Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/302

286 some copy used by the prompter or stage-manager of a theatre in which these plays were performed, somewhere about the date of the folio, 1632.

Now, Mr. White will not hear of "authority" being due to our possible Perkins. The corrections are many of them, he contends, anachronistic, such as no paulo-post Shakspeare-corrector could have perpetrated; some of them he can fix on the eighteenth century; and the share of various hands, writing at sundry times and in divers manners, in the concoction of the ensemble, he treats as beyond controversy. Besides, and this he adduces as an overpowering argument against both the authority and the intelligence of the MS. corrector, very many of the corrections are "inadmissible, and could not possibly have formed a part of the text." And he insists, with more emphasis than discretion, maybe, that if we defer to a single change in Mr. Collier's folio because of its "authority," we must defer to all—whereas its best advocates exercise their individual judgment in accepting or rejecting its proposed changes, and, by so doing, refuse actual deference to its authority What Mr. White maintains, is, that the only source of any authority for the text of Shakspeare is in the original folio of 1623, as published by the poet's friends, fellow-actors, and theatrical partners; that when that text is utterly incomprehensible from the typographical errors which deform it, and then only, we should seek emendations; that those emendations should be first looked for in the quartos, because they were contemporaneous with Shakspeare, although surreptitiously published, or at least entirely neglected by him; that only such corrupted passages as the quartos do not make clear are proper subjects for the exercise of conjecture; and that such of these as conjecture does not amend, in a manner at once consistent with the context, with common sense, and with the language and customs of Shakspeare's day, should be allowed to stand untouched. Not what Shakspeare might, could, would, or should have written, but what, according to the best evidence, he did write, is held up as the only admissible object of the labours of his editors and verbal critics—the only guaranty for the integrity of his works consisting in the preservation of the words of the only authentic edition, when those words are understood by minds of ordinary intelligence, or supported by comparison with the language and manners of the author's day, or those of the immediately antecedent age. Until the self-elected editorial reformers of the text have taken out letters patent to improve it, would it not be better for them, Mr. White suggests, to confine themselves to editing it? seeing it is the function of no man to re-write Shakspeare, even to improve him, and our object being to arrive at what he wrote, not what, in our opinion, he should have written; nor would it ever do to say that if a suggested change be for the better, it must be accepted, because Shakspeare was sure to choose the most beautiful and