Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/212

 200 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH in the line : ' That shall full soone make thee to flee ' (D), the word 'full/ Both are presumably errors and possibly mere slips. Such coincidences must now and then be expected, and fortunately these anomalous readings attack our scheme at its strongest point namely, the grouping of W K. We have now considered the objections to our hypothesis as to the relations of the manuscripts, and our scheme may be held to have stood the test satisfactorily. As yet, however, I have said nothing as to the relative value of the extant texts. For anything our scheme tells us to the contrary, W may on the whole contain the most original and H the least original readings within the group of cyclic manuscripts. Happily the independent position of P affords a certain criterion for the originality of the readings in the other texts. Since the main object of this inquiry is to ascertain the rules that should govern the editing of the Chester plays, we must now apply ourselves to this criticism, remembering that anomalous groupings must first be reduced to the normal ones, of which they are presumably obscured variants. 1 After making these corrections we arrive at the following results. H has 47 readings which are certainly unoriginal, in 38 of which it is opposed by a concensus of all the other manuscripts. There are also six readings in which H is unsupported, 1 For instance such a grouping as P H D : B W K may be an obscured instance of P H : B W K : D, D diverging from its own group B D W K and accidentally returning to the original reading, or else of P H D : B : W K, B diverging from its own group P H B D and accidentally making the same change as p.