"CLOUDS" OR SHROUDS, IN SHAKESPEARE.
I quite agree with your correspondent D.N.R., that there never has been
an editor of Shakespeare capable of doing him full justice. I will go
farther and say, that there never will be an editor capable of doing him
any thing like justice. I am the most "modern editor" of Shakespeare,
and I am the last to pretend that I am at all capable of doing him
justice: I should be ashamed of myself if I entertained a notion so
ridiculously presumptuous. What I intended was to do him all the justice
in my power, and that I accomplished, however imperfectly. It struck me
that the best mode of attempting to do him any justice was to take the
utmost pains to restore his text to the state in which he left it; and
give me leave, very humbly, to say that this is the chief recommendation
of the edition I superintended through the press, having collated every
line, syllable, and letter, with every known old copy. For this purpose
I saw, consulted and compared every quarto and every folio impression in
the British Museum, at Oxford, at Cambridge, in the libraries of the
Duke of Devonshire and Lord Ellesmere, and in several private
collections. If my edition have no other merit, I venture to assert that
it has this. It was a work of great labour, but it was a work also of
sincere love. It is my boast, and my only boast, that I have restored
the text of Shakespeare, as nearly as possible, to the integrity of the
old copies.
When your correspondent complains, therefore, that in "Hen. IV. Part 2,"
Act III. sc. 1., in the line,
"With deafening clamours in the slippery clouds,"
the word _shrouds_ is not substituted by editors of Shakespeare for
"clouds," the answer is, that not a single old copy warrants the merely
fanciful emendation, and that it is not at all required by the sense of
the passage. In the 4to of 1600, and in the folio of 1623, the word is
"clouds;" and he must be a very bold editor (in my opinion little
capable of doing justice to any author), who would substitute his own
imaginary improvement, for what we have every reason to believe is the
genuine text. _Shrouds_ instead of "clouds" is a merely imaginary
improvement, supported by no authority, and (as, indeed, your
correspondent shows) without the merit of originality. I am for the text
of Shakespeare as he left it, and as we find it in the most authentic
representations of his mind and meaning.