The Shakespeare-Expositor. Thomas Keightley

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      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 from my own experience. I must, however, previously notice the rather curious fact, that these four sources of error, which I had traced out in our printed works, are all, and no other, acted upon by that, in my mind, most able of the German critics, J. Olshausen, in that chef d'œuvre of criticism, his Comment on the Book of Psalms, thus showing how universal they are.

      7.

      Omission.—If any one will examine a proof-sheet as it comes from the hands of a compositor, he will find abundant instances of this source of error. One would think that such could hardly escape the author's eye; and yet, in the edition of Ben Jonson's plays corrected by himself, almost the only errors detected by the editors have been those of omission; and a few more have, I think, escaped them. I may add that the words supplied by them seem to me to be almost invariably the very words which had been omitted. In Notes and Queries (3 S. vii.) there is a list of the principal errata in the reprint of the First Folio, in 1808; and the far larger portion of them are omissions which can easily be supplied. From my own experience in the case of reprints, I can further assert that corrections of this kind are by no means a matter of hap-hazard; for where I have supplied the words I supposed lost or altered I have almost invariably found, on referring to the original edition, that I had hit on the exact word. As an instance, in a late reprint of Akenside's Poems, the following line occurs in the Hymn to the Naiads:

      Your sultry springs, through every urn.

      Here I at once corrected salutary, and on looking at the original edition I found I was right. Yet, had this correction been made in Shakespeare, we know how it would have been disputed. As to omissions I can give the following instances. In a reprint (Lond. 1816) of Fletcher's Purple Island, we find (xii. 74, 85) the following lines:

      Thus with glad sorrow did she plain her.

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