LOST SHAKESPEARE LINE

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6632, 11 June 1928, Page 2

LOST SHAKESPEARE LINE

A HIATUS IN “HAMLET.” Mr. - Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburg, in merry mood offered a prize in the Bulletin, 'the official organ of the great institution, lor the reader who would find the lost line in Shakespeare. He know whore the lapse occurred, for as a boy with aspirations stagoward he had learned several of the poet’s tragic plays by heart, and his analysis of the sense of ■what ho read and learned showed him a hiatus in a scone of the greatest of them all. There were many answers, satirical, humorous, pleading and, most curious, one from Dr. Horace Howard Furness, jun. ,son of the. editor of the Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s works, and himself Die successor of his distinguished father in the work of editing the vast quantity of matter gathered for his monumental edition. The lino or lines, that have been lost, occur in the first scone of “Hamlet,” in the speech of Horatio to his friends on the watch for the ghost of Hamlet’s father. He is talking of the death of Julius Caesar and the portents of that ‘fearsome time. He says:— “The graves stood tcuantloss and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the liomai. streets; As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun.” Dr. Furness wrote to Mr. Church stating that, ho had never heard (here was a lino lost in “Hamlet,” which showed ho had never looked info his father’s tome on the play—two volumes, being required for the exposition of meanings and readings in “Hamlet”—for lie devoted three pages to a discussion of the “lost line,” quoting authorities from Knight to Ciavcrdon. Mr. Walter Hampden, Hie actor, showed himself also to be a ripe Shakespearean scholar, for he at once indicated the very line,