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Nothing is more common in the works of our old dramatists than malarrangement of the text, some lines being too long, some too short; but among them they are sure to contain the requisite number of feet. Editors have often taken the most justifiable liberty of rearranging the text; but on other occasions they have exclaimed against those who have followed their example. In this case, however, the only limit to the discretion of an editor is that of not putting—except in the cases above mentioned—more or less than five or six feet in a line. I must not omit to observe that editors have done injury to many passages, by the decasyllabic superstition which I have already noticed.
I will give one instance of a place where a most slight rearrangement gives perfect harmony to what has been a stumblingblock to editors:—
And sandy-bottom’d Severn have I sent him
Bootless home, and weather-beaten back.
1 Hen. IV. iii. 1.
The last line, it will be seen, is the merest prose, but transfer “him” to it from the preceding line, and we at once get harmonious verse.
The following passages are thus arranged in the original editions:—
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling; doth glance
From heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things
Unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes,
And gives to airy nothing a local habitation
And a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, &c.
Mids. Night’s Dream, v. 1.
It seldom visits Sorrow; when it doth, it is a comforter.
We two, my lord, will guard your person,
While you take your rest, and watch your safety.
—
Thank you. Wondrous heavy.
Temp. ii. 1.
Those, then, who would refuse an editor the right of rearrangement are bound, if they would be consistent, to retain such passages as these unaltered. I may here make the boast that mine is the only edition of these plays in which the text is strictly metrical throughout.