Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/21

Rh proves that Night is the runaway. Douce thinks that Juliet is the runaway. Monck Mason is confident that the passage ought to be, 'that Renomy's eyes may wink,' Renomy being a new personage created out of the French Renommée, and answering, we suppose, to the 'Rumour' of Spenser." Knight then adopts unawares, the suggestion of a compositor named Jackson. Others, of the present day, think that "runaways" are prying spectators on the street but yet wonder whether, after all, the word may not mean the steeds of the sun whose eyes will wink at sunset.

More serious than this change in the interpretation of the word itself is the fact that, in the hope of wresting sense out of the passage as a whole, the words are cut up into quite different sentences in various editions, the editor ignoring the punctuation of the First Folio entirely and putting a period here and a semicolon there as he sees a chance to make something else out of it; and this effort is still going on. Neilson's edition, for instance (1909), has gone back to a sentence division quite different from that of the Globe text of 1895 long considered standard by Shakespeare scholars generally. It must be evident however that any ingenious effort with exclamation points, periods and commas must be vain so long as we remain in the dark as to the sense of the one word which gives the point of view of the whole passage. As so much of the text is in-