;
"_Wreaking_ as little" to "_Wrecking_ as little"; "painted _cloathes_"
to "painted _clothes_"; "words that _shakes_" to "words that _shake_."
Twenty-eight such corrections for the thirty-one pages of "Hamlet" give
us about eight hundred and fifty for the nine hundred pages of the whole
volume,--eight hundred and fifty instances in which the alleged forger,
who wished to obtain for his supposed fabrication the consideration due
to antiquity, modernized the text, though he obtained thereby only a
change of form, and not a single new reading, in any sense of the term!
We turn to kindred evidence in the stage-directions. In "Love's Labor's
Lost," Act IV., Sc. 3, when Birone conceals himself from the King, the
stage-direction in the folio of 1632, as well as in that of 1623, is
"_He stands aside_." But in Mr. Collier's folio of 1632 this is changed
to "_He climbs a tree_," and he is afterward directed to speak "_in the
tree_." So again in "Much Ado about Nothing," Act II., Sc. 3, there is a
MS. stage-direction to the effect that Benedick, when he hides "in the
arbour," "_Retires behind the trees_." Now as this use of scenery
did not obtain until after the Restoration, these stage-directions
manifestly could not have been written until after that period.
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