But to understand Shakespeare’s meaning in a degree that will authorize us to amend the text, we must understand Shakespeare’s speech; that is, we must be thoroughly familiar with the words and usages of Elizabethan English; and not only with Elizabethan words and phrases, but also, as far as possible, with the very pronunciation.

This fundamental principle is well enforced and illustrated in Dr. Ingleby’s book, which was originally published in one of the Annuals of the German Shakespeare Society under the title of The Still Lion, a title suggested by a passage in De Quincey, where the danger of meddling with Milton’s text is compared to that of meddling with a still lion, which may be neither dead nor sleeping, but merely shamming.  Dr. Ingleby substitutes Shakespeare for Milton, and maintains that the mass of Shakespearian emendations that have been proposed during the last twenty years are needless; and that corruptions have been assumed where none exist, owing to the limited knowledge possessed by the critics.  Thus, for instance, in the Comedy of Errors (I. i. 152) the Duke bids Aegeon to “seek thy help by beneficial help.”  At once there is a chorus from all of us, sciolists, of “Corruption!” “Sophistication!” “Cacophonous repetition!” etc. etc.  “But gently, friends,” says Dr. Ingleby:  “may not ‘help’ have borne a different or a special meaning in Elizabethan English?” and turning to medical writers and books on medicine of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (among them Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare’s own son-in-law), he proves that heal and help having a common origin, help was used by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as a synonym for cure, deliverance.  The text, then, is perfectly correct, AEgeon being bid to seek his deliverance from the doom of death by the help of what friends he can find.  The lion’s slumbers were here of the lightest, and happy men be our dole to have escaped with whole skins.  Thus Dr. Ingleby takes up passage after passage of Shakespeare that has been pronounced corrupt, and shows that the fault imputed to it lies not in the text, but in the lack of requisite knowledge, be it of language, of usage, of manners and customs, or even of Elizabethan spelling and grammar, on the part of the critic.  The mischief that ignorance has done in the past is irrevocable, but such impressive warnings as Dr. Ingleby gives us may help, in both senses of the word, in the future.  We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless “felicitous” conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody.  It was proposed many years ago in sport by the late deeply-lamented Chauncey Wright, and, as far as we know, has never yet appeared in print, though it may live to be gravely noted down in some future Variorum, being a genuine echo of many a note by Zachary Jackson or Andrew Beckett.  In As You Like It occur the familiar lines, “And