Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, 1927. EMENDING SHAKESPEARE

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 24, 29 January 1927, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, 1927. EMENDING SHAKESPEARE

Mr. L. F. Salzman, whose learned, entertaining, and beautifully illustrated volume on "English Life in the Middle Ages" has just been produced by : the Oxford University Press, contributes a by-product of his researches to the November number of the "London Mercury." The title of his article, "Shakespeare and the Quarter Sessions," suggests an imaginative treatment of the same theme on which Landor in "The Examination of Shakespeare" and Richard Garnett in "William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher" had previously tried their hands. But Mr. Salzman makes no attempt to reconstruct the tradition of Shakespeare's youthful adventures in Charlecote Park and the'disgrace that overtook him at the hands of Sir Thomas Lucy, J-P.

My foe is at my feet; there shall he lie, Though all the angels swore his alibi. There is none of this in Mi\ Salzman's brief essay. He gives us some interesting glimpses into the social life of Elizabethan England as revealed in the proceedings of its rural Courts, provides some delightful samples of their Latinity, bases upon the English rendering supplied in one of them a brilliant Shakespearian emendation, and just as we are settling down to enjoy ourselves thoroughly, he has done. In one information the ladder which the prisoner is accused of stealing is • rendered "adulescentiorem." In an examination the term might have floored the most ingenious Latiner, but Mr. Salzman's explanation .is conclusive. If the Latin for "lad" is "adulescens," the Latin for "ladder," which is obviously the comparative of "lad," must of course be "adulescentior," so down it goes! Such a comparative is indeed, as Mr. Salzman says;' superlative. ' His suggestion is that the "scholard," to whom some simple clerk had appealed for help in his translation, had pulled his leg with this brilliant result. Still more obviously is rusticity revealed as the key of another conundrum. In a Devonshire case a prisoner charged with shooting a ( woodcock was fined "pro claudendo cum (for shutting with) hayle shott" and was bound over "quod non claudebit iterum" (that he shall not shut again). I imagine, says M!r. Salzman, the clerk turning to his neighbour and saying, "What is the Latin for 'to shutt'J" and he (sic), not recognising the dialectic form of "shoot," replying in. all good faith, "Claudere." But it was the description given .in English of the "corpus delicte" in one of these cases that inspired Mr. Salzman to lay profane hands' on one pf the most familiar texts 'in Shakespeare, the promise of Bottom to "roar you as gently as any^ sucking dove." la 1599, Mr. Salzman writes, Peter Eyres of Aston was fined for shooting 'with a handgun, charged with powder and shot, "unam damam loetantem, Anglico, a sucken doe." As I read the accusation I exclaimed, "Bless thee, Bottom! Thou art translated" Assuredly "I will roar thee as gently as a sucken doe." For, mark you, a sucken. doe,does gently roar, or bleat, or bell, or whatever the correct term may be; and'"sucking dove is not such a malapropism as any rustic would make. But the compositor, who converted the "dooe" into a "dove" was an inadvertent genius. There can, I think, be no doubt about it. But I shall miss my "sucking dove." Mr. Salzman might have slightly strengthened his case if he had pointed out v that the "v" and the "v" were freely interchangeable iri Elizabethan and Jacobean printing offices, and that the First Folio actually has "sucking Dove" in this passage. The difference between "Dove" and "Dooe" is a small matter indeed in a work of which it has been said that perhaps in the whole annals of English typography there is no record of any book, of any extent and reputation, having been dismissed from the press with less care and attention. In this case, however, the First Folio is not without corroboration, for the two quarto texts are in agreement with it. It is therefore clear, that Mr. Salzman claims too much for his happy discovery when he ventures as to say that there can be no doubt of it. But long before now he has doubtless encountered a more serious trouble than the scepticism of the scholar or the disposition of the ordinary reader to resent any tampering with a familiar text as sacrilege. . Such opposition would go to the happiness of Mr. Salzman's discovery, which -is; a matter of opinion, but that it is not a discovery is a matter of fact. A reference to the Furness's Variorum Shakespeare—that monument of American scholarship which, begun more than fifty years ago, is slowly nearing completion under the son of the original editor —shows that as long ago as 1862 Mr. Salzman's conjecture had been anticipated by Mr. S. Bailey. "Sucking dove," Mr. Bailey argued, is 30 utterly nonsensical that it is mar-

vellous how it has escaped criticism and condemnation. So far from suffering such a tate it continues to* be quoted, as if it were some felicitous phrase.j, The plea can hardly be set up that it is humorous, for the humour of the passage lies in Bottom's undertaking to roar gently and musically though acting the part of a lion, and it is not at all dependent on the incongruity of representing a dove as sucking. The blunder which is whimsical enough may be rectified by the smallest of alterations—by striking out a single letter from "dove," leaving the clause "as gentle as any sucking doe."

Mr. Salzman must find what comfort he may in the classical stand-by of the scholar in like circumstances. "Pereant illi gui ante nos nostra dixerunt" perisli .they who said our good things before us). But the comfort will not be,increased by the suggestion that this particular good thing is not so very good after all. Mr. Furness goes so far as to pronounce it very bad. "Had Bailey no judicious friend?" is his galling comment on the critic who anticipated Mr. Salzman,' and he says no more. But rescued from its tomb of Elizabethan law Latin, and presented as Mr. Salzman has presented it, "sucken doe" seems to be entitled to a more respectful hearing. It is at least an interesting subject for speculation, in which the common sense and the good taste of the average reader may serve as a jury to check the rulings of the scholar.