deep).  Nor can we take the Folio in which all his dramas were first collected:  Shakespeare never saw a line of it; for seven years he had been hid in death’s dateless night when that volume was printed.  What, then, is to be done?  The Quartos and Folios are all the authority we have, and none of them present what can be held to have been undeniably Shakespeare’s exact words.  In dealing with the text we must never for a moment forget that there stands, and will for ever stand, as interpreters between us and Shakespeare, a crew of dishonest actors or of more or less ignorant compositors.  Is such a text, thus transmitted, to be held in reverence so deep that not a syllable is to be changed for fear of the cry that we are tampering with the words of Shakespeare?  Is the curse in his epitaph on the mover of his bones to hang over his text?  Small reverence for Shakespeare does it betoken, in our opinion, to believe this.  Rather, let us regard these pages of the Folio as what they virtually are in so many cases—­namely, as but little better than our modern proof-sheets.  And they should be dealt with accordingly by a modern critic; but only on one condition precedent:  he must be Shakespeare’s peer.  In default of this we can only humbly erase here, and reverently suggest there, summoning to our aid all possible knowledge, lest in plucking up the tares we pluck up the wheat also.

And this is really all that textual criticism for the last hundred and forty years has aimed at—­merely to get at what Shakespeare really wrote.  We know that he could not write sheer nonsense, and yet at times sheer nonsense mows at us from his printed page.  Those who clamor for Shakespeare’s text, pure and simple, divested of all notes and annotations, have no idea how much thought and time have been expended on every line,—­nay, on every word, on every comma,—­in the text of any good modern edition of his dramas, and with the single aim, be it remembered, of revealing exactly what the poet wrote.

It must not, however, be thought that since the original texts of Shakespeare’s plays are so corrupt, any criticaster has good leave to expunge or expand at will, under a roving commission to hack and hew wheresoever and howsoever it may please him, under the plea of restoring the text.  On the contrary, since we cannot fulfill the condition precedent of being Shakespeare’s peers, we must exercise the greatest caution in changing a reading of the Quartos or Folios, lest in condemning the text as corrupt we pass judgment on our own wit.

  He who the sword of Heaven would bear
  Must be as holy as severe.

And we must be very sure that the passage is corrupt before we set about amending it.  First and last, we must remember that primal elder law, that of two readings the more difficult is to be preferred. Durior lectio preferenda ’st should be a frontlet between our brows.  The weaker reading or the plainer meaning is more likely to be a printer’s interpretation of what he failed to comprehend.