years since the last variorum edition of Shakespeare made its appearance. During that period Shakespeare has advanced more rapidly than ever before towards supremacy as a universal classic. Especially is this the case in Germany, where a great, wise, thoughtful people accept him as their "Emperor of Literature," setting him above all their national kings and princes of thought, and laying their vast treasures of learning and philosophy under contribution to interpret and illustrate his teachings. In fact, he may now be said to have made a full conquest of the whole German mind. Very great progress towards the same end has also been achieved in France. The tone with which Voltaire and other lawgivers in poetry used to speak of him has pretty much ceased to be heard. He is not, indeed, so reverentially studied there as in Germany, for reverential study in anything is not much the custom there; and, though the French mind does not yet appear to take to him cordially, it appears to be growing more and more into the persuasion that it ought to do so.

Within the same period of time, Shakespearian criticism has undergone an almost entire revolution. Both in its spirit and its method it is now quite another thing than it was fifty years ago. Shakespeare has on all hands come to be regarded as an authentic and ultimate lawgiver in his province. His critics, instead of affecting to teach him, or to sit in judgment upon him, are content to sit at his feet, and accept his deliverances as authoritative legislation in the realm of thought; they take him as their canon both of poetical and of human wisdom, and deem themselves happy if they can make their philosophy large enough and deep enough to comprehend and interpret the facts of his workmanship.

These great and wide-reaching changes in men's thought and discourse about Shakespeare afford ample reason why a new variorum edition of his works should be forthcoming. It may almost be said, indeed, that the just rights of Shakespearian literature imperatively call for such an undertaking. And it must be added, withal, that the same causes which authenticate the demand at the same time very much augment the labor and difficulty of the enterprise. High, very high indeed, must be a man's endowments in learning and judgment, to qualify him for doing the work as the present condition of the subject requires. To set forth a full and fair digest and compendium of what has been written about Shakespeare during the last fifty years is in truth a herculean task. Scholarship at once profound and varied and comprehensive; a discrimination naturally quick and keen, and largely exercised, besides, in the accumulated and diversified specialties of the matter; a judicial calmness and equanimity of temper; a firm grasp

of general principles, together with a minute and exact attention to details; a vigilance that nothing can escape, a diligence that nothing can tire, a patience that nothing can exhaust; - these are among the qualifications fairly requisite for the due performance of such an undertaking. This supposes, indeed, a very rare combination of faculties : memory, reflection, judgment, taste, industry, exactness, all working together; and the process involving at every step great breadth and delicacy of perception, and the constant exercise of a mind prompt to seize the essential point, and skilled to sift it clear of encumbrances and obscurations.

So far as we are able to judge in the matter, the specimen before us warrants the assurance that the work has fallen into the right hands. Mr. Furness is evidently a workman of no ordinary stamp. He has a just and clear understanding of what such a work ought to be; he shows an ample mastery of his tools; and he walks as one well at home in all the parts of his wide field. His plan is as original as any plan ought to be in an enterprise of that nature; and it is exceedingly bold withal, though not bold in such a sense as to preclude the modesty of a well-poised judgment; in fact, it seems almost a marvel that any man should find the courage and resolution to grapple with an undertaking of such magnitude and requiring so great a stress of labor.

We must endeavor to make some tolerable statement of what his plan is, and what it includes. And here it will not be out of place to remark, that in his Preface to the second volume the Editor tells us he has somewhat modified the plan with which he set out. The modification, however, is in the way of enlargement, and does not touch the essential virtue of the thing. In the case of "Romeo and Juliet," which occupies the first volume, he took the variorum edition of 1821 as his point of departure, not intending to go back of that in the matter of the annotation. In that edition, the notes were selected and made up as the editors judged best from the whole range of preceding commentators; and the design of Mr. Furness was to accept their work as a sort of finality in reference to that part of the field. Of course, such a limitation would very much abridge the labors of his task. Nevertheless, he now repeals that limitation; and he is assuredly right in doing So. For, however well and wisely the editors of 1821 may have done their work, still there is no good reason, except for the saving of time and toil, why the ground which they included should not be traversed and explored again. Mr. Furness has satisfied himself, as indeed he well might, that much of valuable matter, which was overlooked or rejected by the editors of 1821, is still to be gleaned in the walks of commentary whence their gatherings were made. And it is abundantly

certain that no available aids and resources towards ascertaining and elucidating Shakespeare's thought and language ought to be dispensed with or neglected in a work of such encyclopedian character. So that Mr. Furness's plan, as now enlarged, just takes in the whole field. Accordingly, for the material of the annotation in his second volume he draws upon the entire range of editors and commentators from Rowe down to the present time. Doubtless the work done in 1821 will very much facilitate his survey and assist his harvest; still he has in all conscience work enough on his hands.

Now for some particulars of his plan. First in order, he aims, of course, to set forth, as well as may be, the poet's genuine text. This is a labor requiring the nicest tact; and nothing but a long steeping in the poet's idiom of language can rightly prepare one for the attempt. On this point, his workmanship strikes us as eminently judicious. He is cautious and wary in a very high degree. We have to confess, indeed, that he is rather more conservative than we should be; but the error, if it be one, is certainly on the right side. It is better to be too slow than too fast in accepting the results of conjectural emendation. For instance, he retains the original reading in the following passage, Act I. Sc. 2:

"If I say sooth, I must report they were

As cannons overcharg'd with double cracks;

So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe."

Walker notes doubly as a probable interpolation. Whether the word came there by interpolation or by accidental repetition from double in the line before, we make no question that it ought to be omitted; both sense and metre cry out against it. Nevertheless, Mr. Furness is probably right in retaining the word in his text; for he marks the proposed reading in his notes, and furnishes all the matter that we need in order to judge for ourselves how the text ought to be.

Next in order comes the point of different readings. This is a matter requiring the utmost vigilance and exactness. To be sure, this part of the work is not a little furthered and lightened by what the editor finds done to his hand. Especially, as he remarks in his Preface, the Cambridge editors, by their accurate collation of the old copies, have been of great service to him. Yet he does not rest satisfied with this; he takes nothing at second-hand, and lets no item of their collation pass without verifying it for himself. And his indebtedness on this score is most handsomely acknowledged. "Although," says he, "the present collation is entirely original, and no reading is recorded at second-hand, yet it should be always borne in mind that I had the great

advantage of a check-list, so to speak, in the foot-notes of the Cambridge Edition."

As "Macbeth" was first printed in the folio of 1623, the editor, of course, had no quarto copies to help or hinder him in the record of various readings. That first edition was reprinted in 1632, 1664, and 1685; and as all these reprints were conducted under editorial supervision, such as it was, they have many differences of text among themselves. It is in these that the work of collation needs to be prosecuted with the most care and minuteness of attention. Mr. Furness has, with almost incredible diligence sifted out and marked down all the varieties of reading in these copies that can be of the slightest moment to average students, and a great many besides that are quite superfluous except to the most inquisitive Shakespearians. Nor does he stop with verbal and literal differences, but carries his discriminating record into minute varieties of punctuation. All this, no doubt, is as it should be; though it may well be thought that with much less of labor on the editor's part he would still have left us without any cause to complain of his work. As it is, even the strongest weakness of faultfinding can get nothing here, apparently, to stick upon.

All this, however, is little more than the beginning of his work of collation. Besides the four folios which may be termed old copies, his collation embraces upwards of forty modern editions, scattered all the way from Rowe's, in 1709, to the latest issue in 1871. Here we have even in the brief compass of one play a long list of various readings from the inexhaustible spring of conjectural emendation. Many of these, indeed, are so wide of the mark, or so absurd in themselves, that no one would deem it worth the while to reproduce them; but all or nearly all of them fairly worth considering are duly registered by the learned and indefatigable editor. Even this, however, is far from adequately describing the extent of his labor in the record of textual varieties. Besides the work of Shakespeare's many editors, a vast deal has been written towards correcting his text by other hands. This matter is spread over a wide surface, in the shape of notes and essays published in all sorts of periodicals, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily. Many volumes, also, have been published, entirely or mainly devoted to the same purpose; these ranging over a long period of time, from Heath's "Revisal of Shakespeare's Text" to the sagacious and exquisite labors of Walker and Lettsom in our day. There is, indeed, almost no end to the proposed changes in the poet's text, changes varying in worth from nothing, or perhaps less than nothing, to what may be called first-class corrections. A careful and searching review of all this matter, and a sifting-out of every grain of thought

that may be deemed worth preserving, is also included in the editor's scope in regard to various readings.

We have said that Mr. Furness registers all or nearly all the variations of text that are fairly worth considering. It occurs to us to note one seeming exception to this statement. We refer to the well-known passage in Act I. Sc. 7:

"Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dress'd yourself? hath it slept since?

And wakes it now, to look so green and pale

At what it did so freely?"

In a note on this, the editor justly quotes the following from Bailey : "Surely it is on the confines at least of absurdity to speak of dressing yourself with what may become intoxicated. The substitution of two letters restores, I apprehend, the genuine text. Read bless'd for dress'd, and all is plain and apposite and Shakespearian." Now it seems to us at least worth considering whether dress'd is not used here in the old sense of addressed, that is, made ready or prepared. "Was it a drunken man's hope in the strength of which you made yourself ready for the killing of Duncan?" This not only relieves the metaphor of the incongruity, as Abbott puts it, of "making hope a person and a dress in the same breath," but also sets the passage in full accordance with what the same speaker says a little after:

"When you durst do it, then you were a man.

Did then adhere, and yet you would make both :

They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you."

And here no change is required but the putting of an apostrophe before dress'd thus: "Wherein you 'dress'd yourself." So in "King Henry V." Act IV. Sc. 1:.

"Besides, they are our outward consciences,
And preachers to us all; admonishing
That we should 'dress us fairly for our end."

But it is, we suspect, in the article of annotation that the editor's labors will prove the most generally useful and acceptable. A part of what we had to say on this point has been anticipated in speaking of his enlargement of plan. Here we are really something at a loss whether his comprehensiveness of design or his judgment in the execution be the more to be approved. Probably it was in this part of the work that he found his patience and his discrimination the most severely taxed. Every one at all conversant with the subject knows that the