Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/234

 228 Oliphant of a messenger; but that does not prove that the play was acted, but only that it was cast. The naming of that actor,by the way, was the primary cause of attention being directed to the possibility of Shakspere's connection with the play; since he is known to have belonged to the company to which Shak- spere belonged, and since the manager of the company, if he required alterations to be made, would naturally call upon the company's poet to make them. Since the original MS was found to be in the hand of Mun- dy, it seems to have been invariably assumed that he was the sole author of the play in its first form. The probabilities certainly seemed to point in that direction; but it puzzled me that one man's work should have been submitted to four men's revision, and that the sum total of the alterations made by these four revisers should be so insignificant in quantity. Thus, the contribution of Dr. Greg's "A" amounts to only 71 lines, that of Shakspere to not much more than twice that, and that of Dr. Greg's "E" to only about half of A's. "B" provides one passage smaller than A's and several trifling insertions. "C's" contribution is the largest of all, and even his is not very much larger than Shakspere's. He is the writer whom I agree with Dr. Greg in regarding as a mere scribe. The joint circumstance that so many hands should have been employed on the work of revision and that every one of them should have done so very little struck me as a most singu- lar phenomenon; and then, as the result of a close examination of the text, I made two discoveries that seemed to me to afford an explanation of the puzzling circumstance. First, I perceived or thought I perceived, for I have no desire to speak dog- matically, that there was no difference in style between most of the added passages and the scenes in which they were to be imbedded; and then I discovered, and this was really only a corollary of my first discovery, that three different styles were discernible in the original version of the play. There being, including Mundy, five authors at work on the alterations, I might perhaps have expected to find four, or even five, in the original draft; but, as a matter of fact, I found, as I have said, only three. The first, whose work extends right up to the end of III 2 (adopting the divisions of Professor Tucker Brooke