Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents?—what are thy comings in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul, O, adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy, being feared,
Than they in fearing."
The MS. corrector gives us—
"O, ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul but adulation?"
The objection to this reading is that Shakespeare's lines are equivalent to—
O, ceremony, thou hast no worth;
O, adoration, thou hast no soul—
absolutely none. This reading, which denies to ceremony and adoration all soul and substance—all worth and reality—is more emphatic than the corrector's, which declares that adulation is the soul of ceremony; and we therefore vote for allowing the text to remain as we found it.
Act IV. Scene 3.—In the following lines Shakespeare pays a compliment—not of the most elegant kind we admit—to the English, whose valour, he says, is such that even their dead bodies putrefying in the fields of France will carry death into the ranks of the enemy.
"Mark, then, abounding valour in the English;
That being dead, like to a bullet's grazing,
Break out into a second course of mischief,
Killing in relapse of mortality."
The similitude of "the bullet's grazing" has led the MS. corrector into two execrable errors. By way of carrying out the metaphor, he proposes to read "rebounding valour," and "killing in reflex of mortality." But Shakespeare knew full well what he was about. He has kept his similitude within becoming bounds, while the corrector has driven it over the verge of all propriety. Both of his corrections are wretched, and the latter of them is outrageous. We are surprised that he did not propose "killing in reflex off mortality," for this would bring out his meaning much better than the expression which he has suggested. But we may rest assured that "killing in relapse of mortality" merely means, killing in their return to the dust from whence they were taken; and that this is the right reading.
The First Part of King Henry VI.—A difficulty occurs in the last line of Act II. Scene 5, where Plantagenet says—
"And therefore haste I to the Parliament,
Either to be restored to my blood,
Or make my ill the advantage of my good."
This is the common reading, and it means, "or make my ill the occasion of my good." The earlier copies have "will" for "ill," The MS. correction is—
"Or make my will th' advancer of my good."
But this is no improvement upon the common reading, which ought to remain unaltered.
Act IV. Scene 1.—A small but very significant instance, illustrative of what we are convinced is the true theory of these new readings, namely, that they are attempts, not to restore, but to modernise Shakespeare, comes before us in the following lines, where the knights of the garter are spoken of as
"Not fearing death, nor shrinking from distress,
But always resolute in most extremes."
"Most extremes" does not mean (as one ignorant of Shakespeare's language might be apt to suppose) "in the greater number of extremes:" it means, in extremest cases, or dangers. The same idiom occurs in the "Tempest," where it is said—
"Some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone and most poor matters
Point to rich ends;"
which certainly does not mean that the greater number of poor matters point to rich ends, but that the poorest matters often do so. It would be well if the two words were always printed as one—most-extremes, and most-poor. Now, surely Mr Collier either cannot know that this phraseology is peculiarly Shakespearean, or he must be desirous of blotting out from the English language our great poet's favourite forms of speech, when he says, "there is an injurious error of the printer in the second line;" and when he recommends us to accept the MS. marginal correction, by which Shakespeare's archaism is exchanged for this modernism—
"But always resolute in worst extremes."
