the next to the last line is parenthetical and means, the council not being in session, or being disregarded; but if he can interpret the last line without a note telling him that him' is equivalent to him whom,' also that 'papers' is a verb, meaning 'puts on the list,' he is one of a thousand.

The errors which have been corrected come under several heads:

(a) In some cases speeches are plainly attributed to the wrong person, in the folio and quartos both, as, for example, in the speech of the ghost in Hamlet:

Thus was I, . .

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head; O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible! If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. It seems unlikely that the ghost, who has but a few minutes left, should interrupt himself to comment on his murder, and natural that his son should interject the line beginning, 'O, horrible!' and not confine the expression of his feeling to dumb show. It is very easy for the printer to omit the speaker's name. The speech is usually taken by the actor of Hamlet, and it would seem rightly. But there are other cases where the transference of speeches is not warranted, though the sequence of ideas would be more manifest if it were done.

(b) As a matter of course many words and phrases used in 1600 have since become obsolete. Some of these are explained as allusions to social customs, to folklore of the day, or to sports, as archery, hawking, or bowls. The vocabulary of slang is very ephemeral. No one ever uses wrongly a slang expression of his time, but it is sometimes very difficult to appreciate the force of ob

solete slang, and the same may be said of fashionable jargon and the current style of wit. This is especially evident in Love's Labour's Lost, and is one of the subjects that need illuminating notes. All these questions have been pretty well threshed out, and this book will be concerned with them only incidentally. The reader soon learns from the context that, with Shakespeare, sad means serious, but not melancholy; conceit, mental conception, not egotistic self-esteem; favor, countenance, not good-will; complexion, natural composition, not hue of skin; owe, own, not be indebted; and the significance of many other words which are not obsolete but have changed their shade of meaning. But he learns it more readily from having it pointed out to him.

(c) Closely allied to the above is the question of grammatical construction. Shakespeare knew nothing of our modern rules, and would have disregarded them cheerfully in favor of current usage had they been drilled into him. His usage was of course the good usage of his day, for he was very sensitive to the signification of words as well as to English syntax, though he wrenched both in the latter part of his life when vigorous expression was in question. That he uses 'who' when we should say 'whom,' and writes 'none' with the plural or singular verb according to the shade of meaning, is not a matter of great importance either way. As a rule his style is very idiomatic, and therefore offensive to purists.

(d) In places where the original sources fail to convey an intelligible meaning, conjecture has been resorted to, sometimes with happy effect and sometimes with inconceivable ineptitude. For example, in Twelfth Night the Duke says of music:

That strain again:—it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound

That breathes upon a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odour.

Though music is a 'sound,' it is difficult to see how it could confer or convey smell. Pope changed 'sound' to 'south,' which makes the passage one of those appropriate images disclosing the essence of the thing described, a creation of a poet. The damp south wind in spring passing over beds of flowers does steal and give odor. Nevertheless, the emendation is not universally or even generally accepted.

Another famous and universally accepted change is less satisfactory. In Henry V, 11, iii, Dame Quickly, describing the death of Sir John Falstaff, says, 'His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green fields.' Theobald, an excellent critic of the eighteenth century, the man who incurred the enmity of Pope, who called him 'poor piddling Tibbalds' in the Dunciad because he had pointed out some of the shortcomings of Pope's edition, emended this passage to read: For his nose was as sharp as a pen and he babbled of green fields.'

Whoever has witnessed the deathbed of an old man of the Falstaff type knows that the delightful old reprobate never weakened to a commonplace pathos in the stupor that precedes dissolution. His nose was as sharp as a pen' is precisely the realism of a woman like Quickly, to whose mind details like the 'dish of prawns' and the 'parcel-gilt goblet' are always present, and Mr. Collier's suggestion: His nose was as sharp as a pen on a table of green frieze' seems nearer the true reading. But the former is universally accepted.

In some cases, like 'that runaway's eyes may wink in Romeo and Juliet, it is impossible to hit on a satisfactory reading, though we should like exceedingly to know who 'runaway' was. The conjecture 'rumour's

eyes' is not altogether satisfactory, and the question is insoluble. In other cases the true word or the meaning of the word is of little consequence, as in The Tempest, when Caliban, in an excess of loyalty to his new master, Stefano, says, 'I'll bring thee to clustering filberds, and sometimes I'll get thee young scammels from the rock.'

What are scammels? Sea birds or oysters? It is of no consequence that we cannot tell. They were something good to eat,—excellent beyond question, and the freckled whelp knew where they most did congregate.

There are some hundred and eighty cases where conjecture is at a loss. These are known as 'cruxes.' Many of the ingenious minds of the nineteenth century commented on these and endeavored to suggest a meaning. When a line has apparently dropped out in the printing, it is hopeless to attempt to replace it, so much of the force of Shakespeare's verse depends on the individual choice and collocation of the words. For instance, in the first act and first scene of Hamlet, Horatio is describing the portents that appeared

He

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell.

says:

The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star

Upon whose influence Neptune's Empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

In the above 'stars' and 'disasters' are plainly subjects with no verb. Perhaps a line was omitted by the compositor. If so, it has dropped into oblivion. It has been suggested that 'disasters in the sun' might be changed

to 'disastrous, dimmed the sun,' but that will not do, for comets do not dim the sun, and, besides, we cannot give up the great phrase 'disasters in the sun.' Here, then, is a place when Heminge and Condell failed in their promise to give us the plays 'cured and perfect of their limbs, and all the rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived them,' and modern ingenuity cannot touch it. We must submit to one of the great historical misfortunes. Fortunately few of the insoluble cruxes occur in passages as beautiful as the above. In some cruxes a meaning is dimly shadowed but cannot be formulated. The various suggestions and conjectures as to the force of the words and as to the true reading in these cases are brought together with great patience and fidelity by Dr. Furness in the notes on the plays contained in his great Variorum Edition, and it is to be regretted that he does not oftener sum up the argument and give a decision, which no one is more competent to do. Some of the guesses are more plausible than others, but as a rule no one is convincing. The unjustifiable suggestions of the eighteenth century have as a rule been rejected. The Globe Edition - based on the Cambridge Edition of Aldis and Wright— is an example of conservative scholarship. In it the passages where a definite meaning cannot be gathered without violent conjecture are marked with a dagger. They number 185, if the writer counted correctly, and even some of these suggest a logical thought, shadowy perhaps, but not entirely dark.

It was of course absolutely necessary first to settle as nearly as possible on all textual questions. The subject has been exhausted, and the argument for the various conjectural readings is easily accessible. Nevertheless, the following interpretation by Mr. F. Sturges Allen of Springfield, almost unquestionably correct, was made in the spring of 1907: