The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 16, February, 1859

"Concerning the place and the period of the action of this play, it seems that Shakspeare did not trouble himself to form a very accurate idea. The Ephesus of "The Comedy of Errors" is much like the Bohemia of "The Winter's Tale,"—a remote, unknown place, yet with a familiar and imposing name, and therefore well suited to the purposes of one who, as poet and dramatist, cared much for men and little for things, and to whose perception the accidental was entirely eclipsed by the essential. Anachronisms are scattered through it with a profusion which could only be the result of entire indifference,—in fact, of an absolute want of thought on the subject."—Vol. III. 189.

We think this could not be better said, if only we might supplant "things" with the more precise word "facts"; for about things Shakspeare was never careless. It is only that deciduous foliage of facts which every generation leaves heaps of behind it dry, and dead, that he rustles through with eyes so royally unconcerned. As a good example of Mr. White's style, we should be inclined to cite the Introduction to "Love's Labor's Lost," from which we detach this single crystal:—

"It is ever the ambitious way of youthful genius to aim at novelty of form in its first essays, while yet in treatment it falls unconsciously into a vein of reminiscence; afterward it is apt to return to established forms, and to show originality of treatment."

The temptation which too easily besets an editor of Shakspeare is to differ, if possible, from everybody who has gone before him, though but as between the N.E. and N.N.E. points in the circumference of a hair. We do not find Mr. White guilty in this respect for what he has done, but sometimes for what he has left undone in allowing the Folio text to remain. The instance that has surprised us most is his not admitting (As You Like it, Act iv. Sc. 1) the reading,—"The foolish coroners of that age found it was Hero of Sestos," instead of the unmeaning one, "chroniclers." He has been forced, for the sake of sense, to make some changes in the Folio text which seem to us quite as violent, and we cannot help thinking that the gain in aptness of phrase and coherence of meaning would have justified him in doing as much here. He admits, in his note on the passage, that the change is "very plausible"; but adds, "If we can at will reduce a perfectly appropriate and uncorrupted word of ten letters to one of eight, and strike out such marked letters as h, l, and e, we may re-write Shakspeare at our pleasure." Mr. White has already admitted that "chroniclers" is not perfectly appropriate in admitting that the change is "very plausible"; and he has no right to assume that the word is uncorrupted,—for that is the very point in question. As to the disparity in the number of letters, no one familiar with misprints will be surprised at it; and Mr. Spedding, in the edition of Bacon already referred to, furnishes us with an example of blunder27 precisely the reverse, in which one word of eight letters is given for two of ten, (sciences for six princess,)—the printer in both cases having set up his first impression of what the word was for the word itself. Had this occurred in Shakspeare, instead of Bacon, we should have had a series of variorum notes like this:—

"That sixpence was the word used by our author scarcely admits of doubt. From a number of parallel passages we select the following:—

'Live on sixpence a day, and earn it.'—Abernethy.

'I give thee sixpence? I will see thee and-so-forthed first!'—Canning.

'Be shot for sixpence on a battlefield.'—Tennyson.

'Half a crown, two shillings and sixpence.'—Niemand's Dictionary.

Moreover, we find our author using precisely the same word in the 'Midsummer Night's Dream':—

'Thus hath he lost sixpence a day during his life.'" JONES.

"Had the passage read 'two princes,' we might have thought it genuine; since 'the two kings of Brentford' must have been familiar to our great poet, and he was also likely to have that number deeply impressed on his mind by the awful tragedy in the tower, (see Richard the Third,) where, it is remarkable, precisely that number of royal offspring suffered at the hands of the crook-backed tyrant. The citation from Niemand's Dictionary, by the Rev. Mr. Jones, tells as much in favor of two princes as of sixpence; for how could the miseries of a divided empire be more emphatically portrayed than in the striking, and, as it seems to me, touching phrase, HALF a crown? Could we in any way read 'three princes,' we should find strong support in the tradition of 'the three kings of Cologne,' and in the Arabian story of the 'Three Calenders.' The line quoted by Thomson, (Shakspeare, by Thomson, Vol. X. p. 701.) 'Under which King Bezonian, speak or die!' (though we agree with him in preferring his pointing to the ordinary and meaningless 'Under which King, Bezonian,' etc.) unhappily can throw no light on the present passage till we know how many King Bezonians are intended, and who they were. Perhaps we should read Belzonian, and suppose a reference to the Egyptian monarchs whose tombs were first explored by the intrepid Belzoni. The epithet would certainly be appropriate and in Shakspeare's best manner; but among so many monarchs, a choice of two, or even three, would be embarrassing and invidious." BROWN.

"As for the 'Three Calenders,' there can be no reasonable question that Shakspeare was well acquainted with the story; for that he had travelled extensively in the East I have proved in my 'Essay to show that Sir Thomas Roe and William Shakspeare were identical'; and that he was familiar with the Oriental languages must be apparent to any one who has read my note on 'Concolinel' (Love's Labor's Lost, Act iii. Sc. 1). But that 'six princes' is the true reading is clear from the parallel passage in "Richard the Third," which I am surprised that the usually accurate Mr. Brown should have overlooked,—'Methinks there be Six Richmonds in the field.'" ROBINSON.

"I was at first inclined to the opinion of the late Mr. Robinson, but maturer consideration has caused me to agree with the eloquent and erudite Jones. There is a definite meaning in the word sixpence; and a similar error of the press in Lord Bacon's 'Advancement of Learning,' where the context shows that sixpences and not sciences was the word intended, leads me to suspect that the title of his opus magnum should be De Augmentis Sixpenciarum. Viewing the matter as a political economist, such a topic would have been more worthy of the Lord Chancellor of England; it would have been more in accordance with what we know of the character of 'the meanest of mankind'; and the exquisite humor of the title would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us in his 'Discoveries,' under the head Dominus Verulamius, that 'his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.' Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment, a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord Chancellors. A comic stroke of this description would have been highly attractive to a mind so constituted, and might easily escape the notice of a printer, who was more likely to be intent upon the literal accuracy of the Latin than on the watch for extraordinary flights of humor." SMITH.

But we must return from our excursion into an imaginary variorum, delightful because it requires no eyesight and no thought, to the more serious duty of examining the notes of Mr. White. We have mentioned a single instance in which we differ with him as to the propriety of a fanatical adherence to the text of the Folio of 1623. We differ, because we think that sense is not all that we have a right to expect from Shakspeare,—that it is, indeed, merely the body in which his genius creates a soul of meaning, nay, oftentimes a double one, exoteric and esoteric, the spiritus astralis and the anima caelestis. Had the passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm, —had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination, to tamper with which because we could not understand it would be Bottom-like presumption,—one of those tempests of passion where every word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen,—in any of these cases we should have agreed with Mr. White that to abstain was a duty. But in a sentence of lightsome and careless prose, and where the chances are great that the word to be changed is the accident of the printer and not the choice of the author, we say, give us a text that is true to the context and the aesthetic instinct rather than to the Folio, even were that Pandora-box only half as full of manifest corruptions as it is.

In the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," (Act iii. Sc. 1,) Mr. White prefers, "She is not to be fasting in respect of her breath," to "She is not to be kissed fasting in respect of her breath,"—an emendation made by Rowe,28 and found also in Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio of 1632. We cannot agree with him in a reading which seems to us to destroy all the point of the passage.

In Dumain's ode, (Love's Labor's Lost, Act iv. Sc. 3,) beginning,

  "On a day, (alack the day!)  Love, whose month is ever May,"

Mr. White chooses to read

  "Thou, for whom Jove would swear  Juno but an Ethiop were,"

rather than accept Pope's suggestion of "ev'n Jove," or the far better "great Jove" of Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio,—affirming that "the quantity and accent proper to 'thou' make any addition to the line superfluous." We should like to hear Mr. White read the verse as he prints it. The result would be something of this kind:—

Thou-ou for whom Jove would swear,—

which would be like the 'bow-wow-wow before the Lord' of the old country-choirs. To our ear it is quite out of the question; and, moreover, we affirm that in dissyllabic (which we, for want of a better name, call iambic and trochaic) measures the omission of a half-foot is an impossibility, and all the more so when, as in this case, the preceding syllable is strongly accented. Even had the poem been meant for singing, which it was not, for Dumain reads it, the quantity would be false, though the ear might more easily excuse it. Such an omission would be not only possible, but sometimes very effective, in trisyllabic measures,—as, for instance, in anapests like these,—

  "'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,  And the owls have awakened the crowing cock,"—

where iambs or spondees may take the place of the first or second foot with no shock to the ear, though the change of rhythm be sensible enough,—as

  'Tis th[)e] d[=e][=e]p midnight by the castle clock,  And [)o]wls have awakened the crowing cock.

We quite agree with Mr. White and Mr. Knight in their hearty dislike of the Steevens-system of versification, but we think that Coleridge (who, although the best English metrist since Milton, often thought lazily and talked loosely) has misled both of them in what he has said about the pauses and retardations of verse. In that noblest of our verses, the unrhymed iambic pentameter, two short or lightly-accented syllables may often gracefully and effectively take the place of a long or heavily-accented one; but great metrists contrive their pauses by the artistic choice and position of their syllables, and not by leaving them out. Metre is the solvent in which alone thought and emotion can perfectly coalesce,—the thought confining the emotion within decorous limitations of law, the emotion beguiling the thought into somewhat of its own fluent grace and rebellious animation. That is ill metre which does not read itself in the mouth of a man thoroughly penetrated with the meaning of what he reads; and only a man as thoroughly possessed of the meaning of what he writes can produce any metre that is not sing-song. Not that we would have Shakspeare's metre tinkered where it seems defective, but that we would not have palpable gaps defended as intentional by the utterly unsatisfactory assumption of pauses and retardations. Mr. White has in many cases wisely and properly made halting verses perfect in their limbs by easy transpositions, and we think he is perfectly right in refusing to interpolate a syllable, but wrong in assuming that we have Shakspeare's metre where we have no metre at all. We are not speaking of seeming irregularities, of lines broken up by rapid dialogue or cut short by the gulp of voiceless passion, nor do we forget that Shakspeare wrote for the tongue and not the eye, but we do not believe he ever left an unmusical period. Especially is this true of passages where the lyrical sentiment predominates, and we beg Mr. White to reconsider whether we owe the reading

"All overcanopied with luscious woodbine" (instead of lush)

to the printers of the Folio or to Shakspeare. Even if we accept Steevens's "whereon" instead of "where" in the first verse of this exquisite piece of melody, and read (as Mr. White does not)

"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows,"

it leaves the peculiar lilt of the metre unchanged. The varied accentuation of the verses is striking; and would any one convince himself of the variety of which this measure is capable, let him try to read this passage, and the speech of Prospero, beginning "Ye elves of hills," to the same tune. In the verses,

  "And ye that on the sands with printless foot  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, | and do fly him  When he comes back,"

observe how the pauses are contrived to echo the sense and give the effect of flux and reflux. Versification was understood in that day as never since, and no treatise on English verse so good, in all respects, as that of Campion (1602) has ever been written. Coleridge learned from him how to write his "Catullian hendeca-syllables," and did not better his instruction.29

In "Measure for Measure," (Act i. Sc. 1,) in this passage,—

"what's open made To justice, that justice seizes: what knows the law That thieves do pass on thieves?"

does Mr. White believe the "that" and "what" are Shakspeare's? Does he consider

"To justice, that justice seizes: what knows the law"

an alexandrine,—and an alexandrine worthy of a student and admirer of Spenser? Should we read it thus, we should dread Martial's sarcasm of, Sed male cum recitas. We believe that Shakspeare wrote

    "What's open made  To Justice, Justice seizes; knows the Law  That thieve do pass on thieves?"

We have pointed out a passage or two where we think Mr. White follows the Folio text too literally. Two instances we have noted where he has altered, as we think, for the worse. The first is (Tempest, Act iii. Sc. 3) where Mr. White reads,

  "You are three men of sin whom Destiny  (That hath to instrument this lower world  And what is in't) the never-surfeited sea  Hath caused to belch you up,—and on this island  Where man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst men  Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad."

The Folio reads, "Hath caused to belch up you"; and Mr. White says in his note, "The tautological repetition of the pronoun was a habit, almost a custom, with the Elizabethan dramatists." This may be true, (though we think the assertion rash,) but certainly never as in this case. We think the Folio right, except in its punctuation. The repetition of the "you" is emphatic, not tautological, and is demanded by the whole meaning of the passage. Ariel is taunting the persons she addresses, with the intention of angering them; and the "you" is repeated, because those highly respectable men cannot at first bring their minds to believe that such unsavory epithets are addressed to them. We should punctuate thus, following the order of the words in the Folio,—

  "Hath caused to belch up,—you! and on this island,  Where man doth not inhabit;—you 'mongst men  Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad."

In the "Comedy of Errors," (Act ii. Sc. 2,) Adriana, suspecting her husband of unfaithfulness, says to him,—

  "For, if we two be one, and thou play false,  I do digest the poison of thy flesh,  Being strumpeted by thy contagion.  Keep, then, fair league and truce with thy       true bed;  I live distained, thou undishonored."

Such is the reading of the Folio. Mr. White reads,

"I live distained, thou one dishonored."

But we cannot help thinking that the true reading should be,

"I live distained, though undishonored,"

which is a less forced construction, and coincides with the rest of the passage,—"I am contaminate through thee, though in myself immaculate."

In "As You Like it," (Act ii. Sc. 3,) Mr. White (with the Folio and some recent editors) calls the Duke's wrestler, "the bonny priser of the Duke." The common reading is "bony," which seems to us better, though we believe brawny to be the word intended. We likewise question Mr. White's explanation of the word priser, which, he says, "is prize-fighter, one who wins prizes." One who "fights for prizes" would have been better; but we suspect that the word is more nearly akin with the French prise (in the sense of venir aux prises) than with prix. We should prefer also "Aristotle's ethicks" (Taming of the Shrew, Act i. Sc. 1) to the ordinary "Aristotle's checks," which is retained by Mr. White. In "Much Ado about Nothing," (Act ii. Sc. 1,) we have no doubt that Mr. Collier's corrector is right in reading "sink apace," though Mr. White states authoritatively that Shakspeare would not have so written. It is only fair to Mr. White, however, to say that he is generally open-minded toward readings suggested by others, and that he accepts nearly all those of Mr. Collier's Corrected Folio on which honest lovers of Shakspeare would be likely to agree. In comparing his notes with the text, our eye was caught by a verse in which there seems so manifest a corruption that we shall venture to throw down the discord-apple of a conjectural emendation. In the "Merchant of Venice," (Act iii. Sc. 2,) where Bassanio is making his choice among the caskets, after a long speech about "outward shows" and "ornament," he is made to say that ornament is,

"in a word, The seeming truth which cunningtimes put on To entrap the wisest."

We find it hard to believe that times is the right word here, and strongly suspect that it has stolen the place of tires. The whole previous tenor of the speech, and especially of the images immediately preceding that in question, appears to demand such a word.

We have said, that we considered the style and matter of Mr. White's notes excellent. Indeed, to the purely illustrative notes we should hardly make an exception. There are two or three which we think in questionable taste, and one where the temptation to say a sharp thing has led the editor to vulgarize the admirable Benedick, and to misinterpret the text in a way so unusual for him that it is worth a comment. When Benedick's friends are discussing the symptoms which show him to be in love, Claudio asks,

"When was he wont to wash his face?"

Mr. White annotates thus:—

"That the benign effect of the tender passion upon Benedick in this regard should be so particularly noticed, requires, perhaps, the remark, that in Shakspeare's time our race had not abandoned itself to that reckless use of water, whether for ablution or potation, which has more recently become one of its characteristic traits."

Now, if there could be any doubt that "wash" means cosmetic here, the next speech of Don Pedro ("Yea, or to paint himself?") would remove it. The gentlemen of all periods in history have been so near at least to godliness as is implied in cleanliness. The very first direction in the old German poem of "Tisch-zucht" is to wash before coming to table; and in "Parzival," Gurnamanz specially inculcates on his catechumen the social duty of always thoroughly cleansing himself on laying aside his armor. Such instances could be multiplied without end.

In annotating Shakspeare, it would, perhaps, be asking too much of an editor to give credit to its first finder for every scrap of illustration. The immense mass of notes already existing may, perhaps, be fairly looked upon as a kind of dictionary, open to every one, and the use of which implies no indebtedness. Mr. White, in general, indicates the source whence he has drawn, though we have sometimes found him negligent in this respect. He says, in the Advertisement prefixed to his second volume, "that in every case, where no such credit is given for a restoration, a conjecture, or a quotation, the editor is responsible for it; and as he is disinclined to the giving of much prominence to claims of this sort, he has, in those cases, merely remarked, that 'hitherto' the text has stood thus or so." We have not been at the trouble of verifying every one of Mr. White's "hithertos," but we did so in two plays, and found in "Midsummer Night's Dream" four, and in "Much Ado" two cases, where the reading claimed as a restoration occurred also in Mr. Knight's excellent edition of 1842. These oversights do not affect the correctness of Mr. White's text, but they diminish our confidence in the accuracy of the collation to which he lays claim.

The chief objection which we have to make against Mr. White's text is, that he has perversely allowed it to continue disfigured by vulgarisms of grammar and spelling. For example, he gives us misconster, and says, "This is not a mis-spelling or loose spelling of 'misconstrue,' but the old form of the word." Mr. Dyce insisted on the same cacographical nicety in his "Remarks" on the editions of Mr. Collier and Mr. Knight, but abandons it in his own with the artless admission that misconstrue also occurs in the Folio. In one of the Camden Society's publications is a letter from Friar John Hylsey to Thomas Cromwell, in which we find "As God is my jugge";30 but we do not believe that jug was an old form of judge, though a philological convict might fancy that the former word was a derivative of the latter. Had the phrase occurred in Shakspeare, we should have had somebody defending it as tenderly poetical. We cannot but think it a sacrifice in Mr. White that he has given up the whatsomeres of the Folio. He does retain puisny as the old form, but why not spell it puisné and so indicate its meaning? Mr. White informs us that "the grammatical form in use in Shakspeare's day" was to have the verb govern a nominative case! Accordingly, he perpetuates the following oversight of the poet or blunder of the printer:—

            "What he is, indeed,  More suits you to conceive, than I to speak of."

Again, he says that who, as an objective case, "is in accordance with the grammatical usage of Shakspeare's day," (Vol. II. p. 86,) and that, "considering the unsettled state of minor grammatical relations in Shakspeare's time," it is possible that he wrote whom as a nominative (Vol. V. p. 393). But the most extraordinary instance is where he makes a nominative plural agree with a verb in the second person singular, (Vol. III. p. 121,) and justifies it by saying that "such disagreements … are not uncommon in Shakspeare's writings, and those of his contemporaries." The passage reads as follows in Mr. White's edition:—

            "A breath thou art,  Servile to all the skiey influences  That dost this habitation where thou keep'st  Hourly afflict."

Hanmer (mistaking the meaning) read do. Porson objected, on the ground that it was thou and not influences which governed dost. Porson was certainly right, and we wonder how any one could ever have understood the passage in any other way. The mediaevals had as much trouble in reconciling free-will with judicial astrology as we with the divine foreknowledge. A passage in Dante, it appears to us, throws light on the meaning of the Duke's speech:—

  "Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia;  Non dico tutti; ma posto ch' io 'l dica  Lume v' è dato a bene ed a malizia,  E libero voler che, se fatica  Nelle prime battaglie col ciel dura,  Poi vince tutto se ben si notrica." Purg., Cant. xvi.

Cielo is here used for the influence of the stars, as is clear from a parallel passage in the "Convito." Accordingly, "Though servile to all the skyey influences, it is thou, breath as thou art, that dost hourly afflict thy body with the results of sin." But even if this be not the meaning, is Mr. White correct in saying that influence had no plural at that time?31 Had he forgotten "the sweet influences of Pleiades"? The word occurs in this form not only in our version of the Bible, but in that of Cranmer, and in the "Breeches" Bible. So in Chapman's "Byron's Conspiracy," (Ed. 1608, B. 3,)