cific gravity, reverend as Warburton in his | got home, he repented of his bargain, so right reverend overseership. If he scouts damaged and defaced was it intus et in the "narrow pedagogism of Seymour, the cute; and how, in a fit of disappointment, he blatant stupidity of Becket, and the compla- threw it by, nor, for the space of a year, had cent feeble-mindedness of Jackson," so does a word to say to (or peradventure of) it. he "the conceited wantonness of Pope, the Then, however, on moving it from the dust arrogance of Warburton, the solemn inflexi- and degradation of an upper shelf, Mr. Colbility of Johnson, and the smartness and lier discovered, to his surprise, that there mechanical ear of Steevens"—all of whom he was hardly a page in the disrespectable lookaccuses of seeking to commit outrages on the ing folio which did not present, in a handtext quite as insufferable as those of the writing of the time, some emendations in the small fry fore-going. Mr. Dyce is the editor pointing or in the text, while on most of them in whom he seems to place most confidence, they were frequent, and on many numerous. and from whose prospective labors he expects The handwriting, he is of opinion, is one most, though Mr. Dyce is remonstrated with man's only, though the amendments must on his "needless display of reading of worth- have been introduced from time to time, less books," and his habit of heaping up, as possibly during the course of several years. if a good sorites were to come of it, "instance Who the ready writer was who handled the upon instance from old volumes in all modern pen so industriously, is an interesting problanguages. upon Shakespeare's text lem, but not easily "floored;" Mr. Collier, without illustrating it." Mr. Knight is com- however, suggests a claim for Richard Perplimented, as unsurpassed, perhaps unequal-kins, the "great actor of the reign of Charles led among fellow-editors in intelligent venera- I." As to the capital question of the authortion for his Master, and a sympathetic ap-ity upon which these emendations were inprehension of his thoughts-but is gently rated for his "superstitious veneration for the first folio." Mr. Collier, too, is complimented on his devotion to the study of old English literature, especially to that of the Elizabethan age; but as an expositor of the Bard of all time, he is now regarded as stark naught. Mr. Collier's recent publication has excited our Skakspeare's Scholar to something like fever-heat-that publication of marginalia, so multifarious in character and so mysterious in origin, whereby hangs a tale. .. troduced, he contends, in limine, that no authority is required, that they carry conviction (generally speaking) on the very face of them. "Many of the most valuable corrections of Shakespeare's text are, in truth self-evident; and so apparent, when once suggested, that it seems wonderful how the plays could have passed through the hands of men of such learning and critical acumen, during the last century and a half . . . . without the detection of such indisputable blunders."* Mr. Collier avows his inclination to think that his possible Perkins, in some of the changes he made in the text, was indebted to his own sagacity and ingenuity, and merely guessed at arbitrary emendations; hence, and so far, his suggestions are only to be taken as those of an individual, who lived, we may suppose, not very long after the period when the dramas he elucidates were written, and who might have had intercourse with some of the actors of Shak But 'tis an old tale now, and often told. We have all heard, it may be presumed, the story of Mr. Collier's singular purchase: how in the spring of 1849 he happened to be in the shop of the late Mr. Rodd, of Great Newport street, at a time when a package of books arrived from the country; how, among the contents, two folios attracted his attention, one of which, bound in rough calf, was a copy of the second (1632) folio of Shakespeare's day. But again Mr. Collier argues, speare's Plays, "much cropped, the covers old and greasy," and "imperfect at the beninning and end;" how, in spite of the cropping, and the grease, and the imperfections, he bought the thing" an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own"-for thirty shillings sterling, paid down on the nail; how, when he Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays, from early MS. Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632, in the Possession of J. Payne Collier, Esq., F. S. A. Second Edition. London: Whittaker. 1853. from certain characteristics in his emendator's handicraft, that he must have had recourse to some now not extant authority. The emendation has special reference to stage purposes; and this fact, taken together with the internal evidence, has induced some of Mr. Collier's ablest reviewers to concludef that *Collier: Introduction, p. xviii. The Athenaeum, for instance; which observed, at the first appearance of the Perkins' folio, that here an anonymous corrector had humbled the dogmatism of critical savans and the sagacity of conjec the book in question was amended from some copy used by the prompter or stage-manager of a theatre in which these plays were performed, somewhere about the date of the folio, 1632. Now, Mr. White will not hear of "authority" being due to our possible Perkins. The corrections are many of them, he contends, anachronistic, such as no paulo-post Shakspeare-corrector could have perpetrated; some of them he can fix on the eighteenth century; and the share of various hands, writing at sundry times and in divers manners, in the concoction of the ensemble, he treats as beyond controversy. Besides, and this he adduces as an overpowering argument against both the authority and the intelligence of the MS. corrector, very many of the corrections are inadmissible, and could not possibly have formed a part of the text.' And he insists, with more emphasis than discretion, maybe, that if we defer to a single change in Mr. Collier's folio, because of its "authority," we must defer to all-whereas its best advocates exercise their indvidual judgment in accepting or rejecting its proposed changes, and, by so doing, refuse actual deference to its authority. What Mr. White maintains, is, that the only source of any authority for the text of Shakspeare is in the original folio of 1623, as published by the poet's friends, fellow-actors, and theatrical partners; that when that text is utterly incomprehensible from the typographical errors which deform it, and then only, we should seek emendations; that those emendations should be first looked for in the quartos, because they were contemporaneous with Shakspeare, although surreptitiously tural emendation, by at once gathering a whole harvest off a field which had been reaped and gleaned by many of the finest intellects of the last two centuries. "In justice to them," continues the reviewer, as well as on many other grounds, we must think that this emendator had access to an authority which they and we have not. With all the advantages and appliances which nearness to the author and to the first representation of his works may have given him over ourselves, it is to us an incredible supposition that any man should have done so infinitely more than all others put together, if he had depended solely on the same power of conjecture which those others possessed." -Ath. No. 1315. So, again, a reviewer of weight in Mr. White's own country, thinks it impossible that some of these corrections should have been "invented, or made up by mere conjecture, by a poor player in the earlier part of the seventeenth century [pet. princ.]..... when conjectural emendation of an English author was an art as yet unheard of," &c.— North American Review, April, 1854. published, or at least entirely neglected by him; that only such corrupted passages as the quartos do not make clear are proper subjects for the exercise of conjecture; and that such of these as conjecture does not amend, in a manner at once consistent with the context, with common sense, and with the language and customs of Shakspeare's day, should be allowed to stand untouched. Not what Shakspeare might, could, would, or should have written, but what, according to the best evidence, he did write, is held up as the only admissible object of the labors of his editors and verbal critics-the only guaranty for the integrity of his works consisting in the preservation of the words of the only authentic edition, when those words are understood by minds of ordinary intelligence, or supported by comparison with the language and manners of the author's day, or those of the immediately antecedent age. Until the self-elected editorial reformers of the text have taken out letters patent to improve it, would it not be better for them, Mr. White suggests, to confine themselves to editing it? seeing it is the function of no man to re-write Shakspeare, even to improve him, and our object being to arrive at what he wrote, not what, in our opinion, he should have written; nor would it ever do to say that if a suggested change be for the better, it must be accepted, because Shakspeare was sure to choose the most beautiful and forcible expression-since any such rule would put it in the power of every critic, every reader in fact, to decide what is the most beautiful and forcible.* Mr. White has exercised his right of private judgment with much discriminative taste. In the culture both of head and heart, he shows his competency to deal with a subject so replete with difficulty-now marked by rough gnarled obstacles, that seem to defy all " tooling," and now by delicate nuances, which to conserve and present with the bloom on them requires a subtle spirit, and a tender, akin to Shakspeare's own. But, keeping in mind his stand-point, he does seem at times to be a little over-peremptory in his rejection, of preposterous, of emendations which fellow-critics, in their right of private judgment, accept as highly felicitous. There is a soupçon of the Sir Oracle in his voice and mien, when he insists on this as the true reading because it commends itself to his judgment, and scornfully repudiates that as a base cheat and rank imposter, though it com * White, pp. 80, 85, 87, 276, 461, 501. mends itself to the judgment of a Dyce, or a Singer, or a Collier. Against Mr. Collier, indeed, his tone is by no means "nice;" and considering the extent, to which, after all, he adopts the Perkins' corrections-small as the proportion adopted may numerically be to that dissallowed-he might have treated "Perkins's Entire" more tenderly. It is a thousand pities to see how Shakspearian crities and commentators fall out by the way, and how utterly they ignore the nil disputandum in minute points de gustibus, and substitute for that broken law a habit, become second nature, disputandi in sæcula sæculorum. Placable bystanders must make up their minds to see hard blows interchanged in those conflicts, and a determined essay of the pugilists to spoil each other's beauty, as in this present dashing attempt (if we may strain an old verse) to beat the luckless COLLIER White. Mr. White's own house of defence is, perhaps, sufficiently glassy to justify caution in his manner of flinging stones; some of his conjectures and expositions in Shakspearian lore being quite open to attack, or strenuous demur: witness his criticism on Isabella in "Measure for Measure,"-his theory of the Sonnets, his rejection of the rhyming dialogue in the "Cymbeline" apparition scene, and of the dirge in the same play, &c. Or where, on the Clown's saying, in "Othello," to the musicians, "Why, masters, have your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i' the nose thus?" he asks-a proper query! -whether this knowledge of a minute provincial peculiarity is not an evidence that Shakspeare knew more of Italy than by books. or hearsay? Or where, in his dissertation on Othello's complexion, which he is anxious to prove was not at all of the Uncle Tom hue, he explicitly lays it down that Shakspeare "had doubtless never seen either a Moor or a negro, and might very naturally confuse their physiological traits"-although so slight an allusion, ut supra, to the nasal tones of the Neapolitans is enough to make Shakspeare so far-travelled a gentleman. While he is very prompt, again, to ridicule some of his fellow-commentators (if he will allow of the fellowship) for the superfluity and gratuitous character of their occasional glosses, he himself condescends, at intervals, to practice the same work of supererogation-as where he carefully analyses, and distributes to each man his due, the welcome given by Hamlet to Horatio, Bernardo, and Marcellus. The eagerness, too, of his endeavors to find in this way, and have so used it beyond the memory of the oldest living men; just as we say sheer impudence, or sheer stupidity. . . . Thus, we would say that one man committed an act out of sheer selfishness, but that another's was pure benevolence." So ends one paragraph, and the next Mr. White begins with, "Thus much for the benefit of English readers." We can only respond to this beneficium with a graceless "Thank'ee for nothing," or exclaim with Celia, "O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all whooping!" The word "right" too, in the sense of direct or immediate ("for I do see the cruel pangs of death right in thine eye," King John, V. 4), he is happy to say, survives in America, as it does in England, though the compound "right away, which he adduces in evidence, and which he taunts us with sneering at, is we acknowledge, peculiar to America. And hereupon, "right away" he tells us, that "the language of the best educated Americans of the northern states is more nearly that of Shakespeare's day, than that of the best born and bred English gentlemen who visit them; although the advantage on the score of utterance is generally on the side of the Englishmen"*-the 66 *To this statement Mr. White tags a notice of one gross and radical error of language into which all Englishmen of the present day fall, without exception. Oxford-men and Cambridge-men speak it; dor not excepted, write it. They say that one thing and all English authors, Mr. Macaulay and Mr. Lan is different to another. Now, this is not an idiom, or a colloquialism: it is radically, absurdly wrong. One thing is different from another and in America this is the only expression of the least pretensions to education." This is bad news, idea ever heard among those who have even the for news it certainly is to us, that "all Englishmen of the present day, without exception," are guilty of the solecism in question. But as to the truth of the allegation, we differ to Mr. White--and the sense of constraint we endured in writing that to instead of the wonted from, is our internal evidence against him: he may say, indeed, that nobody, even in England, writes" to differ to," while everybody in England writes "different to"-but de jure it is a distinction without a difference; and at any rate we rejoice in knowing plenty of people who do neither. And here, by the way, as Mr. White is seemingly Americans being possibly fonder than their "overweening cousins" of going to Naples, as a certain Clown might infer. Again,-on Johnson's explanation of the word "pheese" ("I'll pheese you in faith," says Kit Sly,) and on that of Gifford and Charles Knight, Mr. White says, "All wrong, as any "Yankee" could tell the learned gentlemen. The word has survived here with many others which have died out in England, and are thence called Americanisms. To "pheese" is "to irritate," "to worry."' We fancy the same usage of the word is not so obsolete in the conservative haunts of racy rural English, as the New Englander supposes. Nevertheless we thank him for this note, and for another on Slender's "two Edward shovelboards," a game said to be now played in England by Colliers only (so their namesake testifies), but which Mr. White has often seen played at the Eagle Tavern, under Brooklyn Heights," though now replaced by the less exigeant recreation of ten pins. The word "placket" too, it seems, is in ordinary currency in the United States in the sense of "petticoat"-and says Mr. White, "Mr. Steevens, Mr. Nares, and Mr. Dyce, might have been saved their labors, and Mr. Halliwell his doubts, by inquiring of the Benedicks among their fellow Shakesperians on this side the water concerning this word. . . . Mr. Douce, to whose learning and judgment the students of Shakespeare are so much indebted, says 'a placket is a petticoat.' Had he been writing for Americans he need not have said it." Nor for Britishers, with a common dictionary within reach. But perhaps the most instructive of Mr. White's national illustrations of this kind is the following: K. Rich. Well! as you guess? --K. Rich. III. Act. IV. Sc. 4. words which it pleases John Bull to call Americanisms, they are English of the purest and best, which have lived here while they have died out in the mother country." Well! John Bull, I guess after that you're a gone coon. But to recur to the Collier controversy. We have testified already to Mr. White's general taste and judgment in matters of conjectural emendation, and for the most part he carries us with him in his decisions. His expose of the extravagances of various Shakspearian commentators is full of honest hearty disdain, as well it may be in an admining lover, loyal to the core, of the myriadminded One. Of Mr. Becket he finds it difficult to speak with patience or decorum, and calls his "Shakspeare's himself again" sheer "stupidity run mad." Zachary Jackson, for his absurd and atrocious changes in the text inevitably suggesting the suspicion of all but idiocy, yet uttered with the consummate serenity of "owlish sapience," he styles "the very Bunsby* of commentators." And who will not share in his protest against such drivelling as we see spent on, e. g, this fragment: Flav. I have retired me to a wasteful cock, And set mine eyes at flow. Timon of Athens, II. 2. "Sir Thomas Hanmer interpreted wasteful cock' a cockloft or garret! and Bishop Warburton agreed with him. Pope had the effrontery to change wasteful cock' to lonely room. These be thy editors, O Shakespeare!" It must be owned that Mr. White has reason on his side, too, in some of his onslaughts against "Perkins." Valuable we believe many of the MS. emendations to be; many, too bad, and some too good, to be true.t were "If there be two words for the use of Mr. White is fond of an allusion to the light which, more than any others, our English literature of the day. Thus, in describing the procousins twit us, they are well,' as an inter-gress of his own volume he says, the "The book rogative exclamation, and guess.' Milton was not deliberately made; but like Topsy, it uses both, as Shakespeare also frequently adds, "it was not 'raised on a spec;' for... 'growed.' Unlike that young lady, however," he does, and exactly in the way in which they five editions to be sold it would not pay me dayare used in America; and here we have laborer's wages for the mere time I have devoted them both in half a line. Like most of those to the preparation of it." So again he sarcastically refers to "Sir Thomas Hanmer, Baronet, (as Inspector Bucket would say,)"-to the Mantalini-ism of the tie-wig editors, and to Mr. Singer's making Lear in the climax of his agony talk like "the young man of the name of Guppy." punctilious in these minutia, we would fain learn the reason of his eliminating an honest vowel from the word Shakspearian, which he systematically spells Shakesperian? Why onst the a in the antepenultimate? He may twit us with omitting the e of the first syl'able; but that at least is no mere question of grammar, and is (what surely the other is not?) an open question. Let us here indicate a few passages in which the supposed Perkins introduces new matter into the textus receptus, by a whole line or lines at a time. Some of these one can neither believe without a struggle, to be either veri or ben trovati. But The celebrated substitution of "who smoth- | for "to untruth" in a much canvassed line ers her with painting," for "whose mother in the "Tempest" (Act I. Sc. 2.) Shakswas his painting," is ably discussed by our peare, we submit, would have rejoiced in his Shakspeare's Scholar, and we incline on the Scholar, in these and some like instances of whole to his mistrust of the change, as we acute, scrutinizing, rightfully jealous scholarcertainly do to his rejection of "boast" in lieu ship. Mr. White's own conjectural emendaof "beast" in Lady Macbeth's appeal; and tions are few and feasible-affecting little beof "Warwickshire ale" for "shire ale" in the yond a slight misprint or an error in punctuatinker's gossip; and again of "unto truth" tion. It should be added that, notwithstanding his rule of adhesion, wherever it is at all practicable, to the original folio, he is often free enough in his tamperings with its text, and now and then scores a sentence as hopelessly corrupt, and more than once deals in somewhat arbitrary fashion with the very genuineness of what is there set down. what shall be said of the emendator's audacity, if he really emendated without authority? In each of the subjoined extracts the italicised lines are the MS. additions of Mr. Collier's nescio quis: "Says Sir Eglamour to Silvia : Madam, I pity much your grievances, Two Gentlemen of Verona, IV. 3. This is at least plausible, and by those who believe in the authority will be readily accepted. A hitch in the assumed system of rhymes is thus "made right" in Dromio's speech: "No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell: A devil in an everlasting garment hath him, fell; -"Let be, let be! The criticisms interspersed through his volume are highly interesting, and glow with sometimes impassioned admiration, finely attempered to the grand theme. The one badly eminent exception is that on Isabella, to which we may again refer, with regret. The following brief comment on Claudio's dread apprehension of being worse than worst, Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts bespeaks the man of high thought and deep Would that I were dead, but that, methinks, al- possess an awful beauty which it is hardly in ready I am but dead, stone looking upon stone. What was he that did make it?" Lord Bardolph advises Winter's Tale, V. 3. "Consult upon a sure foundation, " &c. 2 Henry IV., I. 3. Especially notable are the new complementary rhymes in the dialogue of Queen Margaret and Glo`ster: "Q.M. I see no reason why a king of years Gl. My staff?-here noble Henry, is my staff: the power of language to describe. The idea seems to be but vaguely hinted; and yet an undefined, peculiar dread goes with the words, that would vanish, or dwindle into certain fear, if we were told exactly what they mean. We feel that they have conveyed to us that which they themselves tell us is too horrible for utterance. What can be those monstrous thoughts which ever seem to be about to take an hideous shape, and ever again vanish into formlessness, leaving the tor *For example, in Theseus' famous verses on Imagination, Mr. White rejects with a peremptory "cannot be Shakespeare's," the two concluding lines "Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear." Midsummer Night's Dream, V. I. As we have seen already, he also repudiates in toto the dirge sung by Polydore and Cadwal over their sister; declaring that nothing could be tamer, more pretentious, more unsuited to the characters. "Will anybody believe," he asks, "that Shakespeare, after being out of Stratford grammar-school, or before, wrote such a couplet as, 'All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust!'" |