PAYNE COLLIER, COLERIDGE, SHAKSPERE. * As Mr. Payne Collier °Couples too
respectable a place among men of letters to need any petty. devices for gaining reputation, we see no sufficient reason why he has bound in the same cover the matter of three if not four independent pamphlets, and issued them in the pretentious form of an octavo volume. What Mr. Collier calls an Introductory Preface is in fact a good third of the book : it contains an explanation of the mannerwhich he be- came possessed of the famous folio, and of the notes'of Coleridge's Lectures ; some records of his early acquaintance with Coleridge, and of that great talker's conversation or rather monologue during a portion of the period ; an apparently well-deserved ex- posure of Mr. Singer's unscrupulous adoption without acknow- ledgment of numerous emendations from Mr. Collier's folio, fol- lowing close upon unmeasured depreciation of the discovery and discoverer ; and, finally, a really valuable series of in- stances, principally from the old plays edited by Mr. Dyce, and especially his Beaumont and Fletcher, illustrating the errors of text, due principally to obvious mistakes of ear and eye in the process of writing from dictation or of setting up the type for printing. Here is already a rather miscellaneous list of subjects, linked together by no very obvious principle except their personal relation to Mr. Collier him- self. Then follow fragmentary notes of a few out of a course of lectures delivered by Coleridge in the year 1811-'12 which notes, in spite of the titlepage of the volume, have nothing to do with Milton except by way of illustration of Shakspere. Last of all comes the list of emendations from the folio of 1632, now pub- lished for the first time complete, and arranged in two parallel columns, with the old text on one side and the emendation of the folio on the other. Beyond the objection. we have to literary hodgepodge, there is a, practical reason for these matters being kept separate. Many, persons may desire to have the notes of Coleridge's Lectures as a supplement to his collected works ; many more would wish to have the emendations of the folio as a necessary supplement to every edition of Shakspere : why should persons who want one be obliged to have both ? or persons who want each separate be obliged to have them together ? and both sets of people compelled to have, along with what they want to gratify purely literary tastes, a vast quantity of personal and miscellaneous polemic of Mr. Collier's ? The volume ought to have been at least three pamphlets. Whatever may be thought of the positive authority of the emendations in Mr. Collier's folio, there can be no question that their comparative value is very high. Unfortunately, there is not a tittle of evidence as to the author of the emendations, the date at which or the circumstances under which they were written, in the copy of the folio so accidentally preserved from destruction. All is conjecture' however probable conjecture, on these points. But it is always to be borne in mind, and the more to be insisted on because recent editors especially have so remarkably lost sight of the fact, that the only positive authority in existence for the true text of Shakspere is itself so defective that it is impossible for any but the blindest adherents to consider it as final, and that even they, while professing in theory so to consider it, have been obliged continually to deviate from .its letter in their so-called re- productions. The case is not, therefore, one of emendations unsup- ported by external evidence against a text bearing upon its sur- face the signs of integrity, but of such emendations against a test which all allow to be full 'of mistakes. Are we, then, to give un- checked licence to conjectural emendation, and wherever we can suggest a fancied improvement in the text of Shakspere, to adopt it at once on the ground that the folio is full of misprints ? Obvi- ously in that case every man would soon be his own Shakspere. Strauss, in his Leben Jesu, saw that his work would only be half accomplished if he demonstrated even to the satisfaction of the world that the history of the origin of Christianity was a mythus ; he per- oeived that it was further necessary to show how the mythus had arisen, and had taken a particular definite shape at a particular time and place. That ingenious essay may at least teach us a lesson in critical procedure. In order to remove a sus- pected reading from a text on conjectural grounds alone, we must not only show that the reading is inferior in sense or force to the one proposed in substitution, but also how the error arose, to what known or probable cause of mistakes in writing or printing it may be referred. If we can succeed in demonstrating that the presumed change of words or letters, or one of the same kind, is frequently made by copyists and compositors, we need have little hesitation in coming to the conclusion that it was made in the Particular instance under dispute ; and though one, cannot be certain of the fact, few persons would resist the moralprobability. For let it never be forgotten, that in the case of Shakspere's text, where the folio fails us, certainty is now beyond pur reach; and
&vest Lecturba on Shakspere and hfitton, by the late S. T. Coleritl#e • a List of
all the NS. Emendations iri Mr. Colliers and Folio, 1632; airintroddctotv Pre- face ky J. Payne Collier, Esq. Published by Chapman and Ball.
lie who will be content with nothing short of it, must be content with the text as the folio gives it, and even then he is certain of nothing more than that the folio gives it ; he is not certain that the editors of the folio intended so to give it, much less that Shak- spere himself so wrote it, or intended to write it.
This, then, is the safe rule for the admission of purely conjec- tural emendations into the text of Shakspere. The failure of the text must be decided, the substitution a manifest improvement, and the origin of the error, the growth of the existing out of the proposed reading, explicable on admitted principles. If this rule 1313 applied to Mr. Collier's discovery,—and it appears from his preface to be the rule to which he is in theory inclined to submit the whole range of conjectural emendations, though in practice he allows himself to be tempted beyond this prudent limit,—its value will be found to be very high as compared not only with the conjectural emendations proposed by any other single editor or commentator, but by the whole body of them together, from Pope and Theobold to Dyce and Singer • while some of the hap- piest conjectures of these critics have 'been anticipated and in some sense verified by their anonymous predecessor,—for of the fact that the manuscript emendations belong to the seventeenth century, there is, we suppose, no reasonable doubt. But it would be doing great injustice to the manuscript emend.- ations to rank them mere y as the best and richest stock of con- jectures that will stand the test we have mentioned : they bear internal evidence of being much more than this. It is a rule among congers of ancient manuscripts, to consider, cteteris pa.- ribus, a difficult or unusual reading more likely to be authentic than one that is easy and familiar. The reason is evident. A copyist would be more tempted to write a word with which he was familiar, instead of one that was strange to him, than he would be to commit the reverse mistake. On a similar principle if we find Mr. Collier's unknown emender altering the text of the folio in a way that we cannot account for by any manifest internal ground for the alteration, we are compelled to think that he may have had external evidence for his altera- tion. The most plausible hypothesis that has been put forward. appears to us to be, that the emender was connected as manager or prompter with the representation of the plays, and that he may have made the emendations from the stage-tradition. This is in- deed, far enough from being a coequal authority with the text printed from Shakspere's own manuscript under the super- intendence of his friends Hemming and Condell. But when that authority utterly fails us, it is a subsidiary aid, for which every reasonable person will be gratefuL
Of course we cannot pretend to do any justice to Mr. Collier's discovery by this sketch of the general argument, as it seems to us to be admitted now, after much rather heated discussion, by all but a few partisans whose passions and interests have been touched. The public has at last what it ought to have had long ago, a complete list of all the manuscript emendations with the old text in parallel columns ; and if the book is not eagerly bought up, it will only be because it is stuffed with a mass of other matter, interesting enough in itself, but having nothing to do with what must be looked on as a supplement to every edition of Shakspere's text.
We have left ourselves no space to speak at length of the Lec- tures by Coleridge which form the middle portion of the volume. Mr. Collier took short-hand notes of the whole course ; of which, however, he has lost the larger portion. The part he has re- covered and now published is, in point of fulness and fidelity, about upon a par with the notes of those lectures published an Coleridge's Literary Remains. However much this leaves to be desired, all students of Shakspere and of Coleridge will be thank- ful for the new contribution. The sterling value of Coleridge's criticism, and its peculiar characteristics, are too well known to need a word of comment in England at the present day. It is to him more than to any other man that the philosophical criticism of the last thirty years among us owes its distinguishing merits, and even its technical terms. If in the hands of pretenders and sciolists the philosophy has become balderdash, and the termi- nology has degenerated into cant, there is no better remedy than to go back to the original source, and see that the philosophy was vital and the terms full of meaning. Even those who have but little appreciation of the profound insight of Coleridge into the conditions of poetry in general and its specific kinds, will be delighted with the criticism in detail supplied by the new lecturea on the Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and Hamlet. Mr. Collier has made a- very precious addition to the Cole-. ridgiana.
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