The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 | Page 2

poet such an
evil turn as if a sculptor's workman took a mould of the clay figure on

which his master had been but a few days employed, and published
casts of it as the sculptor's work.[1] To us not the less is the corpus
delicti precious--and that unspeakably--for it enables us to see
something of the creational development of the drama, besides serving
occasionally to cast light upon portions of it, yielding hints of the
original intention where the after work has less plainly presented it.
[Footnote 1: Shakspere has in this matter fared even worse than Sir
Thomas Browne, the first edition of whose _Religio Medici_, nowise
intended for the public, was printed without his knowledge.]
The Second Quarto bears on its title-page, compelled to a recognition
of the former,--'Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much
againe as it was, according to the true and perfect Coppie'; and it is in
truth a harmonious world of which the former issue was but the chaos.
It is the drama itself, the concluded work of the master's hand, though
yet to be once more subjected to a little pruning, a little touching, a
little rectifying. But the author would seem to have been as trusting
over the work of the printers, as they were careless of his, and the result
is sometimes pitiable. The blunders are appalling. Both in it and in the
Folio the marginal note again and again suggests itself: 'Here the
compositor was drunk, the press-reader asleep, the devil only aware.'
But though the blunders elbow one another in tumultuous fashion, not
therefore all words and phrases supposed to be such are blunders. The
old superstition of plenary inspiration may, by its reverence for the very
word, have saved many a meaning from the obliteration of a
misunderstanding scribe: in all critical work it seems to me well to
cling to the word until one sinks not merely baffled, but exhausted.
I come now to the relation between the Second Quarto and the Folio.
My theory is--that Shakspere worked upon his own copy of the Second
Quarto, cancelling and adding, and that, after his death, this copy came,
along with original manuscripts, into the hands of his friends the editors
of the Folio, who proceeded to print according to his alterations.
These friends and editors in their preface profess thus: 'It had bene a
thing, we confesse, worthie to haue bene wished, that the Author
himselfe had liu'd to haue set forth, and ouerseen his owne writings;
But since it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from
that right, we pray you do not envie his Friends, the office of their care,
and paine, to haue collected & publish'd them, as where (before) you

were abus'd with diuerse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and
deformed by the frauds and stealthes of iniurious impostors, that
expos'd them: euen those, are now offer'd to your view cur'd, and
perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he
conceiued th[=e]. Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a
most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And
what he thought, he vttered with that easinesse, that wee haue scarse
receiued from him a blot in his papers. But it is not our prouince, who
onely gather his works, and giue them you, to praise him. It is yours
that reade him.'
These are hardly the words of men who would take liberties, and
liberties enormous, after ideas of their own, with the text of a friend
thus honoured. But although they printed with intent altogether faithful,
they did so certainly without any adequate jealousy of the
printers--apparently without a suspicion of how they could blunder. Of
blunders therefore in the Folio also there are many, some through mere
following of blundered print, some in fresh corruption of the same,
some through mistaking of the manuscript corrections, and some
probably from the misprinting of mistakes, so that the corrections
themselves are at times anything but correctly recorded. I assume also
that the printers were not altogether above the mean passion, common
to the day-labourers of Art, from Chaucer's Adam Scrivener down to
the present carvers of marble, for modifying and improving the work of
the master. The vain incapacity of a self-constituted critic will make
him regard his poorest fancy as an emendation; seldom has he the
insight of Touchstone to recognize, or his modesty to acknowledge,
that although his own, it is none the less an ill-favoured thing.
Not such, however, was the spirit of the editors; and all the changes of
importance from the text of the Quarto I receive as Shakspere's own.
With this belief there can be no presumption in saying that they seem