Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/21

 and are to be sold at his shoppe under Saint Dunstons Church in Fleetstreet 1604." I. R. stands, we may be sure, for James Roberts.

It is unquestionable that the copy for the Quarto of 1603 was surreptitiously obtained. Errors which seem to be rather errors of hearing than of sight, or of a compositor's memory in setting up a group of words, indicate that, according to a practice of the time, a shorthand writer was employed to take notes of the speeches during a theatrical performance. There are also errors which look like errors of a copyist; some of these may have occurred in writing out the shorthand notes for the printer. T. Bright's system of shorthand, moreover, gave scope for many errors in interpreting the characters of the stenographer. But the conjecture of the editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare that the defects of the manuscript derived from shorthand "were supplemented by a reference to the authentic copy in the library of the theatre," seems to deserve consideration. The earlier portion of the Quarto is both fuller and less inaccurate as compared with the true text than the later; perhaps the shorthand writer scamped his work; perhaps the theatrical underling, whom we may suppose as assisting him by reference to the copy in the theatre, was discovered, or had no opportunity of completing his dishonest labours. In some instances it looks as if only a hasty and partly incorrect note of the substance of a speech was made, and this was expanded into several feeble or incoherent lines.