Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/24

22 tume. told me that on one occasion, by the failure of his costumes to arrive in time, he and his company were forced to present the first scenes of Hamlet in ordinary everyday clothing. “I was conscious,” said Booth, “when I entered with the Danish Court that on the stage there was laughter in the air, and that on the faintest sign of self-consciousness on my part the whole performance would be irretrievably turned into a screaming farce. Consequently, I was even more serious than usual, and I think I never lost myself more completely in the play.” His manager, who had watched the performance from the rear of the house, afterwards assured him that he himself had never been more impressed by the acting, and never had he seen an audience more lost in attention.

Secondly, as to annotated editions; in them you will generally find notes of three kinds, namely, textual, archaeological, and aesthetic. As to textual notes. You all know that not a single play of Shakespeare was printed under his supervision. During his lifetime certain money-making booksellers, possibly by means of shorthand during a performance, or possibly by bribing the actors or the prompter, surreptitiously obtained copies of some of the plays which were printed in a quarto form and sold for sixpence. These Quartos, with their texts, are chronic mysteries. It is probable from what we know of the customs of printers, in London, in the 16th century, that much of the composing was done by journeymen compositors at their own homes, and, when made up, the forms were carried to the master printer to be printed upon his press. It is my private belief that these compositors had an assistant in their homes, who read aloud the copy to them. There are in the Folio, when certain plays happened to be printed from a Quarto, variations and misprints which can be explained, I think, in no other possible way.

Seven years after Shakespeare’s death, two loving friends and fellow-actors gathered together his MSS. and printed them in one large Folio, which, together with the stolen Quartos, provide the material out of which our modern text has been formed.

In the forming of this text there are two editors who deserve the greenest palms: Louis Theobald and Edward Capell. Theobald was an admirable and widely read classical scholar, who, with a better knowledge of Greek than Pope, had assisted the lat-