Having given a few examples of our "Editor's" corrections, we proceed to quote a passage or two which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear.
"A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap, A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate, _Anchoves, caviare_, but hee's satyred And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy spawne Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse-- That which the naturall sophysters tearme _Phantusia incomplexa_--is a function Even of the bright immortal part of man. It is the common passe, the sacred dore, Unto the prive chamber of the soule; That bar'd, nought passeth past the baser court. Of outward scence by it th' inamorate Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties Of his lov'd mistres."--Vol. I. p. 241.
In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough:--
"And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn Of slimy newts";
----"past the baser court Of outward sense";--
but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here deserted by our _fida compagna_?
Again, (Vol. II. pp. 55-56,) we read, "This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his signes to me, and men of profound reach instruct aboundantly; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with signes," etc.
This Granuffo is qualified among the "Interlocutors" as "a silent lord," and what fun there is in the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. It is plain enough that the passage should read, "a man of excellent discourse, and never speaks; his signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abundantly," etc.
In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for the editor, who should have done what Broome was said to have done for Pope in his Homer,--"gone before and swept the way." An edition of an English author ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own tongue should not be as tough to us as Aeschylus to a ten-years' graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances of it is in a speech of _Erichtho_, in the first scene of the fourth act of "Sophonisba," (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to us in this shape:--