LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE No. 1. THE MODERN ENGLISH VERB-ADVERB COMBINATION. Arthur Garfield Kennedy, Instructor in English Philology. 51 pages. 1920. Postpaid, paper, 75 cents; cloth, $1.25. No. 2. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, PARALLEL PASSAGE EDITION. Edited by Alphonso Gerald Newcomer, Late Professor of English; completed by Henry David Gray, Professor of English. 275 pages. 1928. Postpaid, paper, $2.00; cloth, $2.75. LIFE AND TIMES OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA. Rendered into English from the Greek of Philostratus the Elder, by Charles P. Eells. 264 pages. 1923. Postpaid, paper, $2.00; cloth, $2.75. No. 2. THE CLASSICS AND OUR TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETS, address as President of the American Philological Association at Harvard University, December 29, 1926. Henry Rushton Fairclough, Professor of Classical Literature. 52 pages. 1927. Postpaid, paper, 50 cents; cloth, $1.00. No. 1. CUENTOS POPULARES ESPAÑOLES. Tomo I. Aurelio M. Espinosa, Professor of Romanic Languages. 168 pages. 1923. Postpaid, paper, $1.75; cloth, $2.50. STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY COPYRIGHT 1929 BY THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY All Rights Reserved Published 1929 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA It was Professor Newcomer's hope to edit all of the plays of Shakespeare on the plan of the present volume. His death in 1913 prevented his completion of even this first venture. He continued to work upon it, in spite of his failing health, until he reached line 174 of Act v, scene 1.1 It is not right that his valuable plan for presenting Shakespeare as his own interpreter should be forgotten, nor that his contribution to Shakespearean scholarship, upon which he spent so much loving care, should be lost. I have therefore completed Mr. Newcomer's task, supplying notes and parallels from v. 1. 175 to the end of the play. I have also included a few notes of my own (bracketed and initialed) where the controversy of the critics has given particular interest to the passage. Professor Newcomer came late to the critical study of Shakespeare, but throughout his whole life he had an unusual appreciation of and familiarity with even the lesser plays. He was well equipped for his task. And when the fascination of investigation finally got hold of him, he confessed that he had the greatest difficulty in compelling himself to do anything else. The thoroughness with which Mr. Newcomer did his work is evidenced by the fact that he has in his parallel passages and notes 2,617 references to Shakespeare's other plays and poems. And because he had nothing of the sort in mind, the numbers supplied by the various plays may be of interest to those who are curious about such matters. Of course a large proportion of the references are of no value whatever in indicating the kinship of Much Ado to Shakespeare's other dramas, but the remaining fraction will be fairly constant. It will be seen that the plays nearest in time supply the greater number of the references. The list is as follows: LLL, 135; Err., 50; Gent., 84; Mids., 77; Merch., 86; Shrew, 88; Wiv., 91; As, 130; Twel., 99; Troil., 82; All's, 81; Meas., 59; Per., 22; Cym., 73; Wint., 81; Temp., 56. 1H6, 27; 2H6, 39; 3H6, 30; R3, 53; R2, 43; John, 65; 1H4, 89; 2H4, 87; H5, 70; H8, 18. Tit., 20; Rom., 129; Caes., 43; Hml., 107; Oth., 83; Lear, 87; Mcb., 65; Ant., 73; Tim., 26; Cor., 75. Ven., 21; Lucr., 29; Sonn., 67; Compl., 5; Pilg., 2. 1 Citations, throughout this edition, are according to the Cambridge Edition, edited by W. A. Neilson, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1906. The abbreviations used for the titles of Shakespeare's plays are those (with modifications) of Schmidt's Lexicon. The Much Ado text is likewise that of the Cambridge Edition with alterations, explained in the accompanying notes, where preferred by Professor Newcomer. The apparent exception is Love's Labour's Lost, which furnishes the greatest number of all; but in further counting I have examined separately the first three acts and the last two, for all are agreed that the revision of 1597-98 involves Acts iv and v only, to any appreciable degree. The result is interesting: Love's Labour's Lost, Acts i-iii, 38; Acts iv and v, 97. It was with some satisfaction that I noticed that the great majority of the references, including all of genuine significance, were in those portions of Love's Labour's Lost that I had picked out as belonging to the revision. There is, then, no implication in the numbers cited above that Much Ado contains a large amount of early work, as has been suggested by some recent critics. The play which stands next in the number of references is As You Like It; then, among the comedies, come Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives, then the Shrew and the Merchant. Of the histories, it is of course the two parts of Henry IV that lead, then Henry V. The tragedies and the poems follow about the sequence that might be expected, except in the case of Julius Caesar. It is interesting to note that the plays of Shakespeare's part authorship, and these only, furnish in each instance less than 40 references. The surprisingly small number from Julius Caesar may be of comfort to those who believe that this play also was Shakespeare's only in part. The comparatively large number in Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and A Winter's Tale may be due to the fact that the plays of Shakespeare's latest period are particularly rich in analogies to many of the earlier dramas. In this connection the fact that Henry VIII has less even than Titus Andronicus may lend an argument to those who deny Shakespeare's authorship of the former. I suggest these considerations, some of them in opposition to my own beliefs, as showing some of the ways in which Mr. Newcomer's results may be of interest to scholars, and in the hope that his dream of a Parallel Passage Edition of all the plays may sometime be realized. STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CALIFORNIA H. D. G. September 15, 1927 2 See The Original Version of "Love's Labour's Lost," with a Conjecture as to "Love's Labour's Won," by Henry David Gray, Leland Stanford Junior University Publications, University Series, No. 31, 1918. |