Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/647

 Reviews and Notes 643 book of the company. The desirability of reproducing such a quarto with the utmost care as to spelling, punctuation, and even line-divisions, has been recently emphasized by the re- searches of Simpson, Pollard, Greg, and Dover Wilson. In only one respect has the editor departed from his original: he has amended "the metrical alignment," although, he adds, "this, of course, may require the substitution of a capital for a small letter, as when a mid-line word of the Quarto becomes in the re-alignment the first word of the verse." One may question the wisdom of such a revision of the original text in an edition designed solely for the use of scholars; the present reviewer believes that it would have been better for Mr. Lockert to have reproduced the text exactly, and to have indicated in footnotes his proposed metrical rearrangement. But since the necessity for making such changes occurs rarely, and the origi- nal reading is duly recorded at the foot of the page, this objec- tion need not be urged. A more serious complaint may be made that the editor has not informed us what particular copy of the Quarto he has made the basis of his text, and, further, has made no effort to collate this particular copy with other copies. Surely scholars should have learned by this time that different copies of the same edi- tion often present significant variations, due not only to acci- dents in the printing, but also to the custom among early printers of correcting a book while the sheets were passing through the press. An editor, therefore, cannot be regarded as having done his work properly until he has collated several copies of a basic text. The desirability of collating another copy of the first quarto of The Fatal Dowry might have been suggested to Mr. Lockert by several passages in his reprint; for example, III. i. 116, where he gives "thee" in brackets, following the modern editions, but adds in a footnote: "The word in the Quarto is illegible, possibly yee;" or V. iii. 201, where he prints "injuries," adding that the colon in the Quarto is "blurred to appear like a broken s"; or III. i. 184, where the copy he is reproducing has "thy" and all other editors print "this." Some- thing like finality on all such doubtful points, as well as on the text as a whole, might have been secured by a collation of several copies of the 1632 quarto; as it is, that necessary labor remains yet to be done. How meticulously correct the reproduction of the text may be I have no means of discovering, since I have no access to a copy of the first edition. But a few apparent errors, caught in a hasty reading of the play, give rise to some apprehension on this score: I. ii. 60, Speaks seems to be the editor's misprint for Speak; II. ii. 280, ojfter, for ofer; III. i. 449, vemon, for venom; IV. iv. 156, here, for her. If these blunders appear in the original text we should expect the editor, according to his custom, to