Othello i. iii. 330, your>the Antony n.vii.27, our>my Antony 111.xiii.175, in>a Antony 1v.ii.39, not>no Cymbeline 1v.ii.273.

For examples (in F2) of attraction see: to>and Gentlemen iii.ii.8i, when>where Gentlemen v.ii.50, our>your Measure i. iii. 49, beene>bid Errors iii.i.46, moodie> muddy Errors v.i.79, but>beene Errors v.i.399, morall>mortall Much Ado i. iii. 10, he>we Dream ii.i.59, the>these Dream iv.i.88, her>his Merchant iv.i.263, for >from Merchant v.i.131, no>not As You Like It 111.ii.251 (some copies), which > whofe As You Like It iv. iii. 112, lamentation > lamentations All's Well i.i.48, neither

16 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

Another kind of typographical error is due to what may be called automatism. After the compositor has set up a word, through force of habit he goes on adding more letters to it until he has set up a longer familiar word which includes the word that stands in his copy. This phenomenon is well known to writers and copyists. It accounts for a reading like "If you can penetrate here with your fingering, fo" (F2: Cymheline ii.iii.13) fo^ "if you can penetrate her" (Fi). More often, however, the longer word is perfectly intelligible in the context, as when a plural noun is substituted for the singular, and sometimes it does not affect the meaning in the least, as when whilst is substituted for ivliile, amongst for among or yonder for yondP

Sometimes, too, the compositor will unconsciously interpolate a word in the line he is setting up. This error is due to uncertain mem- ory and the influence of habit and is observable in all kinds of mem- orizing. The word interpolated usually suits the context, as in "I will furnilli it anon with the new contents" (F2: Tempest 11.ii.133) ^o^ "with new Contents" (Fi) or "Gozemore, feathers and Ayre" (F2: Lear 1v.vi.49) fo^ "Gozemore, Feathers, Ayre" (Fi).^^

More or less unobtrusive typographical errors are facts of very common experience to those who deal with the mystery of printing, and it may seem strange that the editors of Shakespeare, whom one would certainly include in this class, have not made better use than

>never AlVs Well i.iii.115, thine>mine AWs Well i.iii.175, hand>hands John II. i. 494, fubiect >fubjects John 1v.ii.171, cold>coole Richard //i.i.47, warre>\varres Richard II ii.i.173, my>thy Richard II ii.iii.ioo, my>the Richard II iii.ii.io, fubornation >fubornations / Henry IV i.iii.163, Payment > payments i Henry IV I.iii.i86, pannier > panniers i Henry IV ii.i.25, full >\vofull Henry Fiv.iv.66, turne> returne i Henry V/ v.ii.3, the>to 2 Henry VI 1v.iv.57, pleafure>pleare j Henry VI 111.ii.22, the>thy Richard III I.ii.i88, o'th'>to'th' Henry VIII 111.ii.58, we>the Troilus 111.ii.125, backe>backs Troilus v.i.i8, rorrovv> for rows Titiis 111.ii.38, thy > my Romeo 11. i. 2, world > worlds Romeo v.iii.112, womens>womans Caesar i.i.23, Friend > Friends Caesar i.ii.36, was>were Caesar i.ii.235, Houfe>Houres Caesar 111.iii.37, combuftion >combuftions Macbeth 11.iii.56, Hedge>Hedges Macbeth iv.i.2, iuft. .. Attend >beft... Before Macbeth v.iv.14-5, Forme >fortune Hamlet iii.i.159, our>your Hamlet 1v.vii.34, his>this Othello i.iii.387, reuell >revells Atitony i.iv.5, make>take Antony 11.ii.57, the>thy Antony 11.ii.122, the>his Antony 111.vi.31, that>this Antony 111.xiii.13, with>his Cymheline iv.iv. 14.

"^^ Errors v.i.205 (also All's Well 11.iii.40), Wi^^ter's Tale i.ii.253 (also i Henry VI 11.V.47), Troilus v.u.go. See also (in F2): Flatterer > flatterers Tempest iii.iii.8, after- ward >afterwards Much Ado v.iv.ii6, a night >a nights As You Like It 11.iv.45, Chamber > Chambers Twelfth Night i.i.29, Accufation >Accurations Wijiter's Tale 111.ii.29, Friend > friends Winter's Tale 111.ii.67 (also Othello iv.i.3), eare>eares Richard II ii.i.20. Pudding > Puddings / Henry IV 11.iv.437, humble > humbled

1 Henry VI iv.ii.6, matter > matters i Henry VI v.iv.ioi, Souldier >Souldiers

2 Henry VI v.ii.36, Sonne >Sonnes Richard III v. v. 26, hand>hands Henry VIII iv.i.14, employment >employments Timon 1v.iii.261.

2^ For further examples (in F2) see: the Dream v.i.125 (also Caesar i.i.70), a All's lFe//i.iii.87, now Henry F//7ii.iii.36, I Timon i.i.180.

EDITOR AND PRINTER 17

they have of an understanding of the variety of ways in which a com- positor may unintentionally depart from his copy.^^ The processes of error we have described are not new discoveries. We have called particular attention to them because it is impossible to adjudge ac- curately the variants in the later folios without an understanding of them and because a comparison of the folio texts affords an excellent opportunity to study them. To demonstrate that they are at work everywhere it is necessary only to appeal to experience. Whenever a human being attempts to reproduce language in any form what- soever, his mind, the instrument of reproduction, may betray him into misrepresenting his own thought or the original which he aims to reproduce in the ways described above. Students of Shakespeare, e.g., find the same processes at work in successive quartos. That more examples of their consequences do not appear in present-day books is due simply to more efficient methods of composition and proof reading. Even so, occasional slips of exactly the same kind now and then get into print. There is a capital example of the substitution of a word present near by in the context in Chambers's Elizabethan Stage (iii.335) — "The evidence for Haughton's evidence," where Sir Ed- mund certainly intended, and very likely wrote, "The evidence for Haughton's authorship. "^^

It is really errors like these, psychological errors on the part of the compositor, that are responsible for a large number of the variants between one folio and the next. They are also responsible for the obloquy which some commentators have poured out on the later folios: they are the "capricious alterations" which, according to Malone, disfigure F2. Consequently, we found that our first task was to separate them from the intentional changes in the texts of Fo, F3, and F4 and to discard them, for obviously they are no part of the work of Shakespeare's earliest editors.

This has proved to be the most difficult part of our work. There is no infallible way of deciding whether a textual change is the result of chance or intention : the possibilities of error in the printing process are legion and no one can pretend by analysis or intuition alone to explain unerringly every divergence between the printer's product and the copy from which he worked in its uncorrected form. We do

22 Some of them have explicitly recognized the phenomena described above: see Keightley's Shakespeare-Expositor (1867), p. 58 ff. The recent edition of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Professor J. Dover Wilson, still in progress, is notable for its use of them as criteria to test the likelihood of error in passages for which emendations have been proposed.

22 The vicissitudes of one phrase, "And no such matter?" (2 Henry IV Ind. 15), are another example. In Rowe's second edition of 1709 this appears as "And no much matter" and in Steevens's edition (1793) as "And fo fuch matter?"

18 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

not suppose that our decisions are invariably right or that every one will spontaneously agree with all of them. In particular, we confess that we have found a number of textual changes lying so near the line which separates the deliberate from the accidental that we cannot call them either with full confidence. Such changes are these:

Fi: Hath he not loft much wealth by wrack of Tea, F2: Hath he not loft much wealth by wracke at Sea,

Errors v.i.49

Fi: Here on my knee, before high heauen and you, F2: Here on my knee, before high heavens and you,

AlVs Well l.iii.183

Fi: he may | keepe it ftill at a Face-Royall, F2: he may | keepe it ftill as a Face-Royall,

2 Henry IV i.ii.23

Fi: Thefe cheekes are pale for watching for your good Fo: Thefe cheeks are pale with watching for your good

2 Henry F/iv.vii.79

Fi: Thefe are the Brethren, whom you Gothes beheld

Aliue and dead, and for their Bretheren flaine,

Religioufly they aske a facrifice: F2: Thefe are the Brethren, whom you Gothes behold

Alive and dead, and for their Bretheren flaine,

Religioufly they aske a facrifice;

Titus i.i.122-4

To us there seem to be equally good reasons for regarding these changes as either deliberate or accidental. A compositor's sub- conscious mind could have easily substituted "wracke at Sea" for "wrack of fea"; on the other hand, it is not hard to imagine that the reading of Fi struck the reviser as odd and that he deliberately cor- rected it to "wracke at Sea." "High heavens" for "high heauen" may be a lapse of memory on the part of the compositor or it may be a fancied improvement inserted by a reviser with notions of his own about propriety of style. "Still as a Face-Royall" (a reading, by the way, adopted in the Oxford edition) for "ftill at a Face- Royall" may be an error of the compositor's eye or, as it is the more usual phrase, of his mind or it may have been deliberately substi- tuted by a reviser who thought at was not clear or was a misprint for the more usual as. The expression "pale with watching" may have unconsciously usurped the place of "pale for watching" in the compositor's mind or it may be the emendation of a reviser who did not understand or did not like this somewhat old-fashioned use of for or who objected to the repetition. It is easy for a compositor to interchange the present and past tenses of the same verb, especially

EDITOR AND PRINTER 19

when they differ only in a single vowel and either, on a superficial reading, is tolerable in the context, as in behold for beheld. But in the passage from Titus, considering the corrupt form of line 122 (modern editions read "their brethren," i.e., the brethren of those, with the quartos), behold is a plausible editorial correction, for the Goths and the living and the dead brothers are all present. In Timon (v.i.124) the reading of Fi, "bring vs to him And chanc'd it as it may," appears as "chanc'e it as it may" in F2. Chance is the correct reading according to all subsequent editions. Who can say whether the reading of F2 is a deliberate correction in which the blundering compositor retained the apostrophe of the text before him, or a mis- print which happened to restore, or closely approximate, the true sense? Likev/ise the change in Henry VIII i.iii.14, "Their cloathes are after fuch a Pagan cut too't" (F2), which becomes too' in F3, may be the result of an accidental dropping out of the final / or of a deliberate correction by the reviser, in following which the com- positor carelessly retained the apostrophe. That the simplest kind of typographical error will sometimes make sense is demonstrated by Titus 1v.iv.37. In Fi and the quartos this reads:

But Titus, I haue touch'd thee to the quicke, Thy life blood out:

In F2 out becomes ant. The simplest explanation, which we are in- clined to adopt, is that the n of ont is a turned u, but this typo- graphical blunder, if such it is, makes good enough sense to be adopted, with the necessary apostrophe supplied by F3, in the Arden edition.

Changes like these are real dilemmas; there is, unfortunately, no litmus-paper test for the errors of the compositor's subconscious mind. Nevertheless we have tried to the best of our ability to ascer- tain the reason for every change which we have found and to classify it accordingly. In doing so, we have been obliged to set up the follow- ing more or less arbitrary criteria for determining whether a change in the text is deliberate or accidental. We regard as intentional:

I. A change adopted by many or all modern editors or a change which restores the right sense in a corrupt passage even though it has been superseded in modern editions by the reading of a more authoritative earlier text or by a more acceptable conjectural emen- dation. Very possibly we have classified some accidental changes as deliberate by following this rule, but the percentage of error thus introduced must be quite small. It may have happened a few times that a change made unconsciously by the compositor so convincingly improved the text that modern editors have uniformly followed him;

20 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

it is incredible that an unconscious alteration could often have done so.

2. Unnecessary and arbitrary stylistic changes not vitally affect- ing the meaning, v/hich might suggest one of the kinds of unobtrusive typographical error specified above, if they can be accounted for on some reasonable theory of the reviser's notions of propriety of style, however mistaken such notions may be considered to-day. We have tried to indicate the motives which, we suspect, underlie such changes, but limitations of space do not always permit as full a statement of our opinion as might be desirable. This principle is dis- tinctly fallible; we confess that we have but a shaky kind of confi- dence in many of the judgments which we have formed on this basis. It would have been simpler, no doubt, to consider all of these as typographical errors, but to escape the charge that we have attrib- uted the mistakes of the reviser to the compositor, we classify such changes as deliberate when we can detect, or think we can detect, some glimmer of reason behind them.

3. The omission of a redundant word or of a word whose presence in the text could have been explained as unconscious repetition on the part of the compositor of the previous text.

4. The omission of a word or syllable which, without altering the meaning of the verse, brings it closer to the ten-syllable norm.

5. In questions, a transposition which puts the verb before its subject.

Any other textual change which seems to conform to one of the types of unconscious error described above we regard as uninten- tional.

In separating deliberate from unintentional changes, we also give some weight to the character of the folio concerned. F2 is obviously so badly printed and seems to have received so little proof reading after it was set up that in it we are not surprised to find every con- ceivable kind of typographical error in plentiful numbers. Its editor or editors, however, show so much good judgment in their undoubt- edly intentional alterations that we are inclined to attribute trifling changes of doubtful origin to the compositor. F3 does more credit to the printing house which turned it out and is largely free from gross typographical errors. But from the fact that it unintentionally omitted a great many words, we infer that the proof reading given it was not sufficiently careful to catch unobtrusive compositor's errors. The editor, furthermore, was not nearly so aggressive as the editor of F2 and did not feel free to go further than to correct blun- ders that make nonsense of the meaning, grammatical improprieties,

EDITOR AND PRINTER 21

and archaic diction. Consequently we expect a fairly large proportion of unconscious errors on the part of the compositor in F3. F4 is the best printed of all except for some falling off in accuracy towards the end of the book. The editor, furthermore, though shrewd, was a pedant. We are therefore inclined to attribute a smaller proportion of trifling changes to the compositor.

Besides typographical changes, we also leave out of account mean- ingless orthographical variations, such as deliver for deliuer, jet for iet, ufe for vfe, then for than, and all insignificant changes in spelling (except changes in the spelling of proper names which seem to us to imply some knowledge of history) ; variations in typographical prac- tice, such as the use of italics, capital letters, etc. There is no reason to suppose that these are due to anybody but the compositor or the printing-house corrector.

By applying these criteria, then, we have attempted to distinguish the deliberate editorial changes in the later folios from the almost equally numerous changes which are unobtrusive compositor's mis- takes. That we have done so infallibly is highly improbable; if we could reconstruct every step of the process through which each folio passed in the printing house we should no doubt discover that many of our attributions are wrong. But our errors of commission cannot seriously vitiate the results: neither adding all the changes which we have doubtfully classified as compositor's errors to our lists of de- liberate but mistaken corrections, nor transferring all doubtful de- liberate changes to the category of typographical errors, would in the least affect the answer to the first question we proposed to our- selves, whether or not the later folios really underwent what can fairly be called editorial revision.

We are, of course, aware that our methods have had the effect of attributing to the printing house a large number of mistaken and arbitrary changes in the later folios which hitherto, if we rightly read the opinions of the scholars quoted above, have been charged against their editors. We can only say, as deferentially as possible, that we have sometimes wondered whether the editors and textual students who have branded the changes in the later folios as ignorant and capricious alterations, arbitrary, needless, and incompetent, have ever really faced the question of what constitutes a typographical error. Our own criteria, based on the results of previous research as well as on careful study de novo of the types of textual change, take into account, we believe, a larger number than has been usual of the manifold possibilities of error in the printing process and, we hope, assign to their true cause more of those unconscious slips of

22 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

mind and hand by which a printed text deviates from the copy from which it was set up.

What remains after these subtractions is the work of Shakespeare's seventeenth-century editors — -all the deliberate alterations, all the editorial emendations, right and wrong, in the folio texts. These we set forth and study below.

§3

Classification and Method of Procedure

Our data are displayed extensively in the second part of this treatise, where the reader can see for himself what the editors of the later folios did to the text. There we list some 1600 deliberate changes in F2, 900 in F3, and 700 in F4. These lists, with the exceptions speci- fied above, are as complete as we have been able to make them. But some allowance must be made for possible oversights, both our own and those of the textual collations which we have used.' In addition, we print only a limited number of examples of changes in punctuation and have touched the morphology of proper names in the text but lightly, and, of the hundreds of corrections of obvious typographical errors in all the later folios, especially F2 and F3, which are also probably the editors' work, and are assuredly deliberate changes on somebody's part, we print only a few samples from F2 and count none at all in our statistical tables.

Our somewhat elaborate classification of these data is intended to serve the reader's convenience and to throw as much light as possible on the methods by which the seventeenth-century editors worked and the value of the results which they accomplished. Follow- ing so far as possible objective criteria, we have divided the changes found in each folio into five parts: (i) those adopted by many or all modern editors;^ (2) those which restore the reading of an earlier text (for F2, a quarto; for F3, a quarto or Fi; for F4, a quarto, Fi, or F2) adopted by many or all modern editors; (3) those which emend the passage in substantially the same sense as modern editors do,

1 See p. 98.

^ We do not profess that we have collated all modern editions. To ascertain the practice of modern editors we have, as a rule, taken the consensus of a group of the most independent and scholarly recent editions, viz., the revised Cambridge (1891-3), the Oxford (1892), the Arden (1899-1924), Professor Neilson's (1906), Professor Kittredge's (1936), and, for the comedies, the New Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1921-I-). Virtually, then, "adopted" means adopted in at least three of these editions. In passages regarding which these editions are nearly evenly divided we have usually consulted also the Eversley edition (1899-1900), W. J. Rolfe's revised edition (1903-6), and the New Temple edition (1934-6).

CLASSIFICATION AND METHOD OF PROCEDURE 23

but not in precisely the same language, modern editors sometimes preferring, quite naturally, the reading of an earlier quarto or folio and sometimes, naturally or otherwise, a conjectural emendation; (4) those not adopted by most modern editors but still intelligible according to certain criteria; and (5) those which are mistaken and arbitrary.

The distinction between the first and the second classes is, to some extent, artificial and, from the seventeenth-century editors' point of view, unreasonable. Both classes consist of altered readings which are now the readings of most or all modern editions; both classes consist of adopted readings. The distinction between them, that some are adopted in modern texts on the authority of or at the suggestion of one of the later folios and the others on the authority of a quarto or an earlier folio, is one that the seventeenth-century editors were quite unaware of. When the editor of F2, e.g., changed "Is there any fhips puts forth to night?" {Errors 1v.iii.32) to "Is there any fhip" and when he changed "Is your Englifhmen fo exquifite in his drink- ing?" {Othello 11.iii.75) to "Is your Englifhman" he was completely unaware that his first correction differed in any way from the second, but, from our point of view, we should say that Jliip is an original emendation while E^igliJIiman is a reversion to the reading of the quarto. Both were arrived at by exactly the same process of scrutiny and judgment; both bear equally good testimony to the editor's alert- ness and sense of the fitness of things. Indeed, it is remarkable that these seventeenth-century editors, in F2 nearly a hundred years be- fore Pope began the restoration of quarto readings by the process of collation, should, by a process of divination alone, so often have worked back to the readings of the quartos. But it is necessary to avoid the implication that all correspondences between folio emen- dations and modern texts rest upon the authority of the folios.

Our fourth class consists of changes which, although they are not generally adopted by modern editors, seem to us, nevertheless, in- telligible. Our criteria of intelligibility are that (i) the reading is adopted by a minority of modern editors, or that (2) it emends an undoubtedly corrupt passage, but does not really grasp the meaning adopted by modern editors, the corruption — according to an earlier text or the emendations of modern editors — often lying elsewhere than in the words altered, or that (3) the reading is perfectly correct according to the standards of taste and correctness of the seven- teenth century or seems to have originated in a desire, quite legiti- mate according to seventeenth-century standards, to improve the text, to make the meaning plainer, more literal, or more consistent

24 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

with the context. Such readings are frequently real improvements, but are of course rejected in modern editions because they lack authority.

Corrections of the last kind are unquestionably attempts to im- prove Shakespeare. That such an attempt was allowable by seven- teenth-century standards, that the respect for an author's words because they are his words which we feel today was unknown in the seventeenth century, is a proposition easily demonstrated. We refer the reader to the anthologies of John Cotgrave {The English Treasury of Wit and Language, 1655) and Joshua Poole {The English Parnassus or a Helpe to English Poesie, 1657) discussed in an appendix. These editors, who were literary men, not mere proof readers, altered Shakespeare's text without hesitation when doing so suited their purpose as anthologists or promised to make it easier to understand.

In each of these classes, we have arranged our data under six headings — thought, action, meter, grammar, style, punctuation. Such a classification, with its various sub-headings, has enabled us to bring together all the examples of the same kind of editorial re- vision that we have found, to show what kinds of defects and incon- sistencies in the text the editors were alert to, and to suggest with what thoroughness they carried out their work. This classification is, of course, less objective than the preceding: to the seventeenth- century editors' motives or reasons in making their changes we have no clue but our own judgment. That we have invariably been right in reading the editors' motives or that every reader will at once agree with all our discriminations is not likely, especially since we have often been aware of making fine distinctions or of facing a decision between mixed motives. But even if our guesses that a given change was, for example, made to fill out the rhythm of a verse rather than to clarify the expression of the thought and our delimitations of the various groups under these main headings are more often wrong than we hope, the changes still remain undoubted changes; errors of classification cannot vitiate the broad conclusions to be drawn from this study or even, we think, seriously distort the picture it presents of the editorial revision of the folios.

Preparatory to a description of the work of the editors of the various folios, it may be useful to outline their working methods, as we infer them from our data. When it was decided to reprint the Shakespeare folio in 1632, some one was entrusted with the task of preparing the copy for the press. In the printing of books whose author was dead, or for any reason unavailable, this task was most likely performed by the publisher, the master-printer, or the proof

CLASSIFICATION AND METHOD OF PROCEDURE 25

reader of the shop;^ and had the foHo been a smaller undertaking, probably one of these would have ofihciated here. But it is difficult not to believe that a specially qualified editor was employed. To be sure, the preparation of copy, at that time, did not stop with mend- ing obvious errors; it sometimes supplied new conjectural em.enda- tions, as is apparent in almost any reprint of a Shakespearean quarto. But the work of the editors of the later folios, and that of the editor of F2 in particular, can, we think, be shown to go beyond the normal compass of this process of correction. Who this editor was, and who set him to work, whether the publishers, the printers, or the King's players — if, as is very doubtful, they still had an interest in the edition of Shakespeare's plays — our data do not help to determine. Neither do they throw much light on Mr. Nicoll's supposition that the editor of F2 was actually three separate persons. They by no means gainsay it, but they show a more general and uniform dis- tribution of the kinds of alterations on which Mr. Nicoll based his inferences than he was aware of.

What this editor, or these editors, must have done is to take a copy of Fi, read through it, and mark in it whatever changes reason, a sense of the fitness of things, and some knowledge of history, the theater, etc., suggested. This we infer from the following facts. If the editor derived his emendations from some other source than his own intelligence, it must have been either earlier printed copies, manu- script copies of the plays, or playhouse tradition. As to the latter two, since what they may have been, if they existed at all, we have no idea whatever, we can only say that none of the alterations we have noted exceeds the limits of intelligent interpolation and emen- dation— indeed, there is scarcely one as good as the most inspired improvisations of the eighteenth-century editors. "* As to the first, it can readily be proved that there was no systematic collation with earlier printed copies, in particular with the quartos. It is true that the new readings inserted by the editors of F2, F3, and F4 sometimes agree with quarto readings, but just as often they do not and such new readings are just as numerous in plays never printed in quarto.^ Our superseded changes, however, in which the editor obviously

' See Percy Simpson : Proof-reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1935).

* "Undoubtedly the second folio has some good corrections — some which, to any one unpractised in the art of critical divination, might appear almost too good for conjecture, ...but had these been owing to tradition, or copied from the a\argin of some corrected first folio, it is most likely that they would have been far more numerous." — Badham: "The Text of Shakspeare" {Cambridge Essays, 1856), p. 266.

' "The editor of the second [folio]... never examined a single quarto copy." — Malone (1790), i. xxvii.

26 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

gropes after or approximates the reading of a quarto or earlier folio text but does not quite reach it or expresses it in language different from that of the quarto or earlier folio, make it quite plain that, in these passages at least, he was not getting his emendations from an earlier printed source and that, therefore, he did not in general get them from an earlier printed source. At the sam.e time, this inference, coupled with the fact that all his alterations fall within the scope of human ingenuity, creates a presumption that he used a printed source for none of them.

As for our hypothesis that the editor marked his improvements in a copy of Fi, it is true that our chief reason for thinking so is that such an arrangement is the simplest and most convenient; it is al- most fantastic to suppose that some one made all the changes re- corded here on the proof sheets. There is also an interesting piece of direct evidence. One of the Duchess of York's speeches in Richard III (iv.i.92-5) begins thus in Fii

Go thou to Richmond, & good fortune guide thee, Go thou to Richard, and good Angels tend thee, Go thou to Sanctuarie, and good thoughts poffelfe thee, I to my Graue, where peace and reft lye with mee.

In F2 the first line reads:

Go to Richmond, to Dorfet, to Aiine, to the | Queene, and good fortune guide thee,

The words inserted in F2 indicate the persons to whom the first three lines of the duchess's speech are addressed. In F4 and all subsequent editions they are printed as stage directions opposite the first, sec- ond, and third lines respectively. It seems impossible to explain their appearance in F2 except by supposing that the editor, perceiv- ing the need for indicating the persons successively addressed by the duchess, wrote these phrases in the margin of the copy of Fi he was working over, to be printed in italics, one after each of the first three lines of the speech, at the right-hand margin, like the similar stage-directions at iii.iii. 165-6 in j Henry VI, and that the com- positor, mistaking his intention, possibly because of cramped writing, huddled them all together in the first line after the parallel phrase "to Richmond."

After the editor had finished his work and written his alterations into the text, the revised copy was turned over to the compositors to be set up. So, at any rate, we are inclined to think. The alternative possibility, suggested by Mr. Nicoll, is that the compositor rather than the editor is responsible for changes in spelling and in grammar.

CLASSIFICATION AND METHOD OF PROCEDURE 27

This is perfectly possible, but we regard the other view as more likely. There is an inherent improbability in the idea of an editor's giving a text a pretty thorough general overhauling and leaving sev- eral hundred grammatical discords to the compositor to correct. As these are among the more obvious of all the corrections found in F2, we should rather suspect that he picked them up first of all. In addition, as it is nowadays no part of the duty of a compositor to correct the text he sets up, we doubt that it was in the seventeenth century; besides, the work expected of him was enough to occupy his full attention. Furthermore, even if he were accustomed to take the liberty of correcting obvious blunders in the texts he set up, he knew that this one had been revised by some more competent hand and might very well be expected to take the line of least resistance and trouble himself no further over it. In addition, there is some direct evidence, especially in F2, in the exactness with which he often reproduces minute and quite irregular peculiarities of orthography and typographical practice, of what we interpret, in spite of his numerous unconscious errors, as his aim to follow copy quite literally. Any judgment on a point of this kind must be tentative, but ours is that the compositor is responsible for very few, if any, of the in- tentional changes between one folio and the next.

From this corrected copy of Fi, then, the compositors set up a page-for-page reprint which incorporated the editor's improvements. What happened next is doubtful. We cannot think that the editor himself saw the proof sheets because we do not believe that he could have failed to notice the hundreds of obvious typographical errors that disfigure F2 or a misrepresentation of his intention such as the blunder at Richard III iv.i.92-5 mentioned above. One would sup- pose that a publisher or printer conscientious enough to see that the book he proposed to reissue was revised and corrected would also make sure that it was checked by a competent proof reader. As a mat- ter of fact, however, the proof reading of F2 was very badly done. If it were not that a few variations between different copies show that some corrections were made while the sheets were being printed off, one would suspect that it was neglected altogether, and the large number of obvious typographical errors alone shows that the sheets could hardly have been compared with the copy.^ This gross care-

^ Though it may seem contrary to reason and present-day practice, it does not appear that proofs were regularly read with the copy in the early seventeenth century. Of the corrections found in an interesting example of a page of proof for Fi, Mr. Simp- son says that the professional proof reader who wrote them "probably made them at sight, without reference to the copy" (op. ctL, p. 83).

28 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

lessness, coupled with the shabby make-up and poor presswork of F2, suggests that the blunders which disfigure it originated chiefly in the printing house and that the publisher or some other interested person was primarily responsible for the editorial revision it received. This superficial appearance of carelessness naturally gives one a bad impression of the book as a whole and has perhaps obscured some of the pains which were actually bestowed upon it. For this reason, we have tried particularly to explain how the manifold errors which impair this text are not in the least inconsistent with as much careful and intelligent revision as our data evince and how excellent editorial emendations and gross typographical errors can stand cheek by jowl on almost every page.

As for F3 and F4, one cannot feel equally certain. It is again natural to suppose, on the score of convenience, that the corrections found in F3 were written in the copy of F2 given to the compositors. Yet, in the absence of any confirming evidence, one would hesitate to as- sert that some nine hundred alterations, roughly one to a page, could not have been made on the proof sheets, and indeed the irregularities of spacing evident in a good many lines in which changes occur might suggest that the changes were made after the type was set up. To be sure, F3 also corrects an equal, if not a greater, number of obvious typographical errors and in addition makes a number of intelligent changes of punctuation, but it is not impossible that the correction of obvious typographical errors may have been left to the composi- tors, to whom they would have been as obvious as to anybody else. There is also a good deal of modernization of spelling, but this again may have been left to the compositor. On the other hand, if all these editorial changes and improvements of punctuation were inserted in the proof sheets, one would expect to find a number of diversities in different copies of the book. So far as we are aware, no one has collated a number of copies of F3; we ourselves have encountered no such diversities in the two copies available to us and we have found no hint of them in the Variorum and Cambridge collations. Whether or not the editorial changes displayed below were made before or after the type was set up, there can be very little doubt that F3, being largely free from obvious typographical errors, was carefully read in proof, but the occurrence of a considerable number of un- obtrusive errors suggests that the proof was not checked with the copy.

A different situation is revealed in F4. In the first place, it is to be observed that the book falls into three divisions with separate sig- natures and pagination (comedies, pp. 1-272 +one unnumbered leaf,

CLASSIFICATION AND METHOD OF PROCEDURE 29

A-Y", Z'*; histories and tragedies through Romeo,' pp. 1-328, B-C, Dd-Zz'', *Aaa-*Ddd^, *Eee'^; Timon, the remaining tragedies, and the seven plays added in F3, pp. 1-303 + one blank page, Aaa-Zzz^, Aaaa-Bbbb^, Cccc-) which differ typographically.^ The differences are most obvious in the type used in the head-titles, running-titles, and act and scene designations, in the use of rules marking the end of a scene, and in the use of large initial capitals.^ F4 is not a page- for-page reprint of F3, as (barring some differences in the insertion of blank pages) F3 was of F2 and F2 of Fi; the spacing is somewhat more regular than that of any preceding folio. Run-over lines are generally avoided. In the first and third divisions, a new play is sometimes started in the middle of the page. It is very probable that these differences are due to the book's having been set up (and there- fore probably printed) by three different printers. If so, it is possible that some or all of the changes found in it may be the work of three different correctors of the press, each regularly employed in one of the three printing offices involved. The alternative is, of course, an editor who labored over the book in its entirety, some one, like the editor of F2, probably unconnected with the printing trade, who, so far as veritable editorial supervision goes, superseded the regular correctors of the three printing houses. Is there any evidence which would seem to favor one rather than the other of these alternatives? We believe it is possible to establish the presumption that the former is the more likely.

In the first place, there are some differences in typographical style, besides those already mentioned, which may be attributed to

^ It is a curious fact that in three copies of F4 which we have examined the signa- tures on p. I of the second division (B) and p. 13 (C) are corrected with a pen to Bb and Cc. A similar change is found in some copies on pp. 15, 17 (C2, C3). This correction would also appear to have been made in the copy from which the Methuen facsimile was photographed.

^ These divisions consist of 14, 14, and 15 plays respectively — as nearly as possible an equal number of plays. This principle of division probably accounts for the in- clusion of four tragedies with the histories.

' Pp. 123-4 (sig. L) of the first division {Labour's v.i.io~v.ii.254) are set in smaller type and the text is crowded as much as possible. Two short speeches are printed on the same line as often as may be. In this way matter that occupied a little more than three pages in F3 is squeezed into two. Professor Baugh suggests that the reason for this eccentric arrangement may have been the compositor's accidentally omitting a whole page in setting up from Fg. If so, sig. L is a cancel; evidently the mistake was discovered after the work of printing had gone forward, sig. L was reset in smaller type to accommodate the matter omitted, and the sheet consisting of L and [L6] was reprinted. Incidentally, the type in which F4 is set from p. i through p. 84 (sig. A-G) and from p. loi through p. 107 (misnumbered 109) (sig. I 2^"-[I 5]'') differs from that used in the remainder of the first division: it is wider and rounder and a trifle less bold, and very much like that used in the second division of the book.

30 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

intention rather than to fortuitous causes such as the fonts of type available, the natural differences in practice between printing offices, etc. In stage-directions, which in the earlier folios were printed in italics, F4 prints proper names in roman — sporadically in the first division, generally in the second, and almost uniformly in the third. In the earlier folios stage-directions usually occupy only one line between the dialog above and below so that they are sometimes not very noticeable; in F4 they are often isolated by leads above and below so that they stand out and attract the eye at once — most regu- larly in the third division and least regularly in the first. Stage- directions aligned on the right-hand margin in F3 are sometimes centered in the second and third divisions of F4. Short stage-direc- tions {Exit, Exeimt, indications of incidental action) printed in F3, as in modern editions, along the right-hand margin are set off by a bracket, in the second and third divisions of F4, almost without ex- ception. In the third division, the dramatis personae of Timon and Othello (the only plays in this division for which such lists are fur- nished in the earlier folios) are printed at the beginning instead of the end of the play.^° How far differences like these are the work of the corrector of the press is open to dispute, but they are matters of style which fall within the corrector's province. In the varying de- grees of uniformity with which such typographical practices are carried out there may be evidence of three different correctors.

In the second place, the number of editorial changes varies greatly in the three divisions of the book. We find 157 in the first division (14 plays), an average of 1 1 to a play; 414 in the second (14 plays), an average of 29; and 180 in the eight canonical plays of the third division, an average of 23. While it is true that these differences may reflect to some extent the late seventeenth-century distaste for Shakespeare's comedies, a ratio of nearly three times as many cor- rections to a play in the second division as in the first may also be due in part to greater care on the part of a difi^erent editor. The average num.ber of changes to the page, a somewhat better index, is .5 in the first division, 1.2 in the second, and .9 in the third. Further- more, there is some evidence of difference of editorial standards in the three divisions of the book. The word meaning "to faint" which, in modern editions, is usually printed swoon and sometimes swound occurs in F3 in the form of /wound or found six times in the first division, five times in the second, and five times in the third. In F4

" This is likewise true of Pericles, The London Prodigal, Cromivell, and The Puritan. In Fs the list for Sir John Oldcastle appears, with those for The London Prodigal and Cromwell, on the page opposite the beginning of Oldcastle; in F4 it appears under the head-title.

CLASSIFICATION AND METHOD OF PROCEDURE 31

none of these are changed in the first or third division, but all of those in the second, except one which may not have been recog- nized,^^ are altered to swoon. The shortened ordinal form {fift, Jixt, or eight instead oi fifth, Jlxth, or eighth) appears in F3 six times in the first division, ten times in the second, and four times in the third; in the first division it is changed once, in the second ten times, and in the third four times. '^- The form fir 00k (en instead oi firiick{en is found in F3 four times in the first division and is changed to firuck{en three times in F4; seventeen times in the second division and is changed ten times; fourteen times in the third division and is changed four times. The word whether in the sense of whither occurs thirteen times in the first division in F3 and is changed to whither seven times in F4; eleven times in the second division and is changed ten; twice in the third division and is changed twice. ^^ The word which modern editors print as vile, or one of its derivatives, occurs in F3 with a d (vild(e etc.) twenty times in the first division and is changed to vile twice in F4; eighteen times in the second division and is changed eighteen times; twenty -one times in the third division and is changed thirteen times.

All these facts seem to create the presumption that different minds regulated the reprinting of the three divisions of F4. Differences of arrangement, some of them so drastic that one would not expect a compositor to take it upon himself to effect them, point to differ- ences of taste; differences in the number of changes made point to different degrees of alertness, if not to different standards of pro- priety and correctness. The data on the modernization of certain obsolescent word-forms are especially curious. It is not hard to imagine that a single editor, reading through the whole book and marking corrections in it, might occasionally have overlooked an old-fashioned form which, as a rule, he changed when he noticed it. But it seems quite unlikely that, in changing vild(e to vile, for ex- ample, he would have scored 100% in the second division and only 10% in the first; it is more reasonable to suppose that the alterations

" what will it be

When that the watry palats taft indeed Loves thrice reputed Nectar? Death I fear me Sounding deftruction, or fome joy too fine, Too fubtile, potent, and too fharp in fweetnefs, For the capacitie of my ruder powers;

(F3: Troiliis in. ii. 19-24) 12 This count does not include the numerous occurrences of these words in the head-titles and running-titles of certain of the histories, where they are always changed.

1' It is particularly unlikely that our count for whether -whither is complete; Bart- lett's concordance apparently prints only selected examples of this word.

32 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

in the three divisions of the book were made by three different per- sons and that the editor of the first division was much less alert or much less sensitive to old-fashioned usage than the editor of the second. If, then, it is allowed that three different hands may be de- tected in the editorial work in F4, it seems more likely that these three editors were the correctors of the press attached to the three printing houses in which F4 was printed than that, for some un- imaginable reason, three different persons unconnected with the printing trade were hired to revise the text of the plays.

§4 Changes in the Second Folio

As it has often been remarked before that F2 is an edited text, it is not surprising to find everywhere evidence of attempts to clarify, correct, and improve it. We list below 1679 changes which, accord- ing to our criteria, are deliberate editorial changes, something like two to a page. Of these, 836 are adopted changes (623 appear in most modern editions as emendations of the editor of F2),^ 169 superseded, and 331 intelligible. They are fairly evenly distributed among the categories of thought, action, etc. Alterations of grammar are most numerous (459) and changes pertaining to the action least (130). Changes affecting the thought, meter, and style are very nearly equal in number — 374, 359, and 357 respectively. These last figures are not very significant, but are interesting in comparison with the cor- responding figures for the later folios.

The distribution of changes among the various plays is not at all uniform. The smallest number of changes, 10, is found in John and the largest, 114, in Romeo; the arithmetical average for all the plays is 47. It is a curious fact that in thirteen plays the figure falls be- tween 42 and 56. Among these thirteen plays there are comedies, histories, and tragedies. Still more interesting is the fact that the plays in which the fewest changes are found are all good texts — John, 2 Henry IV, Tempest, Richard II, Twelfth Night, Henry VIII, Merchant, Much Ado, Caesar. This is just what one would expect of a qualified editor, whereas an ignorant and reckless editor might botch a good text just as much as a bad one. After Romeo, correc- tions are most numerous in Antony, Labour's, Troilus, Othello, and Titus, all of them, especially the first three, plays which scholars agree stand in need of some revision.

' See p. 22 f.

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 33

Our data do not precisely corroborate the findings of Mr. Nicoll, who did not, of course, profess to examine systematically all the plays, but there are no serious discrepancies. Among the comedies, he says, Much Ado, Dream, Merchant, and Twelfth Night were left practically untouched. These are among the plays in which we find the fewest changes, but there are still fewer in The Tempest. Among the histories, he says, only Richard II and Henry V were seriously considered. We find 25 and 50 changes, respectively, in these plays and 42 in Richard III, 52 in 2 Henry VI, and 54 in / Henry VI. Of the tragedies, he specifies Troilns, Titus, Romeo, Hamlet, and Antony as having received a good general editing. According to our data, these, with Othello, are the most frequently corrected tragedies, but there are more changes in Othello than in either Titus or Hamlet. With his other inferences, our results agree less closely. We find improvements in the stage-directions running through all the plays instead of being confined to the comedies. Besides 78 in the comedies (of which more than a third are found in two plays, Gentlemeji and Merry Wives), there are 11 in the histories and 41 in the tragedies. Mr. Nicoll singles out Romeo, Titus, i, 2, and j Henry VI, and Winter's Tale as noteworthy for their metrical corrections. Our fig- ures for these plays are 34, 22, 28, 17, 19, and 15 respectively. We also find 23 in Shrew and 17 in Labour s. But there are more metrical corrections distributed through the remaining plays than his re- marks would lead one to suppose.

The dispersion of these changes, the fact that they run through all the plays and affect every conceivable phase of the text, affords a clue, we think, to the editor's method of procedure. He simply read through the text critically, interpreting it to himself to the best of his ability, and tried to clarify what he could not interpret in- telligibly, to normalize irregularities, to reconcile inconsistencies, and to bring up to date what was markedly old-fashioned. While he by no means ferreted out all the corruptions which modern editors have seen fit to emend, he nevertheless showed considerable alertness, ingenuity, and tact. We shall try to illustrate these by reviewing the kinds of defects and inconsistencies he was sensitive to and the remedies he applied to them.

Of the changes which have the effect of clarifying or perfecting the thought of the passage involved, a good many supply omissions (pp. 98 ff., 154 ff.) for most of which, no doubt, the compositors of Fi were responsible. Some of these omissions are rather obvious, but to detect them the editor must certainly have followed the action of the play with care. Some of them, however, are not in the least

34

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obvious: the passage in Measure, "Shee fliould this Angela haue married: was affianced to her oath" (iii.i.209), which the editor rendered "to her by oath," is intelligible as it stands, and the omis- sion of a subject for was affianced is more obvious than that of the preposition. Often in verse passages the meter doubtless served as a clue to omission. Under the heading of grammar we list some further passages in which omissions were supplied (pp. 132 ff., 169 ff.). The difference between these and the changes collected under thought, which is sometimes very slight, is in general that they seem to us not so much to clarify the thought, which is clear enough without addition, as to round out the expression of it. Accordingly they are the more obvious.

We have also collected here a number of passages in which the editor corrected inconsistencies of fact and circumstance by closely following the action of the play (pp. 100 ff., 155 ff.). He remembered, for example, in 2 Henry VI that Peter fights only one person, his master, Horton, and so made him say "O God, have I overcome mine Enemie" rather than "mine Enemies" (11.iii.96). He remembered, in the same play, that the Duke of York had two sons and so, guided also by the pronouns in the following lines, made him say, "Sirrah, call in my fonnes to be my baile" instead of "call in my fonne" (v.i.iii). When he read Juliet's speech at Romeo iv.i.121, as printed in Fi, "Giue me, giue me, O tell me not of care," he remembered that it was not precisely of care that the friar had been speaking and so took feare from the preceding speech of the friar and put it in place of care. He found the speech of Tamora which begins at Titus v.ii.28 blurred by unobtrusive misprints thus:

Know thou fad man, I am not Tamora,

She is thy Enemie, and I thy Friend,

I am Reuenge lent from th'infernall Kingdome,

To eafe the gnawing Vulture of the mind.

By working wreakefuU vengeance on my Foes:

and he was sufficiently alert to the dramatic intention of the scene to change the last two lines to:

To eafe the gnawing Vulture of thy mind, By working wreakefull vengeance on thy Foes.

At Macbeth 1v.iii.133, where, in Fi, Malcolm tells Macduff at the English court

What I am truly Is thine, and my poore Countries to command: Whither indeed, before they heere approach

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 37

Old Seyward with ten thoufand warlike men Already at a point, was letting foorth:

he was sufficiently alive to the inherent improbability of the literal sense of these words and sufficiently bold in dealing with the language of the text to change they heere approach to thy heere approach. Possibly he found a precedent for this unusual phrase at line 148, "my heere remaine in England," the only other adverbial compound in all the plays of which here is the first element.

We have also collected in a separate class a number of changes which correct unobtrusive errors of various kinds which make fairly good sense in their context or at worst do not quite make nonsense (pp. 102 ff., 156 ff.). To correct a mistake of this kind is a very different thing from correcting an obvious typographical error. The easiest kind of mistake to notice is that which defaces a word and results in a combination of letters unparalleled in the standard Eng- lish vocabulary. Mistakes which result in recognized English words, even when they are quite inappropriate to the context, much more often pass undetected. In these passages, as printed in Fi, there are all the degrees of sense and near-nonsense, including that degree of sense in which only a very sharp mind would discover a defect. Superficially there seems to be nothing wrong with the expression of the conceited reference to the lover's thoughts at the end of the letter the duke discovers on Valentine {Gentlemen iii.i.149):

I curfe my felfe, for they are fent by me,

That they fhould harbour where their Lord Jhoiild be.

But the editor adds point to the idea by changing the last line to "where their Lord would be." When Oliver, according to Fi {As You Like It 1v.iii.154), brings Rosalind the blood-stained bandage from Orlando's wound, he tells her he has been commanded

to giue this napkin Died in this bloud, vnto the Shepheard youth,

but the editor bettered this by reading "Died in his blood." In Henry V, when the king, after his victory over the French, orders his troops to restrain their exultation, Fi makes him say, "Come, goe me in proceffion to the Village" (iv.viii.iii) ; the editor very plausibly changed it to "go we." The prince's comment on his banish- ment of Romeo, "Mercy not Murders, pardoning thofe that kill" (111,1.194), according to Fi, is perfectly intelligible, but the editor converted it into a bold metaphor by reading "Mercy but Murders." Changes like these seem to us to show a keen mind alert to the un-

38 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

raveling of the action of the plays and to the dramatic effect of their lines as well as ingenious in improvising corrections and improve- ments.

Under the heading of "Corrupt readings emended by pure guess- work" (pp. 109 ff., 159 ff.), we have segregated the most brilliant of the editor's improvements. The readings of Fi listed here are either perfectly intelligible without alteration, like "a knot: a gin, a packe, a confpiracie againft me" {Merry Wives 1v.ii.103) — where gin, though, in the sense of "trap," entirely suitable, is changed to ging, a word not otherwise recorded, which modern editors explain as meaning gang — or, like the "intemible Sine" oiAlVs Well (i.iii.193) — for which he reads "intenible" — quite unrecognizable. Here we find his most striking efforts — "on the reareward of reproaches" for "on the re- ward" {Much Ado iv.i.126), "the kinde life-rendring Pelican" for "Politician" {Hamlet iv.v.143), "the bafe Indian" for "the bafe ludean" of Othello (v.ii.350), and, possibly most remarkable of all, the "you have Teftern'd me" of Gentlemen (i.i.135), where he evolved a nonce-word to replace the absurd ceftern'd of Fi.

We should like to call attention to the fact that some of the pas- sages printed among our adopted changes are only partially cor- rected. The editor's substitution of lea^ie for leaue in a very corrupt passage in Timon (1v.iii.12-3) —

It is the Paftour Lards, the Brothers fides, The want that makes him leaue: —

seems to show that he weakly grasped the idea concealed there, but that he was forced to give up the first line ("It is the pasture lards the rother's sides") as hopeless. Nevertheless, as all modern editions un- doubtedly read "The want that makes him lean," we do not know why he should not be credited with this improvement even though he left the corruptions in the rest of the passage untouched. The same thing is true of his turning "th'head of Action" at Antony Ii1.vii.51 into "th 'heart of Actium."ylc^zMm ior Action is very good, but at the same time the editor apparently did not understand this use of the word head. It does not seem to us, however, that he deserves no credit at all.

In our superseded changes affecting the thought (pp. 172 ff.) the editor clarifies and perfects the text in the same way, but as he hap- pened not to light on either the very words of an earlier text, where there was one, or of the conjectural emendation which modern editors prefer, they do not adopt his emendation. Thus at Measure iii.i.53, "Bring them to heare me fpeak, where I may be conceal'd," his

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 39

emendation, "Bring them to fpeake, where I may be conceal'd, yet heare them," clearly shows that he saw what was wrong and what the thought concealed by this corruption really was, but Steevens's emendation, "Bring me to hear them speak, where I may be con- ceal'd," is certainly neater. His change at Richard III i.i.75, "for his delivery" instead of "for her deliuery," is exactly right, but the fuller version of the quartos ("to her for his delivery") is better still. That his corrections were sometimes a trifle naive is demonstrated by Othello 11.iii.156. Here Fi makes Montano say, after he has been wounded, "I bleed ftill, I am hurt to th'death," and adds the stage- direction "He dies." The editor recognizes that it is not time for Montano to die and so makes him say, "I am hurt, but not to th'death," and removes the stage-direction. Q2 supplies the standard text: the fear-stricken Montano still announces his death and then faints. In spite of their supersession, some of the editor's improve- ments are quite keen, for example, that at i Henry VI i.iv.95:

Fi: Plantaginet I will, and like thee,

Play on the Lute, beholding the Townes burne:

F2: Plantaginet I will, and Nero like will,

Play on the Lute, beholding the Townes burne:

For the changes collected under "In obviously corrupt passages, a more intelligible reading is inserted or the approved sense is ap- proximately recovered" the editor, as a rule, deserves credit for little but recognizing a corruption when he saw it; his alterations, at best, only approximate the sense that modern editors adopt.

In the intelligible changes affecting the thought (pp. 191 ff.), the editor's changes, while one can see a reason for them, are unnecessary either because they are too finical or because they rest upon a miscon- ception of the meaning or intention of the passage corrected. Take, for instance, his change at Much Ado v.ii.33-4:

Fj: I can finde out no i rime to Ladie but babie, an innocent rime: F2: I can finde out no rime to Ladie but | badie an innocents rime:

It is easy to imagine his noticing that hahy does not, in fact, rime with lady at all and feeling obliged to change it. Apparently he did not dare to change hahie to anything but badie, which, as it is no word, he justified rather neatly by calling it a fool's rime, which, in a manner of speaking, it no doubt is. When he read in Time's prolog at Winter's Tale iv.i.22 "I mentioned a fonne o'th' Kings, which Florizell \ I now name to you," he remembered that Time had not, in fact, mentioned the king's son at all and quite reasonably made him say, "I mention here" instead. Modern editors, interpreting the

40 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

passage less literally, do not find sufficient reason for deserting the more authoritative text. His improvement of Romeo i.v.43 — "Her Beauty hangs upon the cheeke of night" for "It feemes Ihe hangs" — has been adopted by editors as late as Dyce and admired even when not adopted.

Sometimes the editor was thrown off the track by the use of a word in an unusual sense, as at Caesar ii.i.215,

Fi: Cains Ligaritis doth beare Caefar hard,

Who rated him for [peaking well of Pompey;

F2: Caius Ligarins doth beare Ca'far hatred,

Who rated him for fpeaking well of Pompey,

or by a bold metaphor, as at Timo7i v.ii.2, when a senator asks the messenger:

Thou haft painfully difcouer'd: are his Files As full as thy report?

and the editor felt it necessary to change this to "As full as they re- port." These changes, though unnecessary, are both ingenious and economical. Most of his changes of one preposition or conjunction to another were doubtless dictated by his sense of propriety or by a feel- ing that the substitute was the clearer, and at a time when standards of usage were not fixed as they are to-day, it is hard to say that he may not have had some reason on his side, but modern editors, of course, with a respect for the least letter of the primitive text un- known in 1632, preserve the earlier reading.

The mistaken changes affecting the thought we have separated into four groups. In the first of these, the editor has rectified imagi- nary inconsistencies of fact and circumstance (pp. 215 ff.). In the sec- ond he has altered passages in which his unfamiliarity with some particular word or the sense in which it is used led him to suspect corruption which did not exist (pp. 217 ff.). For example, he was quite mystified by As You Like It 111.ii.349, "for fimply your hauing in beard, is a yonger brothers reuennew," and tried to inject sense into it by reading "your having no beard." At Twelfth Night v.i.192, "Then he's a Rogue, and a paffy meafures panyn," he recognized pavin, or pavane, in panyn, but apparently he could not stomach equating the drunken surgeon to a dance. He therefore read "He's a Rogue after a paffy meafures Pavin," apparently conjuring up a picture of the drunkard's staggers following the movements of the dance. The metaphorical use of Starre at Hamlet 11.ii.140 also evi- dently nonplussed him when he made the line read "Lord Hamlet is a Prince out of thy Sphere," and likewise the transitive use of cease

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 41

at Cymheline v.v.255, "A certaine fluffe, which being tane, would ceafe | The prefent powre of life," which he emended to feize. The word sennet, used in stage-directions to indicate a trumpet call, he evidently did not recognize: four times he struck it out, six times he changed it to son{n)et, and five times he let it stand.^ Whether he understood his substitute, sonnet, as the verse-form or as some deriva- tive of the Latin sonus is a question. The most curious mistaken cor- rection of this kind is his treatment of the weird sisters in Macbeth, slightly disguised as the weyard sisters in Fi: once he substituted weyward and twice wizard.

The third group of mistaken changes (pp. 220 ff.) consists of pas- sages in which the editor has apparently felt it necessary to alter the text because he failed to grasp the image, idea, or construction in- volved. Thus at Troilus i.ii.279, "Things won are done, ioyes foule lyes in the dooing," he apparently failed to understand the metaphor and so substituted "the foules joy." Again he seems to have failed to perceive that Romeo's repartee, "Then moue not while my prayers effect I take" (i.v.104), means "while I measure the effect of my prayers," so that he made the line read "while my prayers effect doe take." He also missed Juliet's mockery of the nurse at 11. v. 61 :

How odly thou repli'ft: Your Loue faies like an honeft Gentleman: Where is your Mother?

Juliet is actually quoting the nurse verbatim, but the editor takes her to be using indirect discourse and so changes the last line to "Where is my Mother?" Sometimes, in an equivocal passage, such as Winter's Tale i.ii.139, "Thou do'ft make poffible things not fo held," he emended in the wrong sense. This line means "Thou dost make possible things which are held impossible," but he takes it to mean "Thou dost cause possible things to be held impossible" in reading "Thou do'ft make poffible things not be fo held."

The last group consists of passages in which the editor has mis- takenly tried to clarify the meaning or the syntax (pp. 224 ff.). The effect of his changes is usually to produce a more literal reading. Here he is trying to improve Shakespeare. It is not usually that he has mis- understood the passage so much as he felt that he could, or should, make it clearer, easier to understand, for the reader's benefit. It is characteristic of the seventeenth century, we think, thus to put the reader before Shakespeare and, for the sake of the former, to take liberties with the text at which modern editors hold up their hands in

^ The editor of F3 also changed Sennet to Sonnet at Antony 11.vii.17.

42 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

horror. To the seventeenth-century editors Shakespeare's text was not at all surrounded by the halo of glory through which we look at it to-day and had not the right to stand on its own merits when a slight change would make it more intelligible to the ordinary reader. That respect for an author's words because they are his words which we pay them to-day was scarcely understood; at any rate, it does not seem to have stood in the way of correcting the text where it seemed corrupt or even, on occasion, of improving it. It may be, too, that in 1632, when many of Shakespeare's friends and associates were still alive and his plays kept their place in the repertory of the company that had first produced most of them, the texts were regarded as re- taining some of the fluidity of the theater. In our judgment, there is less irresponsible "improvement" in F2 than might have been ex- pected a priori.

The changes pertaining to the action of the plays (pp. 112 ff., 161) are nearly all indications of entrances and exits and reassignments of speeches. Four stage-directions indicating action on the stage, in- cluding the Kills him at Caesar v.iii.46, are added and four are cor- rectly altered. The speeches redistributed amount to 22. But the most noteworthy accomplishment of the editor in this department is his care in marking a character's entering or leaving the stage. Seventy-three entrances and exits are correctly added and one is correctly omitted. More than a third of these — 27 — are found in two plays, Gentlemen and Merry Wives. The well-known peculiarity of these texts, the massing of all entrances at the beginning of the scene, gave the editor the opportunity of fixing the place of the various internal entrances and exits, and he acquitted himself very credit- ably.

Outside the adopted categories, there are only 21 changes pertain- ing to the action, of which six must be classed as superseded (pp. 1 78 f.). Most of these have to do with the distribution of speeches; there are also two intelligible, but unnecessary, alterations of stage-direc- tions (p. 197) and half-a-dozen mistaken additions or omissions of entrances and exits (p. 224). The most curious mistaken addition occurs at Lear v.iii.322: here, when Kent says

I haue a iourney Sir, fhortly to go, My Mafter calls me, I muft not fay no.

the editor takes him at his word and adds Dyes. This interpretation of Kent's speech persisted in succeeding editions for a hundred and fifty years.

The changes affecting the meter are among the most remarkable features of the work of the editor of F2, especially in view of the fact

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 43

that he far outdid his two immediate successors in this respect. There are 360 of them in F2, 130 of which belong to the adopted categories (pp. 114 ff., 161 ff.) and 70 to the superseded (pp. 179 ff.). In all of the latter, some adjustment is made in a line that modern editors have judged rhythmically unsatisfactory. These changes are usually slight. Sometimes they involve no more than the expansion of a con- traction, such as Let us for Let's, I will for lie, or the contraction of a full form, such as gainjl for againjl, wingd for winged, haviour for hehauiour, or than thorough for through; more often they consist in the insertion or, less frequently, the omission of a monosyllable- — an article, a conjunction, or an interjection. Sometimes a word is re- peated to fill out the line, as at j Heyiry VI 111.iii.156:

Fi: Peace impudent, and fhameleire Warwicke,

Fj: Peace impudent, and fhameleffe War-wicke, Peace,

or parallelism of expression is carried out, as in the substitution of Rapine for Rape at Titus v.ii.62. That these alterations were more than a matter of counting syllables and that the editor really had an ear for the rhythm of verse is constantly shown by such changes as these:

Fi: Where youth, and coft, vvitlefre brauery keepes. F2: Where youth and coft, and witleffe bravery keepes.

Measure i.iii.io

Fi: Becaufe in choife he is often beguil'd, F2: Becaufe in choife he often is beguil'd,

Dream i.i.239

Fi: And not a Tinker, nor Chriftopher She. F2: And not a Tinker, nor Chriftophero Sly.

Shrew Ind. ii.71

Fit The Larke, that tirra-Lyra chaunts,

With heigh, the Thriijh and the lay: F2: The Larke, that tirra-Lyra chaunts.

With heigh, with heigh the Thrujh and the lay:

Winter's Tale iv.iii.io

Fi: I pray you ftay? by hell and hell torments, F2: I pray you ftay? by hell and all hells torments,

Troiliis v.ii.43

Fi: That the bruized heart was pierc'd through the eares. F2: That the bruiz'd heart was pierced through the eare.

Othello i.iii.219

Furthermore, these metrical alterations occasionally add point to the speeches in which they occur, as at Winter's Tale 111.ii.165:

44 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

Fi: Vnclafp'd my practife, quit his fortunes here

(Which you knew great) and to the hazard

Of all Incertainties, himfelfe commended, Fj: Vnclafp'd my practife, quit his fortunes here

(Which you knew great) and to the certaine hazard

Of all Incertainties, himfelfe commended,

Some of his mistaken changes are also bold, such as Timon i.ii.143,

Fi: You haue added worth vntoo't, and lufter,

F2: You have added worth untoo't, and lively lufter,

or J Henry VI i.iv.153,

Fi: That Face of his,

The hungry Caniballs would not haue toucht,

Would not haue ftayn'd with blood: F2: That face of his,

The hungry Caniballs would not have toucht,

Would not have ftayn'd the rofes juft with blood:

or I Henry F/i.vi.2, in which his sense of dramatic realism overcomes his patriotism,

Fi: Refcu'd is Orleance from the Englifh.

Fj: Refcu'd is Orleance from the Englifh wolves:

There are a few passages in which he converted prose into verse (p. 122). It may be noticed, too, that in some of the changes in our other categories care is taken not to spoil the rhythm in making the change. Occasionally, for instance, when a change affecting the thought or the style robs the line of a syllable, the editor will insert a compensat- ing syllable elsewhere in the line.*

The metrical changes which we classify as intelligible (pp. 197 ff.) are those which have been adopted by one or a few modern editors and those which alter passages which modern editors also emend, but differently.

Many of our mistaken metrical changes (p. 225) can also be ex- plained. Most of them, at any rate, occur in lines which are actually defective or at least abnormal. Sometimes modern editors allow the defective line to stand; sometimes they remove the defect by rear- ranging the verse-division of the whole passage, as at 2 Henry VI ii.i.34, 5 Henry VI i.iv.153, and Timon i.ii.199. Other changes can be explained as misunderstandings on the editor's part. His change at Tempest iv.i.121 is an improvement if, as he must have supposed, confines is to be accented on the first syllable:

'See Labour's ii.i.19 (p. 244), v.ii.65 (p. 191), Winter's Tale iv.i.22 (p. 191), I Henry VI i.v.26 (p. 207), Henry VIII 11.iv.159 (p. 207).

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 45

Fi: I haue from their confines call'd to enact F2: I have from all their confines call'd to enact

In the following passages he failed to recognize that earths, houre, Whales are dissyllabic:

Fi: Earths increafe, foyzon plentie, F2: Earths increafe, and foyzon plenty

Tempest iv.i.iio

Fi: He meet you at that place Tome houre hence. F2: He meet you at that place fome houre fir hence.

Errors iii.i.122

Fi: To fhew his teeth as white as Whales bone. F2: To fhew his teeth as white as Whale his bone.

Labour's v.ii.332

Sometimes, but by no means regularly, he removed extrametrical syl- lables:

Fi: Were teftimonies againft his worth, and credit F2: Were teftimonies gainft his worth, and credit

Measure v.i.242

Fi: This man hath bewitch'd the bofome of my childe: F2: This hath bewitch'd the bofome of my childe:

Dream i.i.27

It is also apparent that he had no idea of the theory of the dramatic pause which accounts for the lack of a syllable from his change at Measure 11.ii.117 •

Fi: Thou rather with thy fharpe and fulpherous bolt Splits the vn-wedgable and gnarled Oke, Then the foft Mertill: But man, proud man, Dreft in a little briefe authoritie,

F2: Thou rather with thy fharpe and fulphurous bolt Splitft the un-wedgable and gnarled Oke, Then the foft Mertill; O But man! proud man! Dreft in a little briefe authority.

In some places he tried to cut down alexandrines and even fourteeners to the compass of normal blank verse, as:

Fi: As you haue euer bin my Fathers honour'd friend, F2: As you have euer bin my Fathers friend.

Winter's Tale 1v.iv.485

Fi: How dares thy harfh rude tongue found this vnpleafing newes F2: How dares thy harfh tongue found this unpleafing newes?

Richard II 111.iv.74

46 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

Fi: My Thoughts, are minutes; and with Sighes they iarre, Their watches on vnto mine eyes, the outward Watch,

F2: My Thoughts, are minutes; and with Sighes they iarre. Their watches to mine eyes, the outward Watch,

Richard II v.v.52

Fi: Seek not my name: A Plague con fume you, wicked Caitifs left: Heere lye I Timon, who aliue, all liuing men did hate, Paffe by, and curfe thy fill, but paffe and Jtay not here thy gate.

F2: Seek not my name: A Plague confume you, Califs left: Heere lye I Timon, who all living men did hate, Paffe by, and curfe thy fill, but stay not here thy gate.

Timoft v.iv.71-3

The most striking inadequacy of the editor's treatment of the meter of the plays is his failure to understand the phenomenon of mislineation. There are only a very few changes of the verse-division in F2, notably those in Dream, which are indeed excellent, but, ac- cording to modern editors, drastic rearrangements are necessary in some of the plays to reform the rhythm. It was Pope who proposed most of these rearrangements; it may therefore be said that he and the editor of F2 are the two chief individual reconstructors of the meter of the text.

The changes affecting the grammar (pp. 122 ff., 165 fif., 187 ff.) of the passages involved are mostly of rather obvious kinds — changes in tense, in number, in case, and in person. This is the largest class of changes : of the 458 which we record, 291 belong to the adopted classes and 18 to the superseded. Many of the grammatical discords thus corrected are typographical errors rather than slips on the part of the author of the plays, and some are doubtless obsolescent usages and subjunctives. Many of the changes which, according to our criteria, fall into the intelligible class (p. 200) are identical with other changes in the adopted class — an interesting comment on the practice of modern editors.

The mistaken changes affecting the grammar (p. 236) often origi- nated in the editor's misreading of the passage. Sometimes he was mis- led by wrong or defective punctuation. At Tivelfth Night iii.i.55 "I will confler to them whence you come, who you are, and what you would are out of my welkin," he took ivho you are to go with whence you come instead of with what follows it and accordingly changed the last are to is. At Othello ii.i.26,

The Ship is heere put in; A Verenneffa, Michael Caffio... Is come on Shore:

he rather naturally took Vere?ineffa to refer to Cassio instead of the

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 47

ship and so gave it its masculine form, Veroneffo. Sometimes he was misled by drastic condensation of style, as at Lear 1v.vi.263,

To know our enemies mindes, we rip their hearts, Their Papers is more lawfull.

which he changed to "are more lawfull," not seeing that an implied to rip, not Papers, is the subject of this verb. Some of his changes are also intended to substitute the indicative for the subjunctive, a change which modern editors find undesirable. ]\Iost of the words inserted to round out the sentence structure are perfectly reasonable in the con- text, but as they are not indispensable, modern editors, of course, prefer the more authoritative reading of the earlier text.

The changes which we classify under the heading of style have to do chiefly with matters of taste and propriety, the choice and the form of words. The chief matters of taste concerned are the preference of one word or form to another (pp. 136, 171 f.) and the order of words (pp. 136, 171). By the former we mean a change like the sub- stitution of further i or farther, mine for my, or ivhich for who. Natur- ally, few such changes have been adopted by modern editors. But the editor of F2, who was not in the least deterred by the scruples which forbid modern editors to alter the text unless they think they are restoring what Shakespeare wrote, evidently had definite ideas about certain matters of usage which, in justice to him, rAust be called intelligible. Apparently, for instance, he disapproved of the double negative and obviated it in four places. There is also some evidence of a prejudice against the ethical dative. His idea of the difference between my and mine was apparently different from ours and from his own idea of the difference between thy and thine. With one ex- ception, all his changes of m.ine to my occur before a singular noun, and in the exception {Antony v.ii.222) the noun is Nailes, which, fol- lowing mine, brings together two w-sounds difficult to pronounce distinctly. Likewise, of the three nouns before which he changed my to mine, two are plural and the third is inheritance, which ends in an 5-sound. It is the consistency of these changes that makes us think them deliberate.

Of his changes of the order of words, again, only eight are followed by modern editors. Such changes can only tentatively be described as deliberate: transposition is an easy kind of typographical error. But from the fact that many of them have the effect of putting the verb before its subject in a question or what might have been assumed to be a question, and the fact that a number of others substitute a more for a less usual order, we think it more likely that those we have listed were made deliberately.

48 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

The editor's treatment of archaic, obsolescent, and inelegant words (pp. 135, 170) is quite interesting and affords a rough index to changes of taste and usage or at least a series of straws showing the way the wind was blowing. By seventeenth-century standards, all such changes seem to us perfectly intelligible. The reader must not be surprised to find that the editor's change oi Jometime to fometimes is adopted by modern editors at Tempest i.ii.198 and not at 111.ii.133 oi* that they follow him in changing /om«(/ to /wound at Labour's v.ii.392 but not at Dream 11.ii.154: modern texts are made on larger-minded principles than that of consistency.

The matters of propriety with which our data show the editor concerned are rime and the use of broken English and malapropisms. In nine riming passages he substituted a word that rimes for one that does not (pp. 140, 172). In one of Sir Hugh Evans's speeches in Merry Wives he made the Welshman say pelly instead of belly (p. 136). We suspect that this change may be no more than a typograph- ical error; nevertheless, every subsequent edition has undoubtedly read pelly. Much more often he tried to reduce broken English, puns, malapropisms, and quibbles to sense (pp. 209 ff.). In this mis- taken zeal for correctness, he turned Dogberry's Statues to Statutes, the nurse's endite to envite and even rectified Bottom's exquisite con- fusion of his sense-organs {Dream v.i.190-1).

The rectifications of the orthography of scraps of foreign languages in the plays (pp. 137 f., 171, 190, 246) and of proper names (pp. 138, 171, 190, 211, 246) are also interesting and sometimes clever. The editor's Latin was evidently good, good enough, at least, to recover quotations from Mantuan, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace {Labour's iv.ii. 89-90, Shrew iii.i.28, 2 Henry VI iv.i.117, Titus 1v.ii.20-1); his Italian and French were less good, though he made some partial corrections in these languages too. His change at Henry V 111.iv.52 is another illustration of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing: he found "fo le Foot & le Count" and made it read "il faut le Foot & le Count." His alterations of proper names also show some knowledge of history and the classics. To see Cocitus (Cocytus) in Ocitus {Titus 11.iii.236) or Hiperion (Hyperion) in Epton {Titus v.ii.56) was not the meanest of his feats.

It is also evident that the editor felt free to alter proper names like Bullingbrooke, Pembrooke, and Wejlmerland, the spelling of which was not fixed. With the names of Berowne, Rosencrantz, and Guilden- stern he took even greater liberties. Berowne (except for two Beroune's and two Berown's) is the invariable spelling of Fi in the text, the stage-directions, and the speech-prefixes. In F2 it is invariably Biron

CHANGES IN THE SECOND FOLIO 49

or Birone in the stage-directions and (we believe) Bir. or Biron in the speech-prefixes; in the text, Berowne survives only four times out of twenty-seven. The altered spelling was naturally followed in F3 and F4, in which Berown is preserved only twice, and adopted by editors down to quite recent times. Possibly the editor felt that the more palpably French form of the name was more appropriate in this play. Rosencrantz appears in Fi as Rofincrance (except for two Rofincrane and one Rojlncran misprints) and his partner as Guildenjlerne or Guildenjlern. In F2 they are invariably Rofincros or Rofincroffe and Guildenftar or Guildenjlare. Is it possible that the editor knew that Stern means star and preferred the Anglicized form of the name? If he altered Rofincrance on the parallel assumption that Crantz means cross, he was, of course, mistaken.

We also list here (pp. 213 ff.) a number of examples of the expan- sion of contractions, with the warning, however, that we are not fully convinced that they are all deliberate changes. There are, however, so many of them and this kind of normalizing is so much what one ex- pects of an editor who is trying to tidy up the text he is overseeing that we think it probable that many of them are intentional.

The various substitutions listed under intelligible and mistaken changes seem to us to be attempts to improve the text. Although some of them are the kind about which one cannot feel perfectly sure, they seem to be deliberate changes, but the motives that lie behind them are not always obvious. There are a few which seem to have been made for the sake of euphony or uniformity (p. 242), but too few to give us much confidence in this grouping. Those which seem intended to carry out parallelism of expression (p. 212) look more certain. Those which substitute a more for a less usual word, so far as they are certainly deliberate, and those which attempt to improve the text by expressing its sense in more literal language (pp. 243 ff.), which are the largest classes, are just what one expects from an editor who feels free to perfect the imperfections of the author he is editing. While there are not as many of them as one would expect from an editor who took this duty seriously, there are enough to make us feel that, in general, we have described the motives behind them with sufficient accuracy.

After this brief review of the work of the editor of F2 or, much better, an inspection of the evidence in full below, we think there can be but one answer to the questions we have proposed. In the first place, the text of the plays was undoubtedly revised and corrected by intention: more than eight hundred emendations accepted by most modern editors do not find their way into the text in a single

50 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

edition through the irresponsible improvisations of typesetters and proof readers. Furthermore, the editor's emendations are not only numerous but, far from being as a rule arbitrary and needless, quite as often right as wrong. That they have made a substantial contribu- tion to the standard text of Shakespeare to-day is self-evident. The only point which remains to be taken into account, the editor's errors of omission, will be considered below.

§5 Changes in the Third Folio

In F3 we find a total of 943 editorial changes, about one to a page or 26 to a play. Although this is only a little more than half the number found in F2, it is a good deal more than might be expected in an edition of which the commentators have invariably spoken slightingly. In view of the fact that there is also an equal number of corrections of obvious typographical errors and of improvements of the punctuation and that the spelling is modernized with fair con- sistency throughout, a typical statement like Lee's that F3 is "mainly a reprint of the Second" is clearly wide of the mark.

Of these 943 changes, 314 have been adopted by modern editors, 168 restore the reading of an earlier text (a quarto or Fi), loi have been superseded by more authoritative readings, 187 are intelligible, and 173 are mistaken. If we lump the changes which restore the read- ing of an earlier text with the adopted changes, the proportion of necessary and desirable changes to unnecessary and undesirable is slightly higher than in F2. The figures are 50% for F2 and 51% for F3. The proportion of superseded, intelligible, and mistaken changes in F3 is very much the same as in F2; the figures are 10%, 19%, and 21% for F2 and 10.5%, 20%, and 18.5% for F3 respectively. The correspondences between these figures seem to us remarkable, es- pecially since our classification of adopted and superseded changes rests entirely on objective criteria, so that the totals cannot have been influenced by our own methods of judgment. These figures show that, when he saw fit to make a change in the text, the editor of F3 made a good one just as often as did the editor of F2.

The distribution of changes among the categories of thought, ac- tion, etc., however, differs from that in F2. Changes relating to the action of the plays are again fewest (54), but st^distic changes rather than rectifications of grammar are most numerous (332). The latter fact is not hard to understand: the supply of errors of grammar in the text, so to speak, would naturally tend to become exhausted, and

CHANGES IN THE THIRD FOLIO 51

the higher proportion of stylistic changes is largely accounted for by a natural increase in the number of substitutions for words which in three crowded decades had become archaic and obsolescent.^ The most striking difference from F2 is the much smaller number of metrical changes — 88 as compared with 360, or, to convert these figures into percentages to make the comparison more significant, 9% as compared with 21%. In our opinion, however, this marked drop is to be explained not so much by the fact that most of the necessary rhythmical adjustments had already been made as by the superior competence of the editor of F2 in this kind of emendation.

The changes in F3 are unequally distributed among the plays. The smallest number of corrections, two, is found in Measure, and there are but eleven or fewer in Gentlemen, John, Merry Wives, Winter's Tale, and Richard II. Two of these (John, Richard II) were among the least altered in F2. The largest number of changes is found in Antony, closely followed by Titus, Hamlet, Coriolanus , and Lear. The most significant inference from these figures is that the plays in which the fewest corrections are found are nearly all comedies and those in which the most are found are all tragedies. In general, too, correc- tions are here fewest in the comedies and most numerous in the tragedies. The average for the comedies is 19, for the histories 26, for the tragedies 35. To be sure, certain discrepancies of the same kind appear in F2: here the lowest average is found in the histories, 34.5; that for the comedies is 42 and that for the tragedies 62. An average of twice as many changes in the tragedies as in the comedies, however, may reflect something more than the causes (such as greater length, the corrupt state of certain texts, and unequal distribution of edi- torial care) which would naturally produce more changes. It is pos- sible that the editor was guided to some extent by his interest in, per- haps even his understanding of, the plays. It is a known fact that the taste for Shakespeare's comedies declined much more rapidly in the second half of the seventeenth century than the taste for his trag- edies. Perhaps it was partly because the editor looked on the comedies as trifling and inconsiderable and on the histories and tragedies as serious dramatic efforts worthy of his attention that he expended greater care on the latter.

There is nothing in the changes we have found in F3 to lead us to suppose that the editor proceeded differently from the editor of F2. He too read through the plays critically and made whatever altera- tions common sense suggested to him. There is no more evidence

^ This process of clarifying and modernizing passages for later seventeenth-century readers is observable in the anthologies referred to on p. 24 and in the appendix.

52

SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

		l^^oj.		MO	t- O t^ w rO ^
	CO U <	aiA^s		00	to ^ o o
	JBUIUIBJQ	Tij-M COM 1-1 U-) o (^cs r^cO'^fO'^	o	ts CO O t^ M
	J3;9j\[	)-H M CNLO(NCN(N(NrO	O	LO l-i
	uopay	ro^HHrOMio r^MM		M Tt CO
	iqSnoijx	^ro>-< M rOChr^<N lOM On<N 0^-<^	o 00	M 0\ LO
	C (U	9lAis	M rn CS M (N CS (N	M	M M 0»
	JBUIUIBJQ	MM CNCOm Ol-l(Nr-*(N	MD	(N CO
	-la^aiV	M M CS M	lO	"
	uopoy	M ro M	lO
	iqSnoqx	MM M rOMioroM	vO	C(
	_4J "a! c	ajA^s	M M rOTj-T^ro-^CStNCNM	^	CO LO
	JBUIUIBJQ	mCN m(NCSmmm lo	o	M Ol d ll
	J313IM	M M	M
	uopoy
O	iqSnoqx	^^ <N CO M M (N M	M Hi	Hi
-a -a 0) in a C/5	9lAis	C^ M W CO O) M	M	M M
JBUIUIBJQ	"	M	M
<	J949J\[	M	M	cs
X u	uopoy	"	M	H-l
	;qSnoqj^	M T^WI-l OiMhHrH	CN	t-H l-«
	o en <u	3\MS	»-« M	O)	M M
	JT3UIUIBJQ	M rn O) M	^O	M M Ol
	JaiaW	CN M (N	lO	*"*
	uoipY	INCSMM (M rOMM		"* -,
	iqSnoqx	<N^ MMM t-HMrOMCN	LO M	M M Ol
	a o •V <	9lAis	H ro ro •>^rOLOMLO-*MO)	CO	LO CO t^ O
	JBUIIUBJQ	^ M 11 CO M M	"	^ CN
	J9J3IAI	M M (WO M (- 1	-i - 1
	uopov	M <N M (N 1	o	(N
	^qSnoqx	MMMOtv^clMMrororOiNt^l	O	LO M
			Tempest Gentlemen Wives Measure Errors Much Ado Labour's Dream Merchant As You Like It Shrew All's Well Twelfth Night Winter's Tale	tn m 6 o U	John Richard II 1 Henry IV 2 Henry IV

CHANGES IN THE THIRD FOLIO

53

r^ M w o "^ M fS ro ro fO					CO CO	00 5-	CO
O t^ ^^ o^ ^ *>4 M M	00	s-	moo O Ooo or^ooco	lO rO	M		CO CO	CO On
■^ U-) »-< O CO	•rf	Tt-	loooooro -^a-^o	lO vO	o	00	cs
rO ^ O lO	*"*	rO	-^(Nt^t^ro wMLO	00 lO	"	to	00 00
11 ^ ^	'^		tN ro M ►-. PI Ci	M M	^	CO M
Ci O "^ ^ ^	lO	t^	k- M w Ol ll	CO O^	o	CO M	CO to
ci w H.	'"'	c^	M M l-l MM	^		00	00 CN	CO
Ci o« \o fO	(N	o	<N MM Ol lO	"	CO	lO	<3
C* H-t M	uo	M r<-3 <N N	(^^ rn	M	-*- M
				•O
tH HH CS	^	r^	M<NnP)i-tN^OP»	" O	•*	CO	LO lO
ro ro C^ rO ^	M	ro	M lO-tt-^ro-^tN r^-*	CN M	o	lO	M	00
<N CS CN 0)	O^		M M M 1-. lO	(M	M	CO	to
'"'	•^	M I-.	M	m
		'"'	^	*^
M	<N	M l-H »-t M	'^	r^
M t-t H-l	<s	0-.	P-l M MM M	'~*	*"•	00	00	o
H-t (-1	M	■*	MM M M M	"	cs	00
ro (N	r^	M MM M	CN		O	■*
M HH	ro			to
"■^	"^	^	to tN CS (N M VO Tf	^0	M	LO	M
"^	>-(	'^	(N ro M CS C< M	*"*	M	CO	o	00 NO
CJ <N ro	<N	c^	ro <N CS -^ M N ro	M Tt	O)	C)	CO
CO •-'	M	<2	M M	^		CO	"*
hH CI	CO	M CS M MM	*^		'^	OO
Tj- M CN M	CJ		■^•51-iorotN M CM lOM	M ^	CO	LO CO
lO -^ CO lO oo	tn		roOM C) ro<r)-<^r^M	M O-	■<t	ON lO	to	M CO
CS h-l M CS <N	M	MrOLOroCM mmW	M M	p<	s
M M	'i-	0( M Tt" rO M MM	CO tN		o	CO
'-'	t-H	■*	MM CI	^		lO	to
	"	o	lOO^lOCNro MOOOO	M CN	"	O
Henry V 1 Henry VI 2 Henry VI 3 Henry VI Richard III Henry VIII	en 'u o en	s s 2 i s ^ 1 i 2 :S ^ 1,	taO

54 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

here than in F2 of any consultation of earlier printed texts and, in the superseded changes, just as good evidence of the absence of system- atic collation with Fi and the quartos. A brief review of these changes, or an examination of our data below, will show that, for the most part, they follow the same lines as the changes found in F2.

The changes affecting the thought which we have found in F3 are practically indistinguishable in kind from those found in F2. Because the corruptions corrected by the changes classified as adopted (pp. 247 ff.) were overlooked by the editor of F2, one might expect them to be superficially plausible readings and not obviously corrupt. To some extent, they are: a number of the new readings of F3, at least, indicate a close scrutiny of the text. The change at Labour's v.i.21, for instance, "this is abhominable, which we would call abominable," for "which he would call abhominable" {ive for he is probably a typo- graphical error rather than a deliberate alteration), even shows a touch of the antiquarian spirit, or at least a recognition of the variant pronunciations of the word. But, in general, it is doubtful that the changes in F3 show a sagacity or discernment superior to that evinced in F2: some of them are fairly obvious and some much less so, in both folios. It is noteworthy that there are few emendations by pure guesswork in F3, but those that there are do credit to the editor. That at Coriolanus ii.ii.79, for example, is a stroke of inspiration:

F2: He had rather venture all his Limbes for honor,

Then on ones Eares to heare it. F3: He had rather venture all his Limbs for honor.

Than one on's Ears to hear it.

The changes which restore the reading of Fi (pp. 264 ff.) are, of course, corrections of unobtrusive typographical errors in F2. Whether the editor was aware of this fact we do not know, but we suppose that he thought very little about it. To him a defective line like "but is in a fuite of buffe which refted him," which stood thus in both Fi and F2, looked exactly like "If do not put on a fober habite," which read "If I doe" in Fi. He was not conscious of doing anything differ- ent in making the first read "but he's" from altering the second to "If I doe." Some of these unobtrusive errors, however, make suffi- ciently good sense to pass anything but the closest inspection, e.g.:

F2: Hath Butler bought thofe horfes from the Sheriffe? F3: Hath Butler brought thofe horfes from the Sheriff.?

I Henry /Fii.iii.64

F2: Thou that contrived'ft to murther our dread Lord, F3: Thou that contrived'ft to murther our dead Lord,

I Henry VI i.iii.34

CHANGES IN THE THIRD FOLIO 55

F2: that ftole I old Aloufe-eaten dry cheefe, Neftor: F3: that ftale | old Moufe-eaten dry-cheefe, Neftor:

Troilus v.iv. 10

The intelligible changes affecting the thought (pp. 294 ff.) consist of mistaken corrections in undoubtedly corrupt passages, for which the editor deserves at least the credit of having detected the corrup- tion, or of attempts to improve the text which, though they have something to recommend them, most modern editors will not allow. Among the former occurs the drollest exhibition of mistaken in- genuity in the whole canon. At Merchant v.i.41, F2 reads, "Sola, did you fee M. Lorenzo, and M. Lorenza, fola, fola." "M. Lorenza" is a typographical error for "IM. Lorenzo,'' the reading of Fi, but to the editor it looked like the feminine form of Lorenzo's name and the designation of a different person from Lorenzo (modern editors omit and) and so he changed it to "Mrs. Lorenza." As for his improve- ments, while they are certainly unnecessary, they are, as a rule, quite understandable. There are hardly enough of them to establish clearly a general tendency, but it is frequently evident that the editor tried to alter obscure, unorthodox, or far-fetched expressions to something which, to the literal-minded at least, would be more readily clear.

The same effort may be observed in the mistaken changes affecting the thought (pp. 304 ff.). These changes rest on misinterpretations, sometimes of the circumstances, sometimes of a word, sometimes of a whole idea or image, but their purpose is to make clear what seemed to the editor not clear enough or to make right what his standards of propriety adjudged wrong. The correction at Hamlet v.ii.388 is stupid, but perfectly understandable. After Hamlet's death, Fortin- bras says, "Beare Hamlet like a Souldier to the Stage," meaning the stage ordered erected some twenty lines earlier. The editor, how- ever, thought he must have meant the platform of the theater and so made him say "off the Stage." His change at As You Like It 1v.iii.158 could even be defended. After Oliver has brought Rosalind Orlando's blood-stained handkerchief and she has fainted, Oliver says, "Many will fwoon when they do looke on bloud." Then Celia cries, "There is more in it." This the editor changed to "There is no more in it," on the supposition, presumably, that it is dramatically inappropriate for Celia to excite suspicions in Oliver's mind, that she should, on the contrary, protect Rosalind's disguise and try to allay them.

The changes pertaining to the action of the plays (pp. 251 f.) are, except for a few additions and omissions of entrances and exits, mostly reassignments of speeches. Some of these, such as Por[tia] for Pro., correct obvious typographical errors. At the opposite pole is

56 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

the assignment to Falstaff of his page's speech at 2 Henry 1 V 11. i. 57-8, an innovation which, although both Q and Fi are against it, has been adopted in most modern editions. Virtually all of the changes affecting the action which restore the reading of Fi (pp. 273 ff.) are corrections of the errors of the compositors of F2. The editor's attempt to deal with the confused distribution of speeches at Much Ado II. i. 87-96, still a thorny problem for editors, is noteworthy. Failing, we imagine, to identify Margaret, whose entrance is not separately noted in the stage-directions, but is presumably covered by the term Maskers, the editor gave her speeches to Mas. or Mask; in modern editions the difficulty is resolved by transferring to Bal- thasar the speeches assigned to Benedick. We find only one intelligi- ble (p. 295) and five mistaken (p. 311) changes pertaining to the action. Helena's speech at AWs Well 11. iii. 64-70, which in F2 reads

I am a fimple Maide, and therein wealthieft That I proteft, I fimply am a maide: Pleafe it your majeftie, I have done already: The blufhes in my cheekes thus whifper me, We blulh that thou fhouldft choofe, but be refufed; Let the white death fit on thy cheeke for ever, Wee'l neere come there againe.

evidently nonplussed the editor; failing to understand that in the last three lines she is addressing herself on behalf of her blushes, he changed "Let the white death" to "Let not white death" and added them to the succeeding speech of the king.

The changes afifecting the meter are not only much fewer than those in F2, as was noted above, but also comparatively timorous. Most of the adopted changes (pp. 251 ff.) are elisions and most of those which restore the reading of Fi (pp. 275 fT.) supply words ac- cidentally omitted in F2. The mistaken changes (pp. 311 fif.) are mostly due to a determination, sporadically manifested, to make the verse conform to the standard pattern of ten syllables and to abridge the freedom which Shakespeare allowed himself.

The changes under the head of grammar (pp. 253 fif., 277 fif., 291 fif.) follow the same lines as those found in F2: the verb is put into the same number as its subject or the subject into the same number as its verb; verbs in the second person singular are given the distinctive personal ending, etc. The fairly numerous intelligible changes (pp. 296 fif.) follow the same principles, and we are obliged to classify them as intelligible rather than adopted only because modern editors are at times willing to admit into their texts, not always on consistent principles, archaisms and irregularities which the editor of F3 thought

CHANGES IN THE THIRD FOLIO 57

it advisable to reduce to conformity with the approved usage of his day.

The most important as well as the most numerous of the changes collected under the head of style are substitutions for obsolescent, archaic, and inelegant words. Like the corresponding but less fre- quent changes in F2, they were made on the principle that the reader would better understand or appreciate current than outmoded lan- guage. Furthermore, the changes which we list in the adopted cate- gories (pp. 256 f., 282 f.) are indistinguishable from those which we call intelligible (pp. 299 f.). Some changes, such as ignominy for ignomy, its for it, sometimes for sometime, threaten for threat, appear in both lists; the difference between them does not lie in the principles on which the editor of F3 worked but in the practice of modern editors of treating each passage on its individual stylistic and textual merits. From the old editor's point of view, any one of these would have seemed just as good as any other. It would probably be difficult to explain to him, assuming that communication could be established, why some of them have recommended themselves to modern editors and some have not.

It may be well to mention the fact that F3 is the first text to take steps to bring about some uniformity in the spelling of the name of Ned Poins. In Fi it appears as Pointz, Points, Poynes, and Poines. Curiously enough, on its first appearance in the text, in Merry Wives, and in the first scene in which it appears in both / and 2 Henry IV, the spelling, in the text and the stage-directions, is invariably Pointz. F2 follows Fi with only a little vacillation between i and y. F3, how- ever, after altering the first Pointz {Merry Wives 111.ii.63) to Poinz, repeating the next two (i Henry IV i.ii.i, 103), and turning the Poines at / Henry IV l.ii.108 into Pointz, uniformly suppresses the /, and in 2 Henry IV the e as well. F4 carries on the same tend- ency, omitting all surviving /'s and still more e's and printing i and y about an equal number of times.

The mistaken changes collected under this heading (pp. 317 fT.) are not to be generalized about with confidence. In the first place, the number of them is surprisingly small. In the next, as was re- marked above, some of them may be typographical errors. A few of them seem to us to have been dictated by a desire to attain euphony or uniformity of expression or to avoid bald repetition. Some (and these are perhaps the most exposed to the suspicion of being typo- graphical errors) substitute a pronoun for an article — that for the, my for a, thine for the. In the largest group, the editor seems to have been concerned to substitute a more usual or more literal expression

58 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

for an eccentric or far-fetched expression which he found in the text, or perhaps he felt that his substitute made the meaning clearer. Thus he altered "He give you health" (2 Henry IV v.iii.24), a mis- print omitting the a of Fi, to'Tle drink your health"; "I will take thee a box on the eare" {Henry V iv.i.213) to "I will give thee a box on the ear." This kind of fastidiousness remained characteristic of Shake- speare's editors for at least a hundred years after 1664.

By comparison with those found in F2, the emendations inserted in the text in F3 seem few and unexciting. On the other hand, as we have intimated, it should be remembered that a large number of the most apparent defects of the text of Fi had already been mended in F2, that the opportunity open to the editor of F3 was smaller by just so much good work as the editor of F2 had done. Moreover, our data, in at least one respect, hardly do justice to F3, since they do not at- tempt to record the hundreds of corrections of obvious typographical errors for which the editor may well have been responsible. The care- less workmanship of the Cotes printing office had strewn these thickly through the text; most of them were methodically set to rights in F3, along with a certain number of unobtrusive mistakes which appear in our lists (changes which restore the reading of an earlier text). Al- together F3 is a more satisfactory text for the uncritical reader than its predecessor; it is not disfigured nearly so much by gross typo- graphical errors, and while it retains, of course, many of the unob- trusive accidental variants^ and nearly all of the mistakes of judg- ment of the former, it also clears up a number of passages which there remained corrupt. However poor a showing F3 may seem to make by comparison with F2, our data show that it represents, in various ways, an advance in the process of rectifying the text of the plays.

§6

Changes in the Fourth Folio

There is much to be said for F4 as the most readable text and the most workmanlike piece of printing of the four folios. On the whole, though far from being perfect, the composition and presswork are superior to those of its predecessors. The spelling of the text is in general brought up to date and considerable consistency of typo- graphical practice is achieved, especially in the use of italics, the plac-

' It is just as well to remember that it was not until almost the end of the eighteenth century that all of these were finally expunged from the text. From the charge of perpetuating some of the errors, accidental and otherwise, of its predecessors, no text before Capell's is exempt.

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH FOLIO 59

ing of stage-directions, etc., and the use of capital letters. The punctu- ation is also a good deal improved in many ways. To be sure, it is chiefly the more obvious stops that are supplied or altered; many difficult corruptions due to wrong or defective punctuation are al- lowed to stand.

From these facts and from the character of the editorial changes which we have found in the text, we are inclined to think that the "editor" of F4 was the three proof readers employed in the three printing offices in which the book was set up (see above, p. 28 ff.), and indeed we had come to the opinion that the revision of the text was the work of a proof reader before we noticed the evidence de- tailed above which seems to warrant the assumption of different edi- torial hands in the three divisions of the book. Our data make it plain that the editor of the second division was the most alert and the most successful of the three, but they show very little difference among the three revisers in the aims they pursued. Their minds were fixed on the job of printing under their superintendence, not on Shakespeare's plays; their object was to produce a creditable speci- men of the printer's art and a book that buyers could read with ease. If we may take the taste of their contemporaries and some evidence in their editorial work as criteria, they cared little for the plays as drama or poetry; they were concerned only to make them easy to read, and that chiefly by means of the technique of their vocation. In doing so, they introduced a few very striking emendations into the text, but the great bulk of their work, we think, being of the kinds specified above, has passed almost unnoticed.

In F4 we find 751 editorial changes, 192 fewer than in F3 and less than half as many (44.8%) as in F2. Of these, 45% (192 original emendations and 138 readings which restore the text of a quarto or of Fi or F2, a total of 330), are followed by modern editors; 60 (8%) are superseded changes; 269 (35%) intelligible changes, and 92 (12%) mistaken. The proportion of necessary and desirable changes is there- fore somewhat smaller than in F2 and F3, in which it was 50% and 51% respectively. The high proportion of intelligible changes (35% against 19% in F2 and 20% in F3) is due almost entirely to the large number of changes in diction (substitutions of a current for an obsolescent form or of a synonym). The comparatively small num- ber of mistaken changes (12% against 21% and 18.5%) may also be due, in part at least, to the same cause; half of all the changes in F4 fall under the head of style and, according to our criteria, stylistic changes are as a rule intelligible. It may also reflect a certain lack of aggressiveness on the part of the editors, who were, we imagine, for

60

SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

		F^OX			M VO M M 'J- O ro M M M M l-H
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	o Pi	9lA;s	w <N	■<t	«5 (N M
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	iqSnoqx	<N l-l M CH M	r^	CO (N t:)- M M
	T3 a o -a <	9lA;s	hH M »-lCO^CS>HO*l-ll-(Ht	o	VO CO <N Tj- CM C^
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			Tempest Gentlemen Wives Measure Errors Much Ado Labour's Dream Merchant As You Like It Shrew All's Well Twelfth Night Winter's Tale	.Si -5 E o U	John Richard II 1 Henry IV 2 Henry IV Henry V I Henry VI

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH FOLIO

61

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CN M CS CM M

cs 1-1 cs r^

CO l-H W M

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lO cs o*

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gtc'tlCu.iUOG

H

62 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

the most part content to make changes only when, according to their standards, there could be no doubt of their propriety.

In F4 changes affecting the action and meter sink to almost negligi- ble proportions. There are only 13 of the former and 38 of the latter, or 2% and 5% respectively of all the changes in comparison with 8% and 21% in Fo and 6% and 9% in F3. The proportion of changes affecting the thought, 26%, is almost the same as in F3, and higher than in F2 (23%). But there are relatively fewer changes for the sake of grammatical agreement (17% in F4, 23% in F3, 27% in F2) and more stylistic changes (50% in F4, 35% in F3, 21% in F2). In other words, the editors of F4 seem to have been most concerned to correct and improve the choice and use of words. Indeed, as will appear be- low, a good many of the changes classified under the head of thought are also evidence of this fact. They took few liberties with the stage- directions and speech-prefixes; they cared little about the rhythm of the verse; they pounced on a grammatical discord when they saw it, but the supply of such discords, although replenished to a small ex- tent by new unconscious errors in each successive edition of the plays, was tending towards exhaustion; above everything else, they had a good idea of the meaning of words and a shrewd sense of their fitness.

The distribution of changes among the plays varies a good deal. The smallest number, four, is found in Gentlemen and Errors, and there are fewer than ten each in Measure, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Shrew as well. Most of these plays were seldom altered in F3 too. The largest number of changes, 71, is found in Coriolanus ; then follow, in order, Romeo, Titus, Henry VIII, Richard III, Joh?i, Hamlet. All these plays except Hamlet belong to the second division. Corio- lanus, Romeo, and Titus appear close to the top of the list in both of the other folios, but the appearance here of John, with 32 changes, is something of a surprise, for in Fo it stood at the foot of the list and in F3 third from the bottom. The increase is due almost entirely to ver- bal substitutions. There is again a noticeable discrepancy between the number of changes found in the comedies and in the tragedies. While the average number of changes for all the plays is 20.9, the average for the comedies is only 11, for the histories 22, and for the tragedies 31. It may be doubted, however, whether these differences reflect anything (except the shorter average length of the comedies) which does not also account for the differences in the number of changes found in the three divisions of the book.

The changes affecting the thought in F4 (pp. 320 fi., 337 £f.) are not easy to describe. Comparatively there are not many of them and some of those that we have found are not very remarkable. On the

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH FOLIO 63

other hand, there are a few which are quite remarkable, including one, the disentangling of some stage-directions from the text at Richard III IV. i. 9 2-4, already mentioned above (p. 26), as remarkable as any other emendation in all three folios. On this showing, the forte of the editors appears to have been an exact sense of the meaning of words and a vocabulary of some range, as changes like the following sug- gest:

F3: Ye fhall have a hempen Candle then, F4: Ye fhall have a hempen Caudle then,

2 Henry VI 1v.vii.84

F3: now bull, now dog, low; Paris low; now my double | hen'd fparrow; low Paris, low;

F4: now Bull, now Dog, 'loo; Paris, 'loo; now my double | hen'd fparrow; 'loo, Pam, loo;

Troilus v.vii.io-i

F3: The Darnell, Hemlock, and rank Femetary, F4: The Darnel, Hemlock, and rank Fumitory,

Henry V V.ii.45

F3: Hound or Spaniel, Brache, or Hym:

Or Bobtail tight, F4: Hound or Spaniel, Brache, or Hym:

Or Bobtail tike,

Lear 111.vi.69

It cannot be said, however, that they were altogether insensitive to dramatic propriety, as appears in changes like the following:

F3: To a low Trumpet, and a Point of War? F4: To a lowd Trumpet, and a Point of War?

2 Henry IV iv.i.52

F3: I cannot bid your daughter live, F4: You cannot bid my daughter live, ME: I cannot bid you bid my daughter live;

Much Ado v.i.265

And they wrestle with a few desperately corrupt passages to good effect, even though they do not always recover the sense of the earli- est texts:

F3: We fhould take root here, where we fir;

Or fir State Statues onely. F4: We fhould take root here where we fit;

Or fit State-Statues only.

Henry VIII i.ii.87

F3: My Birth-lace have I, and my lover upon This Enemie Town lie enter, if he flay me He does fair Juftice:

64 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

F4: My Birth-place have I, and my Lover left; upon This Enemy's Town I'le enter, if he flay me, He does fair Juftice: ME: My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon This enemy town. I'll enter: if he slay me, He does fair justice;

Coriolanus lv.iv.23-4

F3: I was the firft-born Son, that was the lalt That wore the Imperial Diadem of Rome: F4: I was the firft-born Son of him that laft Wore the Imperial Diadem of Rome: ME: I am his first-born son that was the last

That wore the imperial diadem of Rome;

Titus i.i.5-6

A certain literal-mindedness appears in many of the intelligible (PP- 355 ff-) and mistaken (pp. 370 ff.) changes, most notably, per- haps, in the complete misunderstanding of Benedick's hyperbole, "I can be fecret as a dumb man," which prompted the F4 reviser to emend, "I cannot be fecret as a dumb man" {Much Ado i.i.180). Their fastidiousness about words again appears in alterations of archaic or strained locutions which they endeavored to reduce to plainer sense. For example, the word sennet evidently was as obscure to the editor of the third division as to the editor of F2,^ and at Caesar i.ii.24 s.d., in a scene at which the Roman senate conceivably could have been present, he changed it to Senate. "The hand of death hath raught him" {Antony 1v.ix.29) he turned to "caught him." The undoubtedly curious use of defenjible at 2 Henry IV 11.iii.38 puzzled the editor and he altered to fenfible.

Altogether, we are inclined to think these changes depict the work- ings of the proof reader's mind. This mind is at its best in dealing with usage, uniformity, and punctuation; at its worst in dealing with the dramatic side of the plays, the action and the rhythm. It is not strikingly bold or ingenious, though our data accredit a palpably greater boldness and ingenuity to the editors of the second and third divisions than to that of the first. Within the limits indicated, the minds revealed in the changes in F4 are good minds. They are not very quick, perhaps, to seize on the less readily apparent defects of the text; they are more concerned with the import of words than with that of clauses and sentences; but once their attention has been fixed on a corruption in the text they are more likely than not to em.end it intelligently. Their failure to grasp the imagery of certain passages which they wrongly or unnecessarily altered betrays a cer-

^ See p. 41.

CHANGES IN THE FOURTH FOLIO 65

tain lack of imagination. In short, they seem to us — with all due allowance for occasional instances of surprising editorial ingenuity — to have been first and foremost the minds of competent proof read- ers.

There are very few changes affecting the action of the plays in F4; most of them alter the distribution of speeches. Some of these correct obvious mistakes and some are very shrewd guesses, the final rectifi- cation of the wrong distribution of speeches at Romeo i1i.ii.71-4 (see p. 344) and the superseded change in Titus (see p. 352) being particularly notable.

Likewise the changes affecting the meter are few and unremark- able. Most of them are elisions. The fact that, in making other alter- ations, the editors often destroyed the rhythm of a line makes us think that they were not particularly sensitive to the metrical flow of verse. The elisions for which they are responsible might well be set down to the desire for uniformity of printer's style which is char- acteristic of them.

In changes affecting the grammar and style, F4 makes a more im- pressive showing. The changes intended to bring about grammatical regularity are fairly numerous and follow the same lines as those ob- served in the previous folios. The changes classified under the head of style, which are, for the most part, similar to those found in F3, are again quite interesting.

The most conspicuous of these are — as in F3 — substitutions for archaic, obsolescent, or inelegant words (pp. 327, 347). They are more numerous than those in F3 and affect the same kinds of words. So far as our data go, vilde and its various derivatives undergo change (to vile) more frequently than any other outmoded form. Among the most interesting of these changes are Alahlajler to AlabaJIer (Richard III iv.iii.ii), Poefie to Pofie (Hamlet 111.ii.147), Ahram to auburn (Coriolanus Ii.iii.i8). The same relationship between the adopted and the intelligible changes (pp. 364 ff.) of this kind that was commented on apropos of F3 (p. 57) obtains here. A peculiarity of F4 is the edi- tors' habit of expanding contractions (p. 369), especially in the second and third divisions; we have noted many more examples than in either of the other folios. What was said above (p. 57) with regard to the mistaken changes under the head of style in F3 applies equally well to the comparatively small number found in F4 (pp. 376 ff.).

It is our opinion that, on the whole, F4 has been generally under- rated. We doubt that our own data do it full justice, for we have the impression that the Cambridge editors collated it somewhat negli-

66 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

gently.^ It has often been spoken of disparagingly for not doing what it never set out to do and has seldom received credit for what it did do. There is less difference between it and Rowe's edition than most people suppose. It is even arguable, we think, whether Rowe's use of F4, "the worst of the four [folios],"^ as the basis of his text was as heinous a crime as students of Shakespeare usually imply. Whatever else it may have been, it was, from Rowe's point of view, the most up- to-date and the most convenient edition and if (as is far from certain) he deliberately selected it in preference to one or more of its prede- cessors, he probably did so for the same reason that Theobald pre- ferred F2 to Fi,viz., that it had the advantage of various readings. One might even, without posing as devil's advocate, question whether F4 really was the worst of the four, w^hether its accumulation of fifteen hundred valid corrections and improvements does not balance its accumulation of mistakes and misprints. We have no desire to over- praise it, or even to praise it, but we think that, in the interest of accuracy, its care in the presentation of the plays to the reader should be recognized and its demonstrable share in the gradual proc- ess of mending and restoring the text of Shakespeare set down to its credit.

§7

Editorial Changes Affecting the Punctuation Alone

The reader who examines the data in Part II will notice in how many of the passages there set forth some adjustment in the punctua- tion accompanies a correction in the wording.^ In a considerable number of instances, however, the folio editors altered only the punc- tuation. These instances have been segregated for special study, and form the material of the present section, the results being disregarded in the statistical tables and in the introductory discussion of each folio editor's work as a whole.

' See p. 98. When we ourselves collated 76 passages containing the word month, we found 36 places in F4 where month was substituted for the moveth of F3. Of these only three are mentioned in the Cambridge edition. We have noticed a number of readings attributed by the Cambridge editors to Rowe which actually appear in F4. ' T. M. Parrott: William Shakespeare: a Handbook (1934), p. 208. 1 Compare for example Coriolanus i.iv.56: Fj: Thou art left Alar tins,

A Carbuncle intire: as big as thou art Weare not fo rich a lewell. Fa: Thou art left Martins,

A Carbuncle intire, as big as thou art, Were not fo rich a Jewel. ^

EDITORIAL CHANGES AFFECTING PUNCTUATION 67

One reason for isolating this material is that we are here, perhaps, less sure than elsewhere when a change is intentional. Obvious mis- prints the correction of which seemed within the scope of an ordinary compositor have of course been omitted from the reckoning. But wear and tear on these smallest of type faces, and mechanical acci- dent— the likelihood of which is increased by the smallness of the marks and by their special vulnerability when occurring at the end of a line — often render it next to impossible to determine what the punctuation really is. Variation in pointing between copies of the same edition adds to the confusion. Ample allowance must be made for the notorious laxity of the typesetters. Hundreds of apparently irresponsible changes in the later folios can only be the result of care- less composition. So numerous are these that it would be strange if none of them happened by the purest chance to improve the mean- ing. But we submit that few of the 173 adopted changes reprinted in the following pages can be the result of chance or of human falli- bility. They are, in our judgment, as truly editorial as those in any other section. 2

The changes in punctuation analysed total 2743^ and include sub- stantially all those noted in the Cambridge edition of 1891-3, with additions from volumes of the Furness Variorum, and from our own collation. Meaningless variations in usage between one folio text and another, and between Elizabethan and modern practice, have been disregarded. In F2, for example, a semicolon appears for a hyphen in compound words with sufficient frequency to suggest that it may

2 The page from the first folio, bearing the original proof corrections, now in the Folger Library, and reproduced by Willoughby in The Printing of the First Folio of Shakespeare (London Bibliographical Society, 1932), shows three actual changes of pointing. One is the omission of a comma which is a fairly obvious misprint; another is the insertion of a comma between two fairly obvious coordinate clauses. The third is of the kind that we classify under "clarifications of the meaning":

Agr. He ha's a cloud in's face.

Eno. He were the worfe for that, were he a Horfe fo is he being a man. is corrected thus: q

Eno. He were the worfe for tha^were he a Horfe. fo is he being a man. £/S y

I ^ Antony ni. 11.51-3

^ In view of the theories advanced by several scholars concerning the relative care with which the different sections of the folios were edited, it is interesting to note that the 2743 changes examined divide as follows: for the 14 comedies, 717 changes; for the histories, 10 in all, 442 changes; and for the 12 tragedies, 1584 changes. This gives an average of 51 changes per play in the comedies, 44 in the histories, and 132 in the tragedies, so that the tragedies have three times as many per play as the histories, and two and one half times as many as the comedies. Comparable averages per page are as follows: comedies, 2.2; histories, 1.6; tragedies, 4.9. These agree in pro- portion fairly closely with the averages per play, and seem to indicate that most care was taken with the tragedies, much less with the comedies, and still less with the histories.

68 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

have been an allowable use, though it was more probably an idio- syncrasy of the printer, or an eas}^ mechanical error. The hyphen is substituted by F3 in most of these cases. F2 also employs at times a comma at the end of an interrupted speech where F3 and subsequent editions have a dash. The insertion of an apostrophe to indicate a contraction has been noted only when the original form makes a different sense, e.g. give's, meaning "give us," for gives. The curious apostrophe which appears occasionally in all the folios, apparently to denote the omission of understood parts of speech,^ has not been considered to affect the meaning or style. The substitution of a period for a comma at the end of a speech where there is no hint that the succeeding speaker interrupts, or where the construction and capitalization indicate the end of a sentence, has been disregarded as being within the scope of the typesetter. No account has been taken of the alternation of interrogation point and exclamation point; nor have we attempted to distinguish the weight and significance of colon, semicolon, and period, or of commas and parentheses.

A tabulation of the 2743 intentional changes reveals considerable variance between the figures for individual plays. In Cymbeline, for example, 269 changes are noted, in Lear 201, in Coriolanus 159; in Gentlemen only 19, in i and j Henry VI 17 each. Variations so marked cannot be entirely explained by the proportionate length of the plays involved and the condition of the text; but since the number of changes affecting the thought in a given play does not increase pro- portionately with the total number of changes examined for that play^ we may reasonably assume that the judgment of the Cambridge editors is sound and that additional collation would add little to the picture.

The impression formed of the relative competency and the spe- cial interests of the editors of the three later folios, in our study of the verbal changes which they made, is substantially borne out by the examination of their work on the pointing. F4 is, on the whole, the best performance of the three. Despite the substantial improvement already made by F2 and F3 it attempts a few more improvements (1049) than does F3 (996) and many more than F2 (698); and it is responsible for more of the adopted emendations affecting the thought than either F2 or F3, though it also makes more errors than either. On certain points of style F4 is remarkably thorough and con-

* See for example Shrew 11. i. 209, F3F4.

* For example, we find in All's Well as many emendations affecting the thought as in Cymbeline (24 in each), though the total number of changes examined in All's Well is only 80, while in Cymbeline it is 269.

EDITORIAL CHANGES AFFECTING PUNCTUATION 69

sistent, as, for example, in the removal of superfluous stops, the set- ting off of vocatives and appositives, and the insertion of the apos- trophe in possessives.

Expressing our comparison statistically, we find that in the com- edies section the editor of F2 attempted 217 changes, of which 172 — the high percentage of 79 — are correct. In the histories section he attempted but 89, of which only 46 or 52% are correct. In the trag- edies section he attempted 427, of which only 183 or 43% are correct, indicating perhaps, exhaustion as he neared the end of his task. The editor of F3 attempted in the comedies section 196, of which 143 — 73% — are correct, in the histories section 152, of which 87 — 57% — are correct, and in the tragedies section 660, of which 474 — 71% — are correct. The "editor" of the comedies section^ of F4 attempted 304, considerably more than the editor of F2, and had 239 correct — 78%, nearly as high a proportion as F2. In the histories section 201 are attempted, of which 124 — 62% — are correct, and in the tragedies section 497, of which 344 — 69% — are correct.

Thus the quality of editorial performance is seen to have grown consistently better, F2, despite its high average in the comedies, averaging for the entire folio only 58% of correctness, F3 67%, F4 70%. The brilliance of F2 appears when the three are compared as to their relative correctness in changes affecting the thought. F2 here stands first, having 65 correct out of 115 attempts or 56%, while F3 has 41 out of 100 — 41% — and F4 67 out of 139 — 48%.

On the whole, however, the three later folios are more nearly alike in their handling of the punctuation than in the other phases of editorial revision, and in view of the opprobrium that has been heaped by scholars on Elizabethan and seventeenth-century print- ers, editors, and authors for their carelessness about punctuation, we have been more concerned to display the folio editors' achievement as a whole. We therefore study as one group the 2743 intentional changes in the three later folios. They are classified as follows: I. Adopted changes affecting the thought, 173; II. Superseded changes affecting the thought, 22;

III. Mistaken changes affecting the thought, no;

IV. Clarifications of meaning, 686;

V. Acceptable omissions, additions, and relocations of marks, not seriously affecting the meaning, 1064;

VI. Superseded changes of the same order, 100; VII. Mistaken changes of the same order, 588.

^ See page 28 fif. '

70 SHAKESPEARE'S SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EDITORS

It is perhaps unnecessary to say that our confidence in our own dis- tinction between intentional and unintentional changes is at its low- est ebb in groups III, V, VI and VII.

Since, as has been said, punctuation changes which alter the sense are of the same order as the intentional emendations considered in other sections of our study, they are similarly classified, though the category "Changes which Restore the Reading of an Earlier Text" does not occur, and we have not attempted to distinguish "intelli- gible" from "mistaken and arbitrary."^

The first group, which is clearly the most important, we reprint in full (pp. 147 ff., 259 ff., 330 ff.). It consists of changes, in the punctuation alone, which correctly alter the sense of a passage, or bring out the correct meaning in cases of ambiguity. A typical in- stance is found at Antony v.ii.55-g, where Fi reads

Shall they hoyft me vp, And fhew me to the fhowting Varlotarie Of cenfuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt. Be gentle graue vnto me, rather on Nylus mudde Lay me ftarke-nak'd,

Guided by the repetition of the construction in lines 58-62, the editor of F2 perceived that — although Cleopatra might reasonably say "Rather a ditch in Egypt" (than be exhibited in Rome), and then adjure her grave, "be gentle unto me" — the period after "Egypt"

^ The temptation to do so in three cases is very great. In Tempesl ni.iii.36-9,

I cannot too much mufe Such fhapes, fuch gefture, and fuch found e.xpreffing (Although they want the ufe of tongue) a kind Of excellent dumb difcourfe. Fi adds a comma after mufe, and rhis reading is followed by the majority of eight- eenth- and nineteenth-century editors. The authority of the Cambridge and most recent editions is, however, against the comma, and the New E?iglish Dictionary quotes the passage under muse, v. trans. Similarly, most modern editions reject the comma inserted by F3 and sundry later editors after "round" in Much Ado iii.iv. 19: "fet with pearles, downe fleeves, fide fleeves, and skirts, round underborn with a blewifh tinfel."

In the case of Fj: Tempest v.i.23, we refrain only because the "emendation" on the Fi reading is the omission of a comma at the end of a line — the easiest, we suppose, of typographical errors. The passage in Fi is as follows:

fhall not my felfe, One of their kinde, that rellifh all as fharpely, Paffion as they, be kindlier mou'd then thou art? Here passion is presumably a verb, meaning "feel," "be moved." In F2, however, the comma after fharpely is missing, so that the sense becomes "relish passion all as sharply as they." Rowe, Halliwell, White, Dyce, Rolfe and the New Cambridge ("That relish, all as sharply, | Passion as they") so read. All other editions, including the Cambridge, prefer the F: pointing. The New English Dictionary quotes under pas- sion, v., the reading of Fi and under relish, v., that of F2!

EDITORIAL CHANGES AFFECTING PUNCTUATION 71

was in fact an error. He therefore substituted a comma, creating a new reading which has been adopted by all subsequent editors.^ We feel that the number of such emendations (173) is surprisingly large, considering the aforementioned attitude of many scholars.^ About one in 16 of all the intentional changes in punctuation is an emenda- tion in thought adopted in essence by all modern editors. Surely this may be allowed to add one more word for the acuteness of the seven- teenth-century editor in deahng with <