‘How can a bell sound on into a race?’ pipe the little editors.  What is ‘the race of night?’ What can it mean?  How could a race be drowsy?  What an awful contradiction in terms!  And so while you and I, and all the other ordinary lovers of Shakespeare are peacefully sleeping in our beds, they come along with their little chisels, and chop out the horribly illogical word and pop in a horribly logical one, and we (unless we can afford the Variorum, which we can’t) know nothing whatever about it.  We have no redress.  If we get out of our beds and creep upon them while they are asleep—­they never are—­and take out our little chisels and chop off their horribly stupid little heads, we shall be put in prison and Mr Justice Darling will make a horribly stupid little joke about us.  There is only one thing to do.  We must make up our minds that we have to combine in our single person the scholar and the amateur; we cannot trust these gentlemen.

And, indeed, they have been up to their little games elsewhere in King John.  They do not like the reply of the citizens of Angiers to the summons of the rival kings:—­

  ’A greater powre than We denies all this,
  And till it be undoubted, we do locke
  Our former scruple in our strong-barr’d gates;
  Kings of our feare, untill our feares resolu’d
  Be by some certaine king, purg’d and depos’d.’

Admirable sense, excellent poetry.  But no!  We must not have it.  Instead we are given ‘King’d of our fears’ (’Globe’) or ‘Kings of ourselves’ (’Oxford’).  Bad sense, bad poetry.

They do not like Pandulph’s speech to France:—­

  ’France, thou maist hold a serpent by the tongue,
  A cased lion by the mortall paw,
  A fasting tiger safer by the tooth
  Than keep in peace that hand which thou dost hold.’

‘Cased,’ caged, is too much for them.  We must have ‘chafed,’ in spite of

  ’If thou would’st not entomb thyself alive
  And case thy reputation in thy tent.’

Again, the Folio text of the meeting between the Bastard and Hubert in Act V., when Hubert fails to recognise the Bastard’s voice, runs thus:—­

’Unkinde remembrance:  thou and endles night,
Have done me shame:  Brave Soldier, pardon me
That any accent breaking from thy tongue
Should scape the true acquaintaince of mine eare.’

This time ‘endless’ is not poetical enough for the editors.  Theobald’s emendation ‘eyeless’ is received into the text.  One has only to read the brief scene through to realise that Hubert is wearied and obsessed by the night that will never end.  He is overwrought by his knowledge of

             ’news fitting to the night,
  Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible,’

and by his long wandering in search of the Bastard:—­

’Why, here I walk in the black brow of night
To find you out.’