The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 47, September, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 47, September, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Compare this with the following extracts from the same journal of July
9th, 1859;--"The folio never had any ascertained external authority.
All the warrant it has ever brought to reasonable critics is internal."
"If anybody, in the heat of argument, ever claimed for them [the MS.
readings] a right of acceptance beyond the emendations of Theobald,
Malone, Dyce, and Singer, (that is, a right not justified by their
obvious utility or beauty,) such a claim must have been untenable, by
whomsoever urged."]
Other points sought to be established against Mr. Collier and the
genuineness of his manuscript authorities must be noticed in an article
which aims at the presentation of a comprehensive view of this subject.
These are based on certain variations between Mr. Collier's statements
as to the readings of his manuscript authorities and a certain supposed
"philological" proof of the modern origin of one of those authorities,
the folio of 1632. Upon all these points the case of Mr. Collier's
accusers breaks down. It is found, for instance, that in the folio an
interpolated line in "Coriolanus," Act iii. sc. 2, reads,--
"To brook _controul_ without the use of anger,"
and that so Mr. Collier gave it in both editions of his "Notes and
Emendations," in his fac-similes made for private distribution, in his
vile one-volume Shakespeare, and in the "List," etc., appended to the
"Seven Lectures." But in his new edition of Shakespeare's Works (6 vols.
1858) he gives it,--
"To brook _reproof_ without the use of anger,"
and hereupon Dr. Ingleby asks,--"Is it not possible that here Mr.
Collier's remarkable memory is too retentive, and that, though second
thoughts may be best, first thoughts are sometimes inconveniently
remembered to the prejudice of the second?"[N] Here we see a palpable
slip of memory or of the pen, by which an old man substituted one word
for another of similar import, as many a younger man has done before
him, tortured into evidence of forgery. Such an objection is worthy of
notice only as an example of the carping, unjudicial spirit in which
this subject is treated by some of the British critics.
[Footnote N: _The Shakespeare Fabrications_, p. 45.]
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