Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/353

 The Furness Variorum 349 own bracketed comment); and he adds a final slip, in "ed. Gifford')." for "ed. Gifford).' " Here, then, it is peculiarly repugnant to us to find Mr. Furness essaying, quite unneces- sarily, to criticize Malone's English in part of this very passage thus: "An edition of his poems was published in 1602, but it did not contain The Baron's Wars"[thus Mr. Furness not Malone] "in any form. They [Qu. it?] first appeared with that name in the edition of 1608." Now, really, this was pretty small game for Mr. Furness, in any case; further, his own lapses, in general and in this very context, do not justify him in assuming the attitude of a purist; and finally, after all, Malone's plural pronoun is perfectly defensible from the standpoints of grammar and established usage, while logically it is even commendable since it avoids ambiguity, for Mr. Furness' "it" might well refer, like the "it" in the preceding sentence, to "An edition" or momentarily confuse the reader into supposing so. II. ERRORS IN JUDGMENT The careful user of this volume soon loses confidence in Mr. Furness' editorial and critical judgment. Mr. Furness seems to accept unquestioningly the validity of the MS read- ings from Collier's annotated folio, and the authority of Steev- ens' mysterious "old black letter" volumes (cf. pp. 467, 103, and 186). He tells us magisterially (p. 225) that Desdemona's glorious dying "lie," to shield Othello, is "to a certain extent, pardonable " ! In the second paragraph of the Preface he admits the existence of differing versions of Shakespeare's text before 1623, and then on page 140 naively argues that because a certain passage appears in a certain form in the 1623 Folio it therefore could never have appeared in any other form in an earlier version; and he immediately follows up this naivete by the further curiously simple-minded demonstration that Wright's direct reference to Drummond's famous mot actually refers to that very mot by Drummond ! The very first sentences of the Preface, in fact, are ominously undiscerning: "The earliest text . . . that of the First Folio ... is markedly free from corruptions," we are told so free, indeed, that "we may almost say that in but one or two instances would an earlier Quarto text be required to render any doubtful readings