condition when she was
overhauled by these Kidds and Blackbeards of the press. Of those four
plays, the two tragedies at least were thoroughly recast, and rewritten
from end to end: the pirated editions giving us a transcript, more or
less perfect or imperfect, accurate or corrupt, of the text as it first
came from the poet's hand; a text to be afterwards indefinitely modified
and incalculably improved. Not quite so much can be said of the comedy,
which certainly stood in less need of revision, and probably would not
have borne it so well; nevertheless every little passing touch of the
reviser's hand is here also a noticeable mark of invigoration and
improvement. But _King Henry V_., we may fairly say, is hardly less than
transformed. Not that it has been recast after the fashion of _Hamlet_,
or even rewritten after the fashion of _Romeo and Juliet_; but the
corruptions and imperfections of the pirated text are here more flagrant
than in any other instance; while the general revision of style by which
it is at once purified and fortified extends to every nook and corner of
the restored and renovated building. Even had we, however, a perfect and
trustworthy transcript of Shakespeare's original sketch for this play,
there can be little doubt that the rough draught would still prove almost
as different from the final masterpiece as is the soiled and ragged
canvas now before us, on which we trace the outline of figures so
strangely disfigured, made subject to such rude extremities of defacement
and defeature. There is indeed less difference between the two editions
in the comic than in the historic scenes; the pirates were probably more
careful to furnish their market with a fair sample of the lighter than of
the graver ware supplied by their plunder of the poet; Fluellen and
Pistol lose less through their misusage than the king; and the king
himself is less maltreated when he talks plain prose with his soldiers
than when he chops blank verse with his enemies or his lords. His rough
and ready courtship of the French princess is a good deal expanded as to
length, but (if I dare say so) less improved and heightened in tone than
we might well have wished and it might well have borne; in either text
the Hero's addresses savour rather of a ploughman than a prince, and his
finest courtesies are clownish though not churlish. We may probably see
in this rather a concession to the appetite of the groundlings than an
evasion of