Shakespeare v. Perkins. quote it in full. "All passages of an indecent, or needlessly licentious character, are carefully struck out, evincing, says Mr. Collier, the advance of a better or purer taste about the time when the emendator went over the volume.'” [Rev. p. 397.] But Mr. Collier does not say so. He says: "Some expressions and lines of an irreligious or indelicate character are also struck out, evincing, perhaps, the advance of a better or purer taste," &c.* This is very far short of the Reviewer's statement; and well may Mr. Collier shelter his supposition behind a contingency; for his own Notes and Emendations shows that the corrector left untouched very many more profane and indecorous expressions than he struck out; and also that he did strike out perfectly unexceptionable passages, too brief to add appreciably to the length of the performance; plainly proving that he was governed only by his own caprice in this regard. The Reviewer most strangely concludes, that these erasures of a few indelicate passages, forbid the conclusion that these marginalia were written after the Restoration, and shows that they were made rather in Charles the First's time, when *** the diffusion of Puritanism compelled the editors of the first folio to strike out the profane ejaculations of Falstaff, and some minor indecencies which had been tolerated in the publication of the earlier quartos." But surely, a writer who undertook to handle this subject, should have known. that those omissions in the first folio were only made in compliance with an express statute which was passed in the first of James I.. 1604!— eight years before Shakespeare ceased to write-twelve years before he died!nineteen years before the publication of the first folio, and twenty-eight years before the publication of the volume upon which these emendations are made! The "diffusion of Puritanism" enforced no other erasures upon the editors of the folios of either 1623 or 1632; neither did it forbid the publication of equally indelicate passages by Davenant, in twelve plays issued between 1634 and 1660, nor the issue of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher in folio 1637, containing, or 555 rather consisting entirely, of plays so indelicate in their very structure as well as language, that Shakespeare's compared to them seem "whiter than new, snow on a raven's back." The Reviewer has undertaken to prove too much, and has thus succeeded in proving nothing at all. Fourth, the assumed fact. that the emendations were made by a player, does not help to give them any authority, or even any consequence, except as auxiliaries to the text of the original folio:-that is, to make them valuable as early reminiscences or conjectures, aided, perhaps, by copies of actors' parts, and to be received when the text of the original is incomprehensible or inconsistent, and they, by probable corrections, make it when clear and congruous. the sake of the argument, let us grant And here, for that these changes were made by Richard Perkins, an actor in the time of Charles I., between the years 1642 and 1658, and that he had copies of actors' parts and prompt books of his time to assist him. What "authority" do his labors derive from those facts, which can give them a feather's weight against the text of Shakespeare's fellow actors and business partners, who had "scarce received from him a blot in his papers,"-when that text is comprehensible? It contains many defects, the results of carelessness; and those, Mr. Richard Perkins, or Mr. John Jenkins, may correct if he can; and the probabilities are in favor of the former, perhaps because he came nearer to Shakespeare. But when, in a passage not obscure, we have to decide between Richard or Thomas Perkins, his Booke, and John Heminge and Henrie Condell, their Booke, is there a question which must go to the wall? The judgment, the memory, the very copied part of an actor, even as to a play in which he performed, is not to be trusted thirty years after its production, against such testimony as we have in favor of the copy from which the first folio was printed. It would not be trusted even in this century; much less two hundred years ago, when, as we know, the lines of the dramatist were wantonly and mercilessly mutilated, both by managers and actors. but to make one of his actors climb a tree, he must have the tree for him to climb. Should a copy of the Tem pest appear, with MS. directions for a sailor to run up the shrouds, it would prove positively that those directions were written after 1662. But the Reviewer constructed this argument with a want of knowledge singular in an author of such an able paper; for in the original edition of the Tempest (the first folio), there is not the slightest indication, by way of stage direction, that the first scene passes on shipboard; in the first edition of As You Like It (first folio), there is no mention of a forest or a single sapling in the stage directions; and in neither the first folio nor the early quartos of Romeo and Juliet, is there the slightest hint that Juliet makes love in a balcony. All these stage directions are deductions from the text, added in modern days. Did the Reviewer never read, in Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy, the well-known passage alluding to the appointments of the stage for which Shakespeare wrote: "What childe is there, that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?" Notes and Emendations, Second Edition, p. xviii. It is important, too, as affecting the value of emendations derived from actors' parts, to notice that Shakespeare's plays were acted by other companies than that which owned the right in them, and possessed the old stage copies. For, by an entry in the Office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, who was Master of the Revels in the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and which will be found in Mr. Collier's Annals of the Stage, vol. II. p. 7, we know that he was paid £5 by Heminge, on the 11th of April, 1627, "to forbid the playing of Shakespeare's plays to the Red Bull Company." Now this Red Bull Company, or any other which would pirate Shakespeare's plays, would not scruple to mutilate his works, after the fashion of literary pirates, and adapt them to the capacities of their histrionic force and the taste of their audiences, just as, we know, the corrector of this Perkins folio did. The parts of such mutilated plays would be copied out for the actors. and what would such actors' parts or prompt books be worth against the authority of the first folio? Indeed, it is more than probable that this Perkins folio was submitted to the treatment which it has experienced, for the double purpose of a new edition for readers and to supply the wants of the companies which were sure to be formed after Davenant's re-establishment of theatrical entertainments,the rights of Shakespeare's company having determined during the Protectorate. He But the Reviewer seeks to elevate the authority of these emendations, by dragging down that of the first folio. says, that "all the twenty plays which were first printed in the folio, had existed in manuscript, without being seen by their author, for at least eleven years;" that the Two Gentlemen of Verona had "existed only in written copies for thirty-two years;" that "the Globe Theatre was burnt down in 1613, and it is more than probable that all of Shakespeare's original manuscripts, which had survived to that period, were then destroyed." [this, in spite of Heminge and Condell's direct testimony, that they had his papers.] and that "the written copies were multiplied by careless transcribers." Let us again, for the sake of the argument, grant all this ;how does it build up the authority of the Perkins folio? The Reviewer goes on very reasonably to say, "alterations and omissions were made from time to time, to adapt the performance to the varying exigencies of the theatre, or the altered taste of the times." This is very likely to be true; but if it invalidate the authority of the manuscript copy from which the first folio was printed, with what doubled and trebled force does it crush the pretensions of those used by a player in 1642, which had been subject to nineteen years more of alteration and omis sion, to suit the exigencies of the theatre, and the taste of the times! Again, the Reviewer, attempting to grapple with the overpowering argument, against both the authority and the intelligence of the MS. corrector, that so many of his readings are inadmissible, and could not possibly have formed a part of the text, thinks that he has conquered it by fastening the same defect upon the first folio. He says: "We admit it, [the inadmissibility of the readings.] but we must remind the objectors, that precisely the same thing is true of the first folio." To a superficial glance, this seems to be 'a crusher;' but, in truth, it is too weak to stand alone. For we know that the first folio was authorized; and its errors are corruptions, the results of accident and carelessness, of which they are themselves the best evidence; while the absurd, inconsistent, prosaic and ridiculous readings of the MS. corrector are deliberately formed.-the fruits of painful effort to correct those accidental errors in some cases, and to better the text in others. The errors of the first folio are casualties; the stupidities of the Perkins folio are perpetrated with malice aforethought. The former prove only the absence of care; the latter exist only in consequence of care, and therefore prove the absence of authority. The number of cases in which we are assumed to have admitted the success of the MS. corrector, are brought up as evidence in favor of his "authority." There are 173 of his acceptable corrections which have been made by others, and 117 which are peculiar to him, and which, in our own words, "seem to be admissible corrections of passages which need correction."*-making 290 in all, [including, The Reviewer says that this is "grudging language, showing rather the unwillingness of the concession, than any doubt as to its justice and propriety." Not so. We conceded only, that these changes were proba bly [i. e. they seemed to be] admissible, and that the passages in which they occurred seemed to need correction; or, as we remarked again of them in the same paper, they are changes "from which future editors may carefully select emendations." To change the text of Shakespeare, is, in our estimation, no light matter; and it is not to be attempted upon the first seeming acceptability of a proposed alteration. That Mr. Collier has acte on other grounds, is the gravamen of the charge against him. Further investigation has discovered to us, that many of these 117 seemingly acceptable changes are not peculiar to the MS. corrector, and also convinced us, that only about seventy-five of them have claims to a place in the text. Shakespeare v. Perkins. however, the numerous restorations from the first folio. and the early quartos.] What one editor, critic, or commentator, exclaims the Reviewer, can claim the original suggestion of an equal number of conjectural emendations, which are admitted to be sound or plausible? We answer, without hesitation.-Nicholas Rowe; and he only forestalled the others in making them, because he came first. The most of these corrections are of typographical errors, such as no intelligent proof-reader would fail to detect and rectify. Rowe and Theobald made nearly all of them; and Rowe would have almost certainly made them all, had he worked with half the plodding care of the corrector of the Perkins folio. As it was, he made many which his predecessor should have made. We turn to the Notes and Emendations, and notice the first of the coincidences, in the Tempest, Act I. Sc. 2: "A brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature [creatures] in her." Next in the same Scene, Where they prepared What boy in his 'teens, having these passages given him to copy, would not make such corrections instinctively? These are fair specimens of a majority of his [assumed] two hundred and ninety admissi ble corrections; so does the first folio swarm with typographical errors. there are other corrections which seem to show that he sometimes conjectured successfully, or remembered correctly, or had a book or MS. which helped him to the right word. But We think that it is more than probable that he was indebted to all these means. Certainly he was indebted both to conjecture and the early quartos, his restoration of the readings in the latter being nothing in his favor, as they existed in his time in far greater numbers than when the editors of the last century used them. just as he did. Assuming that the MS. corrector was a player, who had lived in an age (the first half of the seventeenth century) when conjectural emendation of an English author was an art as yet unheard of, and when the writings of our great dramatist were so little known or prized. that four rude and uncritical editions of them sufficed for a century;" and concluding that it is impossible that the 557 whole eight [entire lines] should have been invented, or made up by mere conjecture, by a poor player in the earlier part of the seventeenth century," the Reviewer considers it established, that the corrector could not have conjectured, but must have had authority. But even granting that these emendations were made between 1642 and 1664," it is a well-known fact, that at least a dozen corrected folios of the second, third, and fourth editions exist at present, one of them, Mr. Dent's, being not only, like the others, corrected "in an ancient hand," but its numerous emendations being "curious and important, consisting of stage directions, alterations in the punctuation, &c." Did conjectural emendation spring up at once, armed at all points, immediately after the publication of the third folio? But whether it did or not, the man who made some of the corrections in the Perkins folio did conjecture; and has left irrefragable evidence that he did. Fac-similes, now before us, of a passage near the end of the last Scene of Hamlet, and of another in Othello, Act. IV. Sc. 1, as they appear in this Perkins folio, show this undeniably. lines are printed thus: In the first, two "Good night, sweet Prience, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." "Therefore the poet did feign Here "tears" is a misprint for trees, which appears in the first folio, and in the two early quartos; but the MS. corrector substituted the latter word at first; after deceived by the likeness of tears to beasts referring to the other editions, however, he restores the right word, tears. If this be not conjecture, Nahum Tate wrote King Lear. Conjecture helped or hindered this corrector as it did those of the dozen or more copies of the other "rude and un critical editions" which "sufficed for a century." But neither the number-fourof these editions, nor their careless printing, shows that Shakespeare's works were "little known or prized;" for half that number of editions sufficed for every other dramatist of that century; and all, except those of careful Ben Jonson, were vilely printed. Thus it will be seen that we do not, as the Reviewer asserts, by a gross petitio principii "take for granted the two chief points at issue. namely, that the first folio, * * * does contain the text of Shakespeare, and that the corrections of the MS. Annotator are mere guesswork." We have the direct and explicit testimony of Shakespeare's friends, fellow actors and principal partners in the theatre, that the first folio was printed from the text of Shakespeare, and, errors excepted, does contain that text: we have proved that the corrector did indulge in "mere guesswork," and therefore, as against the authorized edition, we must consider all his labors as merely conjectural, and only to be received when they consistently correct the palpable, accidental errors of that edition. But were this not so, we should reject nine tenths of those peculiar to him upon their own merits. They seem to be modelled upon the conjectural effort of the man who, not being able to understand the strong figure, "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel," amended his New Testament to read, "strain at a gate and swallow a saw-mill." But after all, it is not improbable that Richard Perkins did make some of these corrections. We admitted, for the argument's sake, that he did make them; but now having shown that his making them gives them no semblance of authority, we acknowledge that it is even more than probable that he had a hand in them. It seems that this Richard Perkins was not only an actor but "also in some measure a poet, as he wrote a copy of verses prefixed to Heywood's Apology for Actors." The murder's out! He was "something of a poet!" This accounts for his turning speech after speech of blank verse into rhyme, for his making Hamlet bring up with a jingle after first correcting the line to which he tacked his rhyme, for his submitting other plays to similar treatment, and for the insertion of entire lines in several cases, which, although two or three of them are not unlike what Shakespeare might have written in those particular passages, are not at all beyond the reach of any man who is "something of a poet" and has read the context. It seems as if Master Perkins was about to bring out an edition of Shakespeare's works as he thought they should have been written and should be acted. He modernized the language, struck out whatever he thought uninteresting, added rhymes where he thought they were needed, added stage directions to conform to the custom of the day, which was to be very particular in that respect,* attended minutely to the punctuation, corrected even the turned letters, as Mr. Collier assures us, (not at all necessary for a stage copy), changed the old prefix of Beggar in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew, to Sly (equally unnecessary for the stage), underscored the old rhymes and quotations (also entirely needless in a stage copy), and thought that he would have a very fine edition; and it would have been quite as good and of the same kind as Pope's and Warburton's. But the publishers of the next edition, in 1664. did not believe in Shakespeare according to Perkins,' and reprinted the old folios, adding even all the plays that had borne Shakespeare's name in his lifetime. Now Perkins may have acted in Shakespeare's plays while the dramatist was living, he was doubtless "something of a poet," and he may have had some actors' parts which were "copies of copies of a part of a mutilated copy;" but in spite of all this, when there is any question between what Heminge and Condell and our own souls tell us is Master Shakespeare's, and that which probability and our own souls tell us is Master Perkins's, we shall decide in favor of Master Shakespeare. For though the one was something of a poet, we believe that the other was a good deal more of a poet. And all the people say Amen! *It is only necessary to look at the first editions of Shirley's, Shadwell's, and Southerne's plays, the dates of which are from 1630 to 1690, to see how the custom of adding minute stage directions to the printed copies arose toward the middle of the century. Those printed about that time and thereafter have every movement indicated with the greatest particularity. The fact that the first folio has few stage directions sustains the evidence that most of it was printed from the author's manuscript and not from the stage copy or actors' parts, in which those directions would necessarily be numerous; and this is again confirmed by the fact that the quartos, evidently printed from actors' parts, have many more stage directions than the folio. |