Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/48

30 about to confer the power. He selects one of the commissions by which authority is to be conferred and bringing it more prominently into view he says to Escalus:

"Put that (the power), to your sufficiency (your experience and mental ability) as your worth (your character or moral nature) is able, And let them work."

Shakespeare here speaks plainly of the three things which always have determined, and always must determine, the true success of a public officer. And this trinity of qualifica- tions we now have split up and separated by a row of dots upon the supposition that part of the text is missing and that something comes between! This could only be because editors and commentators have failed to see, in these opening lines, Shakespeare's prompt announce- ment of the theme of the play as a whole. Noth- ing has been lost out of this line. Nothing could be added without spoiling it. It is the exact truth of government. To split it up with rows of dots puts an understanding reader entirely astray.

It will be observed that I have emended the first word by changing the B to P. It is very easy for a typesetter, in distributing type, to throw a b into the p box; and such a mis- chance would result in an error like this. In any modern edition, the original text, which was very faulty in type-setting, has been corrected in more than ten thousand places. I