University of Virginia Library

I

In the preface to the first edition of the Cambridge Shakespeare the editorial principles of William George Clark and William Aldis Wright in determining proper names are not mentioned but in the case of the group of historical place-names they can be established relatively easily. Over the centuries preceding editors had been following a general policy of gradually modernizing one historical name after another: as a rule each new edition retained those modernizations already documented and occasionally added a new form to the common stock. The Cambridge editors seem to have frozen the text at the stage they encountered; they neither returned to the old forms nor did they add any modernized ones. They retained, for example, the First Folio's Meisen, assumedly because nobody had modernized it, and also the uniform Poictiers introduced by Pope, which had not been revised by any subsequent editor, although the modern equivalents must have been familiar to the educated reader of their day. They accepted without comment the fact that the prosody is occasionally affected by modernization: following Rowe and Pope they changed the trisyllabic forms Marcellus and Marcellœ to the modern disyllabic Marseilles; following Reed's revision of 1803 they changed the monosyllabic Roan to the disyllabic Rouen. It is important to note this freezing of the modernization process in the Cambridge Edition because a few decades later the movement of the preceding centuries towards modernization is reversed. In this century there have been a few attempts at modernizing such forms as Poictiers and Meisen,[6] but they have been more than offset by the tendency to return to copy-text forms. Two stages in this process can be distinguished. At the beginning of the century only

modernized forms affecting the metre were discarded: Craig's Roan and Brigstocke's Marsellis (Arden, 1904) are the earliest examples. A second stage begins with Kittredge's Frankford and Harflew where the Elizabethan pronunciation is restored although the prosody as such is not affected. Editorial tendencies of this century are very different from those of preceding centuries since the attempts to re-introduce copy-text forms have neither been generally accepted by subsequent editors, nor have they attained more than an experimental stage in any given edition. The cumulative evidence, however, points to a marked tendency to return to copy-text forms based on a reconsideration of the intricate problems of Elizabethan pronunciation.

That this new editorial attitude entails considerable difficulties should not be overlooked. Some of these are of a more practical nature, and there are some basic objections. It certainly is no light matter that the uniformity of names occurring in variant forms is put in jeopardy. Nor does it seem irrelevant that many of the resulting forms are meaningless to the modern reader without an explanatory footnote. It should also be taken into consideration that modern equivalents can offer the necessary flexibility in those cases where metrical demands might speak in favor of retaining copy-text forms. When the modern disyllabic Marseilles is used to replace the trisyllabic Elizabethan form, the use of a diacritical mark, for example, can restore the trisyllable which the metre requires.[7] If the demands of prosody can be satisfied by such an adaptation of modern orthography, the re-introduction of other Elizabethan forms hardly seems justifiable.

Apart from these questions of detail it has to be emphasized that the practice of restoring the Elizabethan forms of place-names in an otherwise completely modernized text has not been carried out consistently by any editor, nor has each Elizabethan form found its champion. The basic problem is whether this practice of re-introducing archaic forms can be raised to a reasonable and working editorial principle. It is significant that editors have rather sporadically retained the one or other old form but seem to have avoided names which would put such a principle to the test, as, for example, those names with variant spellings. Contrary to modern usage Milan is usually stressed on the first syllable in Shakespeare, a pronunciation which might be indicated by retaining a form with double -ll-. Unfortunately, we find two Elizabethan variants in the authoritative texts: Millaine (TMP, TGV, ADO)[8] and Millane (JN). Omitting for a

moment the possibility of modernization, four editorial choices present themselves: 1) exact reproduction of both forms, 2) retention of an "accepted" Elizabethan form, 3) retention of the form preferred by Shakespeare, 4) construction of a form that suggests the Elizabethan pronunciation to the modern reader, e.g. Millan. It is obvious that the second and third choices offer no real basis for solving the problem. There is no fixed Elizabethan orthography, a condition also obtaining for foreign toponyms,[9] and it is practically impossible to determine Shakespeare's spelling preference in this case, assuming that he had one. Millaine, the more frequent form, seems to be independent of compositor, a fact which might be interpreted as pointing to a Shakespearean preference; the same form, however, might simply reflect Ralph Crane's preference since he transcribed those plays in which Millaine occurs most often. The form Millane might have its origin in the foul papers of King John, but even this would provide an insufficient basis for determining a Shakespearean preference. The adoption of the first choice would be confusing and contrary to the general principle of making proper names uniform throughout the same modern-spelling edition. A synthetic form such as Millan might prove least exceptionable, but could create the erroneous impression of an authentic Elizabethan reading, quite apart from confusing the reader as to the identity of the place actually intended.

Barring modernization it seems at best an open question whether a consistent editorial principle that is also textually satisfactory can be developed to cover the many possibilities. But even if such a principle could be evolved, it is still questionable whether place-names in their Elizabethan form are compatible with a text that is in other regards fully modernized. The argument of preserving Elizabethan pronunciation does not really seem cogent since in all other cases the phonetic development of the English language is carefully reflected. Such an argument also fails to take into account place-names whose Elizabethan orthography coincides with the modern but whose Elizabethan pronunciation was considerably different. It may be interesting for the historian of the English language that the name of the French harbor Harfleur was probably pronounced Harflew; it should be no less interesting that the capital of the Imperium Romanum was apparently homophonous with room and that Shakespeare more than once bases a

pun on this phonetic identity. For the modern reader the form Rome no longer reflects this identity, which, thus, goes unnoted in the modern edition.

The retention of a few Elizabethan forms is apt to mislead the reader; even more serious is the undue prominence given to random samples of historical changes in pronunciation which can be profitably studied only within the context of an old-spelling edition. With historical place-names, therefore, the only feasible determinant would be whether an unmistakable identification is possible. That this question is still far from being settled in all cases was shown some years ago with the form Champaigne (1H6 1.1.60 F1) which many editors had understood as the province of Champagne and accordingly altered until A. S. Cairncross (New Arden) identified it on the basis of Shakespeare's sources as the town of Compiègne. If the identity of the historical place is beyond doubt, however, it is difficult to understand why the original forms should not be modernized in a modern-spelling edition.