"He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact,—like one
Who having, unto truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory
To credit his own lie,—he did believe
He was indeed the duke."
For "lorded," Mr Collier's emendator would read "loaded "—a correction which Mr Collier himself admits to be "questionable," and which we throw overboard at once. For "unto truth" he proposes "to untruth"—
"like one
Who having, to untruth, by telling of it," &c.
But here, if one flaw is mended, another and a worse one is made. By reading "to untruth" we obtain, indeed, a proper antecedent to "it," which otherwise must be looked for, awkwardly enough, in the subsequent word "lie." But as a set-off against this improvement, we would ask, how can a man be said to make his memory a sinner to untruth? This would mean, if it meant anything, that the man's memory was true; and this is precisely what Prospero says Antonio's memory was not. We must leave, therefore, the text as it stands, regarding it as one of those passages in which Shakespeare has expressed himself with less than his usual care and felicity.
The substitution of "all" for "are" in the lines,
"They all have met again,
And are upon the Mediterranean float"—
Or, as the MS. corrector reads it,
"They all upon the Mediterranean float"—
strikes us as peculiarly un-Shakesperian. But this instance of the corrector's injudicious meddling is a small matter. The following passage deserves more careful consideration, for we are convinced that the text of the first and second folios, which has been universally rejected since the days of Theobald, is, after all, the right reading. Act III. Scene 1 opens with the soliloquy of Ferdinand, who declares that the irksome tasks to which he has been set by Prospero are sweetly alleviated by the consciousness that he has secured the interest and sympathy of Miranda. He says—
"There be some sports are painful; but their labour
Delight in them sets off: some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone: and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me as odious; but
The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead,
And makes my labours pleasures. Oh, she is
Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed,
And he's composed of harshness. I must remove
Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up
Upon a sore injunction. My sweet mistress
Weeps when she sees me work, and says such baseness
Had never like executor. I forget:
But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours,
Most busy-less, when I do it."
The last line, as it here stands, is Theobald's reading; and it has been adopted almost unanimously by subsequent editors—by the compilers of the variorum Shakespeare—by Mr Knight—and most recently by Mr Halliwell, in his magnificent folio. Mr Singer, in his edition of 1826, and Mr Collier's emendator, are, so far as we can learn,' the only dissentients. The former proposes, "most busiest when I do it;" and the latter, "most busy,—blest when I do it;" which reading we agree with Mr Singer in thinking "the very worst and most improbable of all that have been suggested;"—will he excuse us for adding—except perhaps, his own? Theobald's text is certainly greatly to be preferred to either of these alterations. Had the MS. corrector's emendation been a compound epithet, "busyblest" (that is, blest with my business, because it is associated with thoughts of Miranda), something, though perhaps not much, might possibly have been said in its behalf. But Mr Collier regards the correction as consisting of two distinct words; and, therefore, he must excuse us for saying that it is one in which sense and grammar are equally set at defiance. We now take up the original reading, which has been universally discarded, but which, as we hope clearly to show, calls for no alteration; and an attention to which, at an earlier stage in the revision of Shakespeare's text, might have prevented a large expenditure of very unnecessary criticism. The original text of the line under consideration is this—
