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Notes
I include under 'acoustic' not merely rhythm but euphony. As readers of Shakespeare we are perhaps inclined to overlook the fact that his medium was the spoken word and that Elizabethan habits of speech were very different from our own.
C. J. K. Hinman in Shakespeare Quarterly IV (1953), 287. I regard all fears lest chaos is come again with equanimity Let us remember Henry Crawford's words in Mansfield Park that Shakespeare is 'part of an Englishman's constitution' and that the constitution has since been fortified by the assimilation of Shakespeare, willy nilly, as a school and university subject. Editorial excesses that the national constitution cannot stomach will be rejected sooner or later.
What shook them was the strange nature of some Folio errors which neither the ductus literarum nor the attraction of the eye to a neighbouring word would explain. The one they cited (ed. 1891, Preface, xiii-xiv) was one of Compositor B's-'merit' for 'friends' in M.N.D. I.i (F1, p. 146)-an error of no account, since it occurred in a reprint, though it served as a warning How, they asked, could one retrace the error from 'merit' to 'friends'? The error is certainly perplexing, but we now have the comfort of being able to isolate Folio pages set by B and there is, in any case, no evidence that this kind of aberration occurred so often that normal emendation need take much account of it.
The Old Cambridge editors made an unlucky choice when they concluded that Q2 (Pavier's falsely dated 1619 quarto) was the earlier and took this as the basis of their text. But since Q1 (the Heyes quarto) contained manifestly superior readings, they concluded that the two prints were independently set up from the same manuscript and, having, as they thought, collateral substantive prints, they made their choice of readings on merits. Eclecticism thus saved them from the worst results of wrong conclusions about transmission: the more serious errors of Q2 (set up by Jaggard B) were removed, though many trivial errors (which got the benefit of the doubt) were retained.
The conjectural or fortuitous improvements of these derivative texts have, of course, no authority and I distinguish them from the emendations of 'named' editors merely because some were in all probability accidentally made.
Partly, of course, because we have no collateral text and partly because so little is known about the character of Roberts's proof-reading of this quarto.
I use the word 'errors' for brevity and convenience What the term covers, both here and in my later discussion of Hamlet Q2 readings, is certain errors and some of the more seriously suspect readings (though, of course, not all by any means of the latter in The Merchant of Venice).
This comparison is, strictly, only a fair one if we know that the sheets in question are either all in the uncorrected state or are all in the corrected state after proof-reading with similar care and this we do not know. What we can be certain of is that the errors were the compositor's and, since G(o) of Hamlet Q2 survives in two states and the errors cited were not corrected, it seems legitimate to conclude that (so far as the evidence of this sheet goes) there was negligence on the part of both the compositor and the proof-reader.
Emendation would here be unnecessary if 'these' in the following line was emended (as a common error) to 'them'.
The fall in the number of errors on this sheet, and especially in the number of perversions due to imperfect memorisation, points rather to greater leisure in setting than a chance improvement in handwriting. Nor can the difference be explained as due to careful proof-reading. On the evidence of the Old Cambridge edition notes, the proof-reader merely altered 'most' to 'must' at IV.i.31 on K1v.
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