Page 35 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xxviii H A M L E T

Second Quarto was far from being so, the compositor's
worst fault being the omission of words, phrases, lines
and occasionally of lengthy passages. He was also guilty
of a large quantity of misprints, while his departures
from Shakespeare were both complicated and obscured
by an overlooker who took upon him to 'correct,'
without reference to the manuscript copy, such of his
sins, of omission and commission as he detected or
imagined that he detected. Thus, though the Second
Quarto is the text to build upon, no editor can afford to
neglect the First Folio, if only for the supply of omitted
words and lines. Folio readings are often helpful too in
the rectification of misprints, though in view of the
corruption by double transcription they must be used
with the utmost caution. Nevertheless, in one or two
passages I have adopted Folio readings which have been
rejected or ignored by all modern editors. For when one
can see the ground upon which one treads, it is possible
to take bold steps. Indeed, this sense of assurance, of
knowing more or less exactly where one stands, is
perhaps the greatest of all the rewards to be reaped from
a definition of copy.
The foregoing paragraphs give the gist of the first
volume of my monograph on the good Hamlet texts.
The second is devoted to a detailed discussion of the
editorial problems arising therefrom; a discussion which
serves the purpose of the textual notes in other plays of
the present edition and enables me very greatly to lighten
the notes that follow in a manner set forth on p. 139.
Here it only remains for me to indicate briefly the main
trend of these editorial findings.
By editing the text which was printed directly from
Shakespeare's manuscript instead of one printed from a
careless copy of the prompt-book, and by thus using the
latter merely as an auxiliary, it has been possible to decide
with fair confidence a number of hitherto doubtful
points and also to restore many readings which are not