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Page 17
After the labours of all the editors, I found many passages which
appeared to me likely to obstruct the greater number of readers,
and thought it my duty to facilitate their passage. It is impossible
for an expositor not to write too little for some, and too much for
others. He can only judge what is necessary by his own experience;
and how long soever he may deliberate, will at last explain many
lines which the learned will think impossible to be mistaken, and
omit many for which the ignorant will want his help. These are censures
merely relative and must be quietly endured. I have endeavoured to
be neither superfluously copious, nor scrupulously reserved, and
hope that I have made my authour's meaning accessible to many who
before were frighted from perusing him, and contributed something
to the publick, by diffusing innocent and rational pleasure.
The compleat explanation of an authour not systematick
and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual
allusions and light hints, is not to be expected from any single
scholiast. All personal reflections, when names are suppressed,
must be in a few years irrecoverably obliterated; and customs,
too minute to attract the notice of law, such as mode of dress,
formalities of conversation, rules of visits, disposition of
furniture, and practices of ceremony, which naturally find places
in familiar dialogue, are so fugitive and unsubstantial that they
are not easily retained or recovered. What can be known, will
be collected by chance, from the recesses of obscure and obsolete
papers, perused commonly with some other view. Of this knowledge
every man has some, and none has much; but when an authour has
engaged the publick attention, those who can add any thing to his
illustration, communicate their discoveries, and time produces what
had eluded diligence.
To time I have been obliged to resign many passages, which, though
I did not understand them, will perhaps hereafter be explained,
having, I hope, illustrated some, which others have neglected or
mistaken, sometimes by short remarks or marginal directions, such
as every editor has added at his will, and often by comments more
laborious than the matter will seem to deserve; but that which
is most difficult is not always most important, and to an editor
nothing is a trifle by which his authour is obscured.
The poetical beauties or defects I have not been very diligent to
observe. Some plays have more, and some fewer judicial observations,
not in proportion to their difference of merit, but because I gave
this part of my design to chance and to caprice. The reader, I
believe, is seldom pleased to find his opinion anticipated; it is
natural to delight more in what we find or make, than in what we
receive. Judgement, like other faculties, is improved by practice,
and its advancement is hindered by submission to dictatorial
decisions, as the memory grows torpid by the use of a table book.
Some initiation is however necessary; of all skill, part is infused
by precept, and part is obtained by habit; I have therefore shewn
so much as may enable the candidate of criticism to discover the
rest.
To the end of most plays, I have added short strictures, containing
a general censure of faults, or praise of excellence; in which I
know not how much I have concurred with the current opinion; but
I have not, by any affectation of singularity, deviated from it.
Nothing is minutely and particularly examined, and therefore it is
to be supposed, that in the plays which are condemned there is much
to be praised, and in these which are praised much to be condemned.
The part of criticism in which the whole succession of editors
has laboured with the greatest diligence, which has occasioned the
most arrogant ostentation, and excited the keenest acrimony, is the
emendation of corrupted passages, to which the publick attention
having been first drawn by the violence of contention between Pope
and Theobald, has been continued by the persecution, which, with a
kind of conspiracy, has been since raised against all the publishers
of Shakespeare.
That many passages have passed in a state of depravation through
all the editions is indubitably certain; of these the restoration
is only to be attempted by collation of copies or sagacity of
conjecture. The collator's province is safe and easy, the conjecturer's
perilous and difficult. Yet as the greater part of the plays are
extant only in one copy, the peril must not be avoided, nor the
difficulty refused.
Of the readings which this emulation of amendment has hitherto
produced, some from the labours of every publisher have advanced into
the text; those are to be considered as in my opinion sufficiently
supported; some I have rejected without mention, as evidently erroneous;
some I have left in the notes without censure or approbation, as
resting in equipoise between objection and defence; and some, which
seemed specious but not right, I have inserted with a subsequent
animadversion.
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