The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

ought to be very cautious about introducing their conjectures into the text, and should place them only in notes, unless when they are such as must almost command assent, and the place corrected had previously yielded no tolerable sense or metric melody. It is a good rule to let well alone, as we say, and not to alter what gives tolerable good sense. I have, I believe, transgressed this rule only in a couple of places.

      4.

      The following instance is a convincing proof of the evil consequences of the proof-sheets not having passed under the author's own eye. Sismondi, the celebrated historian of France, wrote an historic tale named Julia Severa, which was of course written in French, and it was printed at one of the best offices in Paris; but the author himself did not see the proofs, whence, though it makes only two rather slender duodecimo volumes, there are actually whole pages of errata! I know, by the way, no better mode of weaning oneself from what I shall presently describe as printer-worship than a habit of examining the errata in books printed in the two last centuries. Further, in good printing-offices, at least in this country, it is the practice that the proofs, after they come from the compositor, should be read in the office and corrected before they are sent to the author or editor; while, even at the present day, in the Royal printing-office in Copenhagen there are no readers, and the sheets are sent out just as they come from the compositor, and what that state is must be known to any one conversant with printing-offices. Now it is very possible, or rather highly probable, if not certain, that such was the case in England also in former times; and supposing that it was the editors, and not Blount, that read the proofs, as the wretched state of the punctuation might seem to indicate, we need not feel any surprise at the very unsatisfactory state of the text of the folio of 1623. In opposition, however, to this opinion, the Cambridge editors think that "there were no proof-sheets, in those days, sent either to author or editor," and that "after a MS. had been sent to press it was seen only by the printers, and one or more correctors of the press employed by the publishers for that purpose." But on this hypothesis how are we to account for the great correctness of our author's Poems, Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, the Works of Jonson, Drayton, and others? The following words on the title-page of Marston's Fawne, 2nd edition, offer decisive evidence that authors did read the proof-sheets of their works:—"Now corrected of many faults, which, by reason of the author's absence, were let slip in the first edition."

      5.

      Notwithstanding all this, there are editors of Shakespeare who, rejecting the evidence of sense, grammar, and logic, obstinately adhere to the printed text, terming that alone authority, and even holding the second and later folios to be such; and it is really pitiable to see them superstitiously retaining for instance 'tis or it's when the metre requires it is, and syncopated forms as lov'd, own'd, etc., when the verse has need of the complete word, and vice versâ. These I denominate Printer-worshipers; for it is in reality to the authority of the printer, not of the poet, that they bow. The most extraordinary instance of this propensity in existence is the retention of "strain at a gnat" in our authorized version of the New Testament, a most manifest printer's error; for no schoolboy could have made it in translating, and in all the previous English versions the word is out. Yet there it has stood uncorrected for two centuries and a half! Hardly inferior as a piece of printer-worship is the following. A stanza of a song in Fletcher's Spanish Curate (ii. 5) ends thus:

      From that breath, whose native smell

      Indian odours far excel,

      thus expressing the very contrary of what was meant! Theobald, a true critic, therefore most properly added doth—in the wrong place, however, as it should begin the line; yet Mr. Dyce says, "the old text is doubtless what the poet wrote"!!

      To conclude, then, if the printed text cannot be made to yield sense the fault must lie, not with the poet, but with the transcriber or the printer, and a correction, made in conformity with the language and mode of thinking of the poet and his time, as it may give what he wrote, or may have written, should be admitted into the text. I must here, en passant, impress it on the reader as a maxim, that no word should be used in correction that is not to be found in the poet himself, or in his contemporaries.

      6.

      A printer is a transcriber or copyist, with the only difference that he uses type instead of a pen. He looks at the copy, as it is termed, and takes up the whole or part of a sentence in his mind, and then goes on composing or setting up the type. Meanwhile he is very possibly engaged in conversation, or he is listening to that of others, or he is thinking of something else. His mind being thus distracted, errors will naturally arise in what he is composing. Besides, he has very often to contend with the difficulties caused by illegible writing in the manuscript. There is another source of error—and one in which the printer is perfectly blameless—which I have never seen noticed. It is this, that in speaking and reading we often slur over, elide or suppress the final consonant if the following word begin with a consonant; and this is not peculiar to the English, but is to be found in the French, German, and other languages, being in fact a law of nature, the result of our organization. The most usual case is when, as in the following example, the first word ends and the next begins with the same consonant. Thus in one of the Irish Melodies of Moore, a poet more devoted to euphony than to sense, we have

      Thou wouldest still be adored as this moment thou art,

      where it will be seen that the letters in italics are not, and cannot be pronounced, without making a pause between the words. In another song of the same poet we have

      Mary, I believed thee true,

      And I was blest in thus believing.

      Here, if it were not for the second line, no one, on only hearing the first, could tell whether the word was believed or believe; for the sound is exactly the same: see on Much Ado, iv. 1; M. N. D. ii. 1. We surely then cannot blame the printer who makes a mistake in such cases, but we should not hesitate to correct it. We should also remember that this suppression or clipping is more frequent with the classes to which the printer probably belonged than with the educated.

      It is chiefly the dentals t and d that are thus suppressed before words commencing with a mute consonant; and it is surprising what a number of words there are in common use that have been thus curtailed. Thus in and the d is rarely sounded, even before vowels; of is so generally pronounced o' that it were needless printing it so, as is usual in the dramatists, were it not that o' represents on as well as of; we all say "Who did you see?" though we should write it "Whom did you see?" Instances, in fine, are numberless; but we should keep the principle constantly in mind. See the note on sly-slow, Rich. II. i. 3; and on by peeping, Cymb. i. 7.

      On the other hand, there is sometimes a transference of a consonant from the end of one word to the beginning of the next, which injures the sense—ex. gr.,

      Thence forth descending to that perilous porch

      Those dreadful flames she also found delayed.

      F. Q. iii. 12. 42.

       Here the poet probably wrote allayed, and the printer transferred to it the d of found. See on Temp. iv. 1.

      While treating of elision, it may not be useless to remark that when a word beginning with h is monosyllabic, or is not accented on its first syllable, the h is not sounded. Any one who will observe will find that his, for example, is usually pronounced is; so that there is no occasion for the 's of the dramatists. So we should write and pronounce a history, but write an historian and pronounce an 'istorian; for a historian, as it is too often written and pronounced, makes a most unpleasant hiatus. We may observe how constantly the aspirate is suppressed in the poetry of Greece and Rome.

      The errors of transcribers and printers are Omission, Addition, Transposition, Substitution. Of these I will now give instances, chiefly