Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/355

 The Furness Variorum 351 Textual Note on page 8, instead of being repeated on pages 24, 44, and (with a new list of editions) 113, but omitted on pages 119, 122, and 123? Finally, it seems very poor judgment to tell us so little about the text iself: i.e., about the " Collier," "Quin- cy," and ''Southern" MS. emendations; about Singer's "neat and accurate MS. transcript of the play, made in the reign of Charles II" (p. 86); and about Jaggard's provocative early MS. version (cf. "Shakespeare Bibliography," Wm. Jaggard, Stratford-on-Avon, 1911, p. 319). III. ERRORS IN FACT Misstatements or inaccuracies in the mere marshalling of elementary facts are not infrequent. For example, it is not true that the Dramatis Personae were " First given imperfectly by Rowe, " as asserted on page one: the list was given ("imper- fectly," too!) in all six quarto editions, which antedated Rowe's first by from 25 to 18 years. It is not true that "distraught" is no longer used (p. 218). It cannot be true that "Skeat's text is that of the edition of 1603" (p. vii), if "Skeat. . . adopted the text of 1612" (p. 297). Similarly, when we read (p. 69) that the Cambridge editors printed "In favour's," and (p. 281) that they printed "in favor's," we cannot accept both statements as true. Another kind of misstatement figures in the announcement of the importance of Cicero's letters as apparently Mr. Furness' own discovery (p. viii), when credit should have been given to Boas, "Shakespeare and his Predecessors," 1896, p. 465 N. Finally, as an illustration of several different varieties of inaccuracy, consider this single sentence (p. 438) : "Among the fifteen old plays enumerated by Downes, the prompter, as forming the repertoire of the King's Company at the Theatre Royal between 1660 and 1830, Julius Cczsar, with one or two other of Shakespeare's plays, is mentioned. " In the first place, of course, Downes's record runs to 1706 only, not to 1830; in the second place, according to Downes "the King's Company at the Theatre Royal" was not established until 1682, while the reference to Julius Ccesar places the play in the repertory of "his Majesty's Company of Comedians in Drury Lane," headed by Killigrew and acting between 1660 and 1682; and in the third place, "the fifteen old plays" (including Ccesar, Othello, and Henry IV) which com-