Imagens da página
PDF
ePub

The folio of 1623 has, what the author doubtless wrote,

"The morning comes upon's: we'll leave you, Brutus."

Vol. i. p. 251;

“Who wears | my stripes | impress'd | on him: who | must bear | My beating to the grave.'

Cor. 5, 6."

Misquoted. In the folio of 1623 the passage stands thus ;

"and his own notion,

Who wears my stripes impress'd upon him, that
Must bear my beating to his grave, shall join

To thrust the lie unto him."

Vol. i. p. 299;

66

"But room, falëry: here comes Oberon.

And here my mistress, would that he was [were] gone!'

M. N. D. 2, 1."

In this passage the substitution of the trisyllabic archaism faëry" for the "fairy" of the old editions is a most daring and ridiculous device to eke-out the metre of a line from which a word has evidently escaped. Shakespeare, of course, always writes "fairy" and "fairies" as dissyllables; which words occur more than twenty times in the play now quoted. Vol. i. p. 303;

"In [For] that it sav'd me, keep it. In like necessity,
Which God protect thee from: it may | protect | thee|.'

Per. 2, 1."

Who would suppose that the second of these lines stands thus in the old editions,

"The which the gods protect thee, Fame may defend thee”?

Let me dismiss the subject of Shakespeare's metre with this remark:-it has sometimes happened that limping lines in our early dramatists, which had appeared more than suspicious to all except the sworn defenders of a very loose versification (who even recognised in them an "elegant retar

dation" or "a pause filling up the place of a syllable"), have been found at last to be mutilated, on the discovery of quartos with a correcter text.

Though the frequent occurrence of my friend Mr. W. N. Lettsom's name in the notes is a sufficient proof that I am greatly indebted to him, it by no means shows the full extent of my obligations; for on every one of the plays he has favoured me with not unimportant suggestions, of which I have silently availed myself.

I have to return my thanks to Mr. Bolton Corney and to my fellow-labourer Mr. J. O. Halliwell for some useful information, bibliographical and biographical; to Mr. Swynfen Jervis, not only for various ingenious conjectures, but also for the very kind interest he has taken in my work; and to Mr. Robson, the printer of the present edition, for again rendering me those services which I had occasion to acknowledge at the close of my former Preface.

ALEXANDER DYCE.

CORRIGENDUM.

P. 75, note 28, for "dramatic works, 1663 (and 1664)" read "dramatic works, 1664" (the seven spurious plays not being contained in the copies of that folio dated 1663: see p. 156 of this volume).

PREFACE

TO THE EDITION OF 1857.

PREVIOUS to the publication of the folio edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works in 1623 under the auspices of his fellow-actors Heminge and Condell, seventeen of his plays had appeared in quarto at various dates,-viz. King Richard the Second, King Richard the Third, Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's lost, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, King Henry the Fifth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer-Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, and Othello. As I have elsewhere enumerated the different impressions of those quartos (see List of Editions in vol. i.), and incidentally noticed their peculiarities (in my introductions to the various plays), I need only observe here, that, though they found their way to the press without the consent either of the author or of the managers, it is certain that nearly all of them were printed, with more or less correctness and completeness, from transcripts of мs. copies belonging to the theatre.

The folio of 1623 includes, with the exception of Pericles, the plays which had previously appeared in quarto, and twenty others which till then had remained in manuscript. The title-page of the volume runs thus,-Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Published according to the True Originall Copies: and in a prefatory address

[blocks in formation]

“To the Great Variety of Readers,"1 the editors announce what they have done in the following terms: "It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings. But, since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by

1 Attributed by Malone and others to Ben Jonson.-In Notes and Queries, Sec. Series, vol. iii. p. 8, Mr. Bolton Corney expresses his conviction that Edward Blount "was the real editor" of the folio of 1623: and on that subject he has recently favoured me with several communications, of which I regret that the limits of a note prevent me from giving more than the following portions. "For some years before I ventured to ascribe the editorship of the entire volume to Edward Blount, it had been my firm notion that the two paragraphs of which the address 'To the Great Variety of Readers' consists could not have been written by the same person. The affectation of smartness, and the anxiety to vend, which disfigure the first paragraph, are utterly unlike the sober criticism and earnestness of feeling which form the substance of the second. What had Ben Jonson to do with the sale of the volume ? What had Heminge and Condell to do with it after the transfer of the copyright? The persons chiefly interested in the sale of it were W. Jaggard, Ed. Blount, J. Smethwick, and W. Aspley; and as Blount had taken up the pen, on various occasions, for more than twenty years,—sometimes writing in a scholar-like way, and sometimes fantastically,-to him I am inclined to ascribe the first paragraph of the address. To Heminge and Condell I assign the rest, and I admire the spirit of it." After enumerating various works edited by Blount, and among them the Ars Aulica of Lorenzo Ducci, 1607, which he dedicated to William Earl of Pembroke and Philip Earl of Montgomery as an expression of his "particular dutie,”—Mr. Corney asks, “Can it be conceived that the other proprietors [of the folio Shakespeare, 1623] would not have urged him to edit the volume? Could he decently refuse the office of editor? He had, moreover, a threefold motive to accept it:-1. As a fulfilment of his particular dutie' to the noble brothers to whom the volume is dedicated; 2. As one of the printers of the volume, and therefore in part responsible for its due execution; and 3. As one of the four publishers at whose charges the volume was printed." Mr. Corney also suggests that Blount may have had some influence in procuring the commendatory poems prefixed to the volume. The verses by Hugh Holland were not composed for the occasion; but those by I. M. (James Mabbe) would certainly seem to have been written at the desire of Blount, who, in 1623, edited and published Mabbe's translation of Guzman de Alfarache (see note on Mabbe's verses, p. 165 of the present vol.); and such, too, may have been the case with respect to the verses by Ben Jonson and Leonard Digges, both of whom contributed lines to the romance just mentioned.

When Mr. Corney ascribes to Blount the editorship of the first folio, he, of course, does not mean that Blount had any concern in selecting the materials of which it consists, but that Blount undertook to see through the press the "copy" (a jumble of printed books and manuscripts) which Heminge and Condell had handed over to him:-and how was that task performed? with a carelessness almost unexampled!

« AnteriorContinuar »