bed by stoops of liquor at
_Yaughan's_ (and from the gibberish here and there set down it is to
be feared that the potations were at times pottle deep). Nor can
we take the Folio in which all his dramas were first collected:
Shakespeare never saw a line of it; for seven years he had been hid in
death's dateless night when that volume was printed. What, then, is
to be done? The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have,
and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably
Shakespeare's exact words. In dealing with the text we must never
for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as
interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors
or of more or less ignorant compositors. Is such a text, thus
transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to
be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of
Shakespeare? Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to
hang over his text? Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken,
in our opinion, to believe this. Rather, let us regard these pages of
the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases--namely, as but
little better than our modern proof-sheets. And they should be
dealt with accordingly by a modern critic; but only on one condition
precedent: he must be Shakespeare's peer. In default of this we can
only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our
aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up
the wheat also.

And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred
and forty years has aimed at--merely to get at what Shakespeare really
wrote. We know that he could not write sheer nonsense, and yet at
times sheer nonsense mows at us from his printed page. Those who
clamor for Shakespeare's text, pure and simple, divested of all notes
and annotations, have no idea how much thought and time have been
expended on every line,--nay, on every word, on every comma,--in the
text of any good modern edition of his dramas, and with the single
aim, be it remembered, of revealing exactly what the poet wrote.

It must not, however, be thought that since the original texts of
Shakespeare's plays are so corrupt, any criticaster has good leave to
expunge or expand at will, under a roving commission to hack and
hew wheresoever and howsoever it may please him, under the plea of
restoring the text. On the contrary, since we ca