KING LEAR.1

I. THE TEXT.

MR. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS-who, although he is doubly a doctor, can afford to be spoken of as if he were only a gentlemen—has added a fourth play and a fifth volume to the new variorum edition of Shakespeare's works which he has begun, and which it is to be hoped that he will have the health, the endurance, and the perseverance to complete. The plays which he has heretofore given us are "Romeo and Juliet," "Macbeth," and "Hamlet." The scale on which he works is so grand that the first and the second of these plays fill, each of them, with their various readings, notes, and commentaries, a large octavo volume, while for "Hamlet two such volumes are required. The fifth volume, now before us, contains "King Lear."

A variorum edition of a great writer is so called, as most of the readers of these pages probably know, because it presents, with his text, all of the work of his various editors and commentators which in the judgment of the variorum editor is necessary to a critical study of that text, and all the various readings of all previous editions which are of any authority or interest. Thus, as Mr. Furness remarks in his preface to the present volume, "the attempt is

1 A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. Edited by Horace Howard Furness, Ph. D., LL. D. Vol. V. King Lear. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1880.

here made to present on the same page with the text all the various readings of the different editions of 'King Lear,' from the earliest quarto to the latest critical edition of the play, together with all the notes and comments thereon which the editor has thought worthy of preservation, not only for the purpose of elucidating the text, but at times as illustrations of the history of Shakespearean criticism;" and yet to this there are added, in the appendix, essays on the text, on the date of the composition of the play, on the source of the plot, the duration of the action, the insanity of Lear, the great actors of the principal part, and the costume of the play, Tate's version of it, selections from English and German criticisms of it, and its bibliography, a work the magnitude, we might almost say the enormity, of which can be appreciated only by those who have some practical acquaintance with such labors.

There have been several variorum editions of Shakespeare's plays. Indeed, as every editor has almost of necessity availed himself of the labors of all of his predecessors and quoted them, every amply critical edition has been more or less a variorum; but the only editions which have really this character in any approach to completeness are those known as Johnson and Steevens's, 1785, in ten volumes; Malone's, 1790, in ten volumes; Reid and Steevens's, 1813, in twentyone volumes; and Boswell's Malone, 1821, also in twenty-one volumes. The great Cambridge edition, by William George Clark and W. Aldis Wright, in nine volumes, is a complete variorum as to readings, but not as to notes and comments. Of these Boswell's Malone is the standard variorum, and is always meant by editors and commentators when they cite "the

Variorum." That of Reid and Steevens is sometimes cited as "the variorum of 1813." But even the former of these does not approach Mr. Furness's work in the vastness of its plan, or in its systematic arrangement, or in the thoroughness of its execution. And the activity of Shakespearean criticism between 1821 and 1880, and the searching and almost scientific study of the English language and its literature during the last twenty-five years, have resulted in the accumulation of a mass of critical material upon this subject since Malone's time which makes a new variorum edition of Shakespeare almost a literary necessity of the day. It is to the honor of the American branch of English literature that the labor of supplying this need has been undertaken by one of our scholars and critics; and still more to its honor that this labor has been performed thus far with the wide range of knowledge, the acumen, the judgment, the taste, and, it may well be added, the invariable good temper which are displayed by Mr. Furness.

To the general reader it may seem that the poet is editorially overlaid in this great edition. The text of "Hamlet may be printed in large type on sixty or seventy duodecimo pages; and indeed it was originally published in a small quarto pamphlet of that size. In the new variorum, Hamlet fills two ponderous octavo volumes. But it is to be remembered that the purpose of a variorum editor is not to produce a pocket edition of his author for popular use. It is not supposed that any one who wishes to take "Hamlet with him on a summer excursion will put the new variorum edition into his travelling-bag,—or the old variorum, for that matter. Boswell's Malone's Shakespeare was quite as much overlaid for its time

as Furness's is; and even more, for it was filled with rubbish which subsequent editors have swept into the dust-bin. A variorum edition professes to give what is necessary for the critical study of its author, and even, as Mr. Furness says, to illustrate the history of the critical literature of which he is the source and the subject. The doing of this involves the preservation of much which is, in the judgment of the variorum editor himself, of little intrinsic value.

It is easy to laugh and sneer at the editors and commentators of Shakespeare; and some of them, in their dulness of apprehension no less than in the voluminous superfluity and feeble triviality of their criticism, are indeed "fixed figures for the time of scorn to point his slow unmoving finger at." But not a little of the scoffing to which they as a class have been subjected is the mere effervescence of the ignorance of the scoffers, which with some folk is a very sparkling quality. Many even of those who read and enjoy Shakespeare talk of being content with "the text” itself without note or comment. But what text? Such objections to editorial labor on Shakespeare can be made by candid and intelligent persons only in utter ignorance of the state in which the text of Shakespeare's plays has come down to us. The "text of Shakespeare," when thus spoken of, means merely the text which the speakers have been in the habit of reading. But that very text, they may be sure, is the result of the painful labors, through many generations, of the very editors of whom they speak so slightingly.

Shakespeare did not publish his plays himself and read the proofs with the assistance of a good corrector of the press. Would that he had done so! They

were, some of them, obtained by their first publishers surreptitiously; they were printed from imperfect manuscripts, or from mutilated stage copies; and then they were printed with less care than is now given to the printing of a handbill. The very edition issued by his fellow-actors after his death, the great First Folio, 1623, a perfect copy of which is worth twenty-five hundred dollars and upwards, is incomplete and full of errors. The first edition of "Hamlet," 1603, is in many passages absolutely unreadable, and is in fact an absurd jumble of what Shakespeare wrote. The "authentic" edition of 1623, besides being full of perplexing errors of the press, is very incomplete. If the text of Shakespeare were put before these captious amateur critics uncorrected by editorial labor and without comment, they would not recognize many parts of it; they would not believe that it was "Shakespeare," and they would be right; and besides this, in numberless passages in which they would really have "Shakespeare" they would be unable to understand him.

The truth upon this point is that the text of Shakespeare's plays has come down to us from his own time with such imperfection and such variety of presentation that to form it into a self-consistent whole requires a degree of scholarship and of critical acumen beyond that required by the text of any other great poet of the past, excepting Homer, whose poems lived only in the mouths of rhapsodists and in the memory of hearers for hundreds of years before they were put upon paper. As to Shakespeare's writings, there is such variety of authority in regard to them and the authority is so conflicting in many cases, they are so lame and mutilated in every "authoritative" form, that they are just in the condition to need and to pro