Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/30

12 pearean cruxes has been practically, and I might say confidently, given up in the last ten or twenty years, this passage has been marked "hopelessly corrupt," as in Neilson's recent edition, on the theory that a passage which no one could ever solve could not possibly be as Shakespeare wrote it. The Globe accordingly places the obolus against it. And Professor Johnson, whose recent book I have mentioned in the beginning, voices the generally accepted opinion that what has not been solved by this time will never be solved. This state of affairs is rather embarrassing to one who would fain come forth and invite the world to re-study Shakespeare with him. It is difficult enough to state the cruxes, with which the human mind seems to have gone completely astray, in a way that will make them simple, without having to struggle against the preconception that one is simply working in ambitious ignorance. It creates a state of mind which is unsympathetic and therefore hard to help. But yet what beauty is hidden away in them! When you consider the feelings of Juliet in the light not merely of her modesty but of her whole previous state of being as a woman whose one ideal was chastity, such a step as marriage was like deserting the very world of maidenhood. What a stroke of truth then to simply have her say the word runaway! So much in so little.