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- PERICLES 25
Progressive degradation of the text.
The two editions of 1609.
printed from the same cause. In the Spanish motto (ii. 2. 27) the words ‘Piu’ and ‘que’ appear as ‘Pue’ and ‘kee’ respectively, and in the Latin motto (ii. 2. 30) the word ‘pompae’ is disguised as ‘Pompey’.
*Pericles* was printed at least eight times in the course of the seventeenth century. Each edition differs from the other in minute points of typography. But no endeavour was made by the editors or printers to give intelligibility to the corrupted text or to respect the metrical intention of the authors until 1709, when *Pericles* was included in Nicholas Rowe’s collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Small literary interest attaches to the successive seventeenth-century editions. They present a curious picture of the progressive degradation of a text which was at the outset inexcusably corrupt.
Two editions were produced by Gosson in 1609, and it is difficult to determine which is the earlier. It is obvious that they are nearly related to one another. They closely resemble each other in their general incompetence. The title-pages are at all points identical. But the variations in spelling and typographic detail, which from the literary point of view are unimportant, are sufficiently numerous to prove that they represent two settings of the type, one of which followed the other with slight arbitrary changes. The ornamental initial letter ‘T’, at the opening of the text, is of different pattern in each edition. An occasional correction was introduced in the second setting, but it was usually balanced by the insertion elsewhere of a new misprint or misspelling, so that it is not easy to state that the text of one edition of 1609 is better than that of the other. The one is easily distinguished from the other by the first stage-direction, which in the one appears correctly ‘Enter Gower’, and in the other is misprinted ‘Enter Gower’. The copy in the Malone collection in the
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