le"; "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. Upon
this point--which was first made in "Putnam's Magazine" for October,
1853, in the article "The Text of Shakespeare: Mr. Collier's Corrected
Folio of 1632,"--Mr. Halliwell says (fol. Shak. Vol. IV. p. 340) that
the writer of that article "fairly adduces these MS. directions as
incontestable evidences of the late period of the writing in that
volume, 'practicable' trees certainly not having been introduced on the
English stage until after the Restoration." See, too, in the following
passage from "The Noble Stranger," by Lewis Sharpe, London, 1640, direct
evidence as to the stage customs in London, eight years after the
publication of Mr. Collier's folio, in situations like those of Birone
and Benedick:--

"I am resolv'd, I over-
Heard them in the presence appoynt to walke
Here in the garden: now in _yon thicket
I'll stay_," etc.

"_Exit behind the Arras_."

But no man in the world knows the ancient customs of the English stage
better than Mr. Collier,--we may even say, so well, and pay no undue
compliment to the historian of that stage;[kk] and though he might
easily, in the eagerness of discovery, overlook the bearing of such
stage-directions as those in question, will it be believed, by any one
not