The Shakespeare-Expositor - Thomas Keightley

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by some one else, or began to write in conjunction with some one, and, the play being unfinished at his death, it was concluded by another poet, possibly Massinger, who alone seems capable of writing such a noble termination of so fine a drama.

      THE TEXT

      CORRECTED AND ELUCIDATED.

      INTRODUCTION.

      I. THE TEXT. II. THE VERSE.

      COMEDIES.

      HISTORIES.

      TRAGEDIES.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      1.

      In reading and criticising the plays of Shakespeare, we must always bear in mind that they were written for the stage, not for the closet, to be acted, not to be read. Shakespeare, as it would appear, was utterly regardless of literary fame; he had, as we have seen, one sole object in view, to acquire as much money as would enable him to quit the hurry and bustle of London, and settle down in his native Stratford-on-Avon as a man of independent property, and be, if possible, the founder of a family. Pouring forth, therefore, his tragic and comic strains, with as little apparent effort as the songsters of the grove warble their native notes, he set no value on them but as they filled the Globe and the Blackfriars and thus tended to the realization of the great object of all his ambition; and he never gave a single one of them to the press, as was done by Jonson and others who sought for literary fame by their dramas. Hence, though the verse is always melodious, we must not look in them for the finish and perfection which we find in those of a Racine or a Molière; we must, on the contrary, be prepared to meet with all the marks of haste and carelessness, with contradictions and even with absurdities. It would really dismay one to think of their being submitted to the ordeal through which the pieces of the great Corneille have been made to pass by Voltaire. Corneille, by the way, like Shakespeare, valued his plays by the money they produced.

      Copies of about one-half of his plays were surreptitiously obtained by the booksellers, who printed them with more or less of care; but of this he took no heed: and when he finally retired to Stratford, he left in the hands of his fellowplayers the manuscripts of his plays, published and unpublished. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that he ever had any intention of collecting and publishing his dramatic writings—a thing of which there had as yet been no instance. In 1616, the very year of Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson, who, widely different from the great dramatist, set a high value, and a just one, on his plays as literary compositions, collected all he had written up to that date and published them, with his other poetical pieces, in a folio volume. It may have been this that induced Heminge and Condell, two members of the company to which Shakespeare had belonged, to make a collection of his pieces also, and give them to the world in a folio volume. For this purpose they used the 4to impressions of such plays as had been printed, making some corrections and alterations in them from the playhouse copies; and adding to these the manuscript plays which were in the possession of the theatre, they put the whole into the hands of the publishers, one of whom, Edward Blount, who was a man of some literary pretensions, is supposed, not without probability, to have undertaken the task of seeing the work through the press. Such was the origin of the celebrated folio of 1623, of which it was, in my opinion most justly, said by the late Mr. Hunter, that "perhaps in the whole annals of English typography there is no record of any book of any extent and any reputation having been dismissed from the press with less care and attention;" while Mr. Knight (who ought to have known a good deal about such matters) boldly declares that "perhaps, all things considered, there never was a book so correctly printed!" Such as it is, however, it and the previous 4to impressions are the only authority we have for the text of these marvellous creations of the human intellect.

      2.

      Few, I should hope, will refuse to assent to the two following postulates.

      I. No eminent writer—however he might obscure his meaning by metaphor, ellipsis, or other figures of speech—has ever written pure nonsense.

      II. No true poet ever wrote limping, imperfect, or inharmonious verses.

      We may add to these the plain facts, that printers are not, and never were, infallible, and that those works of which the authors themselves read the proof-sheets are in general more correct than those of which those sheets were read by others.

      3.

      Now the plays of Shakespeare are, as is well known, full of passages of which it is nearly impossible to make any good sense, and they abound in imperfect and inharmonious verses. On the other hand, the poems of Venus and Adonis, and of Lucrece, which he himself probably saw through the press, are almost entirely free from error, and do not contain a single unmelodious verse. The natural inference, then, is, that the defects of the plays are all owing to the transcribers and printers, and that the correction of them and the restoration of sense and melody, when possible, is the legitimate office of sound emendatory criticism. The truth of this has been felt from the very beginning; for in the 2nd folio, published in 1632, only nine years after the first, there are numerous corrections, which must have been made by the editor solely on his own authority, for, many of them being very bad, he could not have derived them from any manuscripts. And the same is the case in the subsequent folios, of all of which there are many copies in existence, like that which Mr. Collier met with to his misfortune, and which has excited such a storm in a puddle—of which, by the way, my own opinion is that the corrections in it were made between 1744, the date of Hanmer's, and 1765, that of Johnson's edition; whence I only cite it for the corrections later than the former date. These contain manuscript corrections, some, like that copy, anonymously, others by Southern and other men of repute. In the beginning of the last century Rowe gave the first example of an annotated edition of Shakespeare's works, and from that time to the present edition has succeeded edition bearing the names of critics of various degrees of ability and eminence, but all agreeing in the necessity of revising the text and rendering it as correct as may be possible.

      Of the early editors, Rowe and Pope made little more than the most obvious corrections, Warburton, always ingenious and almost always wrong, made notwithstanding some that were very good, as also did Hanmer. But they were all eclipsed by Theobald, one of the acutest emendatory critics that this country has produced, whose merits, though long clouded through the malignity of Pope, are now fully acknowledged. Capell, the next in order of time, also rendered good service; but Johnson, Steevens, and Malone have done much less than might have been expected. Of these the last was a native of Ireland, the only emendatory critic that country has produced; and, in my opinion, he is not at all inferior to his English rival Steevens. That true critic Tyrwhitt should also be noticed as an emendator of a high order. It is surprising how little has really been done in the present century; and I was perfectly astonished to find what a number of passages still remained in a corrupt or imperfect state when I ventured on the task of emendation. It would seem as if critical sagacity, low in rank as it may be, is one of those talents most rarely bestowed; and besides, print appears to exercise almost a magic power over most persons; they seem to think that what is in print cannot be wrong: it is in fact only very few minds that can fully emancipate themselves from its influence. It must, however, be remembered that alteration and critical emendation are widely different. The former is in the power of almost any one; the latter, as I said, requires a peculiar faculty. It is a curious fact that in nothing does critical sagacity show itself more than in, as I may say, seeing what is before the eyes. For an instance see the first note on Henry V. Another curious fact is this, that poets (Coleridge for example) are rarely good emendators. It is, in fine, the merest folly, and a proof of the grossest ignorance, to sneer at such labours and represent them as needless, if not mischievous. Editors,

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