Corrigenda and Explanations of the Text of Shakspere (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Corrigenda and Explanations of the Text of ShakspereNot having read the works of Shakspere for more than the third of a century, it has happened to me within the last few years to meet with passages, as quotations, etc., which appeared evidently to contain errors; but on referring to the Works themselves I was surprised to find the extracts correctly made.Being in possession of leisure, I thought that I might usefully employ some of it in giving a careful reading to these Plays, with the object of detecting errors and seeing how they might be amended, and the result is what I now lay before the reader.It is clear that many of these mistakes have arisen from the type being set up from undecypherable manuscript, and that there has been, in places, much guess-work in making out the copy. This is especially evident in such plays as Cymbeline and Measure for Measure, Very many wrong words arising from these causes have been corrected by the various editors; that many have not been noticed will appear from a perusal of the following pages; and that some are still left I can vouch, as I have tried at various undoubted faulty passages, but have been unable to suggest satisfactory corrections, and these I must leave to those better acquainted with Elizabethan literature than I am.That these mistakes should have occurred was in the nature of things. Considering the extreme juvenescence of the art of printing, when probably reader, compositor, and pressman were all one person, the probable inexperience of the editors, the absence of supervision of the author, it would have been surprising if there had not been a very large number of oversights; for even now, after all the improvements in the art of printing, in works having the great advantage of the supervision of their authors, very vexatious mistakes are not of uncommon occurrence.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.