The commentators have striven hard to extract sense from the first line, but not one of them satisfied another, nor indeed themselves. Edgar, in truth, is shocked at the profligate and uncontrollable licentiousness of Goneril: “O unextinguish'd blaze of woman's will!" in other words, desire (i. e. "will" or lust) in the female sex bursts forth in a flame that cannot be subdued. The scribe did not understand what he put upon paper, misheard unextinguish'd blaze, and wrote "undistinguish'd space." Such was, probably, the origin of the hitherto received nonsense. Another brief and laughable proof may be adduced from "Coriolanus:" it is where Menenius, in Act II. Scene I., is talking of himself to the Tribunes:-"I am known" (he says in all editions, ancient and modern) "to be a humorous. patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine, with not a drop of allaying Tyber in it; said to be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint." Nobody has offered a note explanatory of "the first complaint," and it has always passed current as the language of Shakespeare. Is it so? Assuredly not; for what has "a cup of hot wine" to do with "the first complaint?" The old corrector calls upon us to read " a cup of hot wine, with not a drop of allaying Tyber in it; said to be something imperfect in favouring the thirst complaint," and the utterly lost humour of the passage is at once restored. The scribe misheard thirst, and wrote "first;" and the blunder has already lasted between two and three centuries, and might have lasted two or three centuries longer, but for the discovery of this corrected folio. It is to be observed that these last emendations apply to plays which were printed for the first time in the folio, 1623. This fact tends to prove that the manuscript, put into the hands of the printer by Heminge and Condell, in spite of what they say, was not in a much better condition than the manuscript used by stationers for the separate plays which they had previously contrived to publish. The effect of the ensuing pages must be considerably to lessen our confidence in the text furnished by the player-editors, for the integrity of which I, among others, have always strenuously contended. Consequently, I ought to be among the last to admit the validity of objections to it; and it was not until after long examination of the proposed alterations, that I was compelled to allow their general accuracy and importance. There are some that I can yet by no means persuade myself to adopt; others to which I can only give a qualified approbation; but still a large remainder from which I am utterly unable to dissent". It was, as may be inferred, very little, if at all, the habit of dramatic authors, in the time of Shakespeare, to correct the proofs of their productions; and as we know that, in respect to the plays which had been published in quarto before 1623, all that Heminge and Condell did, was to put the latest edition into the hands of their printer, so, possibly, in respect to the plays which for the first time appeared in the folio, 1623, all that they did might be to put the manuscript, such as it was, into the hands of their printer, and to leave to him the whole process of typography. It is not at all unlikely that they borrowed playhouse copies to aid them; but these might consist, sometimes at least, of the separate parts allotted to the different actors, and, for the sake of speed in so long a work, scribes might be employed, to whom the manuscript was read 5 Some of the most interesting, if not the most curious emendations, apply not only to the songs by Shakespeare, introduced into various plays, but to the scraps of ballads and popular rhymes put into the mouths of many of his characters. Nearly all these, especially the latter, are corrected, and in some places completed; for it is not difficult to imagine that, even if originally accurately quoted, corruptions in the course of time, by the licence of comic performers and other causes, crept into them. These manuscript restorations are so frequent, that it is out of the question to enumerate them, but they apply to nearly every play; and in addition it may be noticed, that whenever the poet borrows any thing, it is invariably underscored by the old corrector: thus several quotations, not hitherto suspected to be such, are clearly indicated; and, as a singular specimen, we may point to the conclusion of "Troilus and Cressida," where Pandarus cites four lines, not hitherto suspected to have been written by any other author. a as they proceeded with their transcripts. This supposition, and the fraudulent manner in which plays in general found their way into print, may account for many of the blunders they unquestionably contain in the folios, and especially for the strange confusion of verse and prose which they sometimes exhibit. The not unfrequent errors in prefixes, by which words or lines are assigned to one character, which certainly belong to another, may thus also be explained: the reader of the drama to the scribe did not at all times accurately distinguish the persons engaged in the dialogue; and if he had only the separate parts, and what are technically called the cues, to guide him, we need not be surprised at the circumstance. The following is a single proof, the first that occurs to memory it is from "Romeo and Juliet," Act III. Scene V., where the heroine declares to her mother that, if she must marry, her husband shall be Romeo: "And when I do, I swear, It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate, Rather than Paris.-These are news indeed!" This is the universal regulation; but, as we may very well believe, the closing words, "These are news, indeed!" do not belong to Juliet, but to Lady Capulet, who thus expresses her astonishment at her daughter's resolution: therefore, her speech ought to begin earlier than it appears in any extant copy. Juliet ends, La. Cap. σ And when I do, I swear, These are news, indeed! There cannot surely be any dispute that this is the mode in which the poet distributed the lines, and in which the old corrector of the folio, 1632, had heard the dialogue divided on the stage in his time. It has been stated that he did not pass over minute changes, sometimes of most trifling consequence; but it is obvious that alterations, very insignificant in appearance, may be of the utmost importance in effect. A single letter, wrongly inserted, may strangely pervert or obscure the meaning; and it may never have been suspected that the early editions were in fault. We meet with a remarkable instance of it in "Macbeth," Act I. Scene VII., where the Lady is reproaching her irresolute husband for not being ready to murder Duncan when time and opportunity offered, although he had previously vaunted his determination to do it: she asks him, "What beast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? Such is the text as it has always been recited on modern stages, and printed in every copy of the tragedy from the year 1623 to the year 1853; yet that there is a most singular misprint in it will be manifest, when the small, but most valuable, manuscript emendation of the folio, 1632, is mentioned. In truth, Lady Macbeth does not ask her husband the absurd question, "what beast" made him communicate the enterprise to her? but, what induced him to vaunt that he would kill Duncan, and then, like a coward, shrink from his own resolution ?— "What boast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me? She taunts him with the braggart spirit he had at first displayed, and the cowardice he had afterwards evinced. It cannot be denied by the most scrupulous stickler for the purity of the text of the folio, 1623 (copied into the folio, 1632), that this mere substitution of the letter o for the letter e, as it were, magically conjures into palpable existence the longburied meaning of the poet. In another place, and in another play, the accidental omission of a single letter has occasioned much doubt and discussion. In Act III. Scene I. of "The Tempest," Ferdinand, while engaged in carrying logs, rejoices in his toil, because his burdens are lightened by thoughts of Miranda:"This my mean task Would be as heavy to me, as odious; but The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures;" and he afterwards adds, as the passage is given in the folio, 1623: "But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours, Most busy lest when I do it." The folio, 1632, altered the hemistich to "Most busy least when I do it," and Theobald read "Most busiless when I do it," not understanding how Ferdinand, at the same moment, could be most busy, and least busy. The corrector of the folio, 1632, however, removes the whole difficulty by showing that in the folio, 1623, a letter had dropped out in the press, the addition of which makes the sense clear and consistent, and concludes the speech by a most felicitous compression of the sentiment of the whole in seven words : "But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours; that is to say, he was most laboriously employed, but blest in that very toil by the sweet thoughts of his mistress. The old corrector converted "least," of the folio, 1632, into blest, by striking out a, and by inserting b with a caret. The constantly recurring question in all these cases is, from whence the information was derived, which enabled a person, so frequently and so effectually, to give us what, by implication, he asserts to be the real language of the greatest poet of mankind? Was he in a condition to resort to other and better manuscripts? Had he the use of printed copies which do not now remain to us? Was he instructed by more accurate recitation at a theatre? Was he indebted to his |