SHAKESPEAREAN scholars have once more cause for rejoicing. In this volume Dr. Furness presents them with the fourteenth play in his admirable edition, equipped as before with the essence of the comment and criticism of two hundred years, with all the results of scholarship on date and sources, and with an account of the fortunes of the drama on the stage. For purposes of comparison Dryden's treatment of the same story in his All for Love is printed in full, and a score of other dramatic versions are summarized with varying degrees of fullness. The quality of the compilation remains as noteworthy as its compendiousness. It is rare indeed to find either in the printing of the Folio text or in the abstracts of criticism any falling away from that accuracy which has from the first distinguished this great undertaking. The mere statement of these facts makes further praise un

necessary.

most said the decision

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But Dr. Furness's eagerness to serve Shakespeare does not stop here. He is no longer content merely to chronicle the opinions and conclusions of others. Every note dealing with a disputed point closes with the judgment we had alof the editor, and in his preface he combats sturdily what he conceives to be widely current misinterpretations of some of the chief characters. The almost official standing which the weightiness of the edition seems to confer upon these utterances warrants us in considering them with great care; for an effort is necessary not to be overawed by the ipse dixit of one whose labors, so amply vouched for, point him out as umpire. He himself has often shown us how to be justly critical of the great Shakespeareans of the past without

stinting admiration, and we would fain follow his example.

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The first question is of the text. Dr. Furness is now the leader of the wholesome reaction against reckless emendation, a reaction which itself tends towards an opposite extreme, that of a superstitious veneration for the authority of the First Folio. It comes to be a foregone conclusion that, where any defense in any degree rational can be made for a Folio reading, Dr. Furness will be found on the conservative side. Of the two extremes this is undoubtedly the safer; yet surely there is a more excellent way. A few examples will show whither the tendency leads. Few of the learned and ingenious Theobald's emendations have been more universally accepted than that which reads in v, ii, 87, in Cleopatra's eulogy of her dead lover, "For his bounty, There was no winter in 't; an autumn 't was That grew the more by reaping."

interrogation mark absolutely wrong? It has been discarded by every editor since the Third Folio. But may it not indicate Charmian's hesitation and Cleopatra's imperious questioning of her delay? To these queries one may safely answer that in modern typography the interrogation mark is absolutely wrong. It is only necessary to read the passage aloud and remember that in the Folio the mark in question has to do double duty for interrogations and exclamations.

In a famous passage in 11, ii, 52, the Folio reads,

"If you 'll patch a quarrell, As matter whole you have to make it with, It must not be with this."

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Rowe, the first editor, corrected you have to "you've not," and most, though not all, later editors have substantially followed him. Ingleby held to the Folio, interpreting “you have [to]', in the sense of obligation, you must." "To me," says Dr. Furness: the meaning seems to be,' If you'll patch a quarrell, inasmuch as you must make the patch out of good whole material, you must not take this.' I think Ingleby is entirely right in his interpretation." But this is to lose the force of the antithesis between "patch" and "whole matter." "You have no solid ground for a quarrell." says Anthony, " and so must base it on fragments. This won't serve even as a fragment."

Opinions on these matters will always differ; but these instances, to which many could be added, will suffice to show Dr. Furness's tendency as a critic of the text.

Of more general interest are the controversies of the Preface. One of these is in a sense also textual, yet of some moment to all who care for our older literature. In several previous volumes, and here once more, Dr. Furness states that many of the misprints in the early editions" are due to the practice of reading the copy aloud to the compositor, practice which we now know obtained in early printing-offices." Among the ex

a

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amples he quotes are these typical ones: For "shall well gree together" the first Folio reads, "shall well greet together;" for "thou should'st tow me after," "thou should'st stowe me after;" for "no more but e'en a Woman," no more but in a Woman." Any compositor, and, I should have thought, any one with much experience of proof-reading, could assure him that precisely such mistakes still occur without the aid of any such copy-reader as he assumes. Recently I have come across such clear instances of mistakes of the ear, as the setting up of "sight" for "site" and "right" for "rite," though the compositor was using printed copy. Such examples merely show that a compositor is often influenced by his mental ear, so to speak. and is liable to confuse words which sound alike as well as words which look alike. Dr. Furness's case, then, cannot be proved from internal evidence. But what about the assertion that we know that the practice of reading to the compositor existed? No reference is given in the present volume, but in the Variorum editions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado about Nothing, where the same theory is upheld, a reference is given to T. L. De Vinne's Invention of Printing (New York, 1876, p. 524), where it is stated that "Conrad Zeltner, a learned printer of the 17th century, said . . . ' that it was customary to employ a reader to read aloud to the compositors, who set the types from dictation, not seeing the copy. But in Mr. DeVinne's second edition (1878) he corrected this statement, on the authority of the French bibliographer, J. P. A. Madden, to the effect that "Zeltner was not a printer, but a Protestant minister . . . the author of a curious book entitled The Gallery of Learned men who have excelled in the honorable Art of Typography. printed at Nuremberg in 1716." This weakens so seriously the authority of Zeltner that it has been necessary to seek more solid evidence. The most elaborate argument on Dr. Furness's side is that

of Dr. Madden himself; but an examination of Dr. Madden's examples from the sixteenth and sevententh centuries has shown that the anagnostes" or "lector" whom he defines as a reader to the compositors was really a reader to the proof-corrector.1 An investigation of some twenty-nine sixteenth-century engravings of printing-offices listed by Mr. Falconer Madan of the Bodleian confirms this conclusion, and makes it clear that the compositor followed with his own eyes the copy, which was fastened to a "visorium" or lay on the type-case. It has seemed worth while to go into this matter in some detail, since the repetition of Zeltner's mistake in volumes so justly regarded as authoritative as the Variorum gives it a wide currency.

The search for the sources whence Shakespeare gathered the material for his plots has engaged the industry of scholars these many years; and now, when these sources, in the case of all but three plays, can be pointed to with fair assurance, one not infrequently hears ungrateful epithets cast at the painstaking "source-hunter." One cause of this ingratitude seems to be that there has been a tendency on the part of the scholars to stop short of their goal. They have too often rested satisfied with the discovery of the bare fact, have failed to go on to its application. For few results of research have placed so potent a weapon in the hands of criticism as those which enable us to observe, as Dr. Furness says in connection with North's Plutarch, "the magic whereby Shakespeare, gilding the pale stream with heavenly alchemy, transfigures the quiet prose, at times almost word for word, into exalted poetry." And in matters of plot and characterization the insight and appreciation that may be gained are no less notable than in the matter of diction and poetry. In his Preface, however, Dr. Furness has chosen to lay stress

The

on the other aspect of the case. accuracy of our reading of the characters of Octavius Cæsar and Cleopatra has suffered seriously, he maintains, from the preconceptions carried over from our knowledge of history; and therefore “ we should accept these plays with our minds the proverbial tabula rasa,” “ we should accept Cleopatra, at Shakespeare's hands, with minds unbiased by history. We should know no more of her than what we hear on the stage."

Several considerations make us hesitate before assenting to this somewhat violent backward swing of the pendulum. Supposing for the moment that the view of Cæsar and of Cleopatra which Dr. Furness opposes to the current one is correct, it is doubtful whether the popular misconception can be laid to excessive study of Plutarch. Surely very many readers are familiar with Shakespeare's play who never turned the pages of Sir Thomas North, popular though he has been in a restricted sense. Again, if, as Dr. Furness implies, our minds have been already biased in our schooldays, his counsel to wipe away every previous record is impossible, and the cure lies not in an attempt to forget, but in a more careful study of what Shakespeare has chosen to omit, to retain, and to add in his treatment of the material supplied by the great biographer of antiquity. Most doubtful of all, however, is his rereading of the two characters in question. He objects to the view of Octavius as " cold, crafty, and self-seeking," and gathers in rebuttal the scenes and utterances which indicate his nobility, his warm-heartedness, and his sincere and fervid love and admiration for Antony. Cleopatra has been unjustly regarded as fickle: "her love for Anthony burned with the unflickering flame of wifely devotion." Nor was Coleridge right in contrasting the love of affection and instinct of Romeo and Juliet with the love of passion and appetite of Antony and Cleopatra. Antony's love for Cleopatra, says Dr. Furness, was not of the senses;

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for, be it remembered, Cleopatra was not beautiful; she had no physical allurements."

Here, surely, is something to make us rub our eyes. The love of Antony and Cleopatra not of the senses! What, then, of the significance of the whole atmosphere of the Alexandrian court, reeking with sensual indulgence, the picturing of which is justly regarded as one of the most superb achievements of the dramatist? Cleopatra had no physical allurements! What, then, of Enobarbus's famous description of her when she pursed up Mark Antony's heart upon the river of Cydnus? There she is described as having o'er-pictured Venus, and elsewhere as a morsel for a monarch," in whose lips and eyes was eternity, whose "hand kings have lipp'd, and trembled kissing."

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But the answer to such extravagances is not best given by quoting opposing passages. For one quality is this tragedy even more notable than for that famous "happy valiancy" of style, for the unparalleled success achieved in it by Shakespeare's characteristic method of

depicting human nature. In this field he is supreme largely because he gives to his creations a complexity that more than anything else makes them real. Smaller men create characters of a single dominating trait, or of a combination of a few easily harmonized traits; or, risking a greater failure, aim at complexity and achieve confusion and inconsistency. Shakespeare above all made men and women about whom we differ as we differ over the people we know; and our instinct is right in condemning the rival interpretation rather than believing that the artist has bungled. What Dr. Furness has done in this attempt to ennoble Octavius and whitewash Cleopatra is to select, under the obsession of an idea, one set of passages, all of which have their due significance, and from these to derive portraits of a man and a woman lacking precisely that subtlety and that delicate balancing of opposing tendencies which are essential elements of some of the most superb characterizations in all literature.

The critic's laurels are not always to be awarded to the scholar.

THINKING BY TYPEWRITER I HAVE been attracted by that feature of Walter H. Page's proposed university course for writers, as outlined in the November Atlantic, which requires daily writing, and I should like to give it what emphasis I can by a short chapter from the biography of a "hack."

Perhaps I had always a vague desire to "touch the magic string," but aside from the usual brilliant and edifying descriptions of country stores, railway stations, vacation episodes, and the like, which are implied by two or three terms of preparatory school, I did nothing in

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the way of deliberate composition until I was farther advanced in years than I now care to remember. After leaving school without having particularly distinguished myself, I experimented for a number of years with a profession with which the accident of birth had made me more or less familiar from childhood. I did not become famous for practical success, but I acquired a considerable capital of technical jargon, and this, bettered by an ancestral example, enabled me to work out a few generalizations for the good of the calling. More precisely, I wrote an article of the how-to-learnhow variety and submitted it to the editor

of a class journal. To my surprise it was published, favorably received, and without any previous experience I was called upon to play the part of a teacher. For five years I have been producing a literature, if such it may be called, of a semitechnical character.

How to accomplish thinking has been my problem from the first. After a few weeks the novelty of authorship wore off and a most obstinate paralysis seized my faculties. With publication day approaching at a gallop, twenty times have I sat at my desk in hopeless vacancy, waiting for the inspiration that never came. I talked with ministers, as having at least an acquaintance with the divine afflatus, but they were only amused at my troubles. I searched the libraries. A text-book on rhetoric assured me that I should have an elaborate plan before attempting to write, and that under no consideration should I presume to write a sentence until I had phrased at least a paragraph in my mind. "If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" Having desperately resolved to follow this method, and having sat at my desk for days in succession without the reward of a single paragraph, I fell into a slough compared with which Christian's was a transparent pool.

Nevertheless, something in me would not yield, and I resolved again and again that I would force thought. Accordingly I began a series of excitements. I tried coffee, opium, physical exercise, dictating to a stenographer, and doubtless stopped short of a phonograph because I could neither buy nor borrow one. I should not have faltered even at alcohol, but that the reaction from coffee left me in such a state of collapse that I was afraid a stronger stimulant might prove fatal.

However, most problems seem to have a solution, and one cannot struggle five years without making some headway. In a newspaper, not long ago, I stumbled upon a criticism of Mr. Page's sugges

tion that one learns to write by continued daily practice. As usual I was receptive, and was at once eager for a test. I began to write every day. In default of ready phrases and clear plans I simply sat down at my typewriter and struck the keys. The product at first was mere drivel, but in two or three hours something like sanity began to emerge, and I could then reduce the chaos to order. Details are unnecessary and might be tedious, but I may say that the total results of this latest experiment have been to me almost incredible. In the last two months alone I have accumulated a vast amount of raw material, and have written more finished articles than I usually write in six. I have put not less than one hundred thousand words upon paper, an accomplishment which in the old days would have required at least a year. To crown all, I now enjoy often the novelty of writing an article at the first attempt.

Whatever merits the plan may ultimately be found to have, I am confident that for such hacks as I, this method will most surely develop thinking. I must think while I write, not in advance, and if I set only rubbish to flowing, real ideas will be caught in the stream. The crudities and platitudes which at first appear need not discourage me. A psychologist has said that whatever occurs in consciousness must be introduced, and the most aristocratic thoughts may be ushered in by ragged associates. By daily throwing off a vast amount of trash, I seldom fail to release ideas that are suited to my purpose. This very article, which is now a thing of beauty, I hope, would at first have disgraced a patent medicine almanac.