Page 38 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

INTRODUCTIO N xxxi

compositors. The best we can hope for in most texts, as
Dr Pollard has shown in his careful analysis of the
punctuation of the quarto Richard II, is that in set
speeches we may find the actual stops of Shakespeare
1
himself . Despite disappointment, however, I have
always retained my faith in Shakespearian punctuation,
for the simple reason that I studied it first in the Second
Quarto of Hamlet, and that here its existence seems
patent and indisputable.
The Hamlet of 1605, though set up from Shake-
speare's manuscript, is, as I have said, a badly printed
book. The compositor was probably a beginner, who
had not learnt to carry words in his head, who had not
mastered his printing-house spelling, and who, driven,
as I suppose, to work at a speed beyond his powers,
committed hundreds of misprints and left out words by
the score. Yet his incompetence, once the simple little
tricks of it are understood, opens up a rich mine to the
enquirer. Behind his misprints and strange spellings
may be detected Shakespeare's old-fashioned orthography
and Shakespeare's wayward penmanship, while for
punctuation, since he was too ignorant to possess more
than the bare rudiments of a punctuation of his own^ he
must have relied almost entirely upon his copy. For the
pointing of the Second Quarto is, in the main, a thing of
beauty from beginning to end. There are passages in which
the stops are obviously wrong or, as is more usual, have
been omitted by accident. But these instances are sur-
prisingly few, and there is no doubt whatever in my mind
that the manuscript of Hamlet, the play to which Shake-
speare gave more thought than any other, was carefully
punctuated, and that the bulk of the stops in the Second
Quarto are his. This punctuation I have endeavoured to
reproduce in the reprint of the Second Quarto issued
from the Cranach Press by Count Harry Kessler in

1
King Richard II: a new Quarto, pp. 64 ff.