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an exhausted ‘my God,’ as emotion got the better of him” (1958: 108).4 The “Englishness” which such texts (perhaps surprisingly, in the case of Hume) could apparently claim to contribute to moral philosophy seems to be the issue. John Gross’s judgment that Q’s “whole conception of English literary history was bound up with a romantic notion of thatched-and-timbered Englishry” finds a certain confirmation here as well as in the passage quoted above (Gross 1973:206). In fact, it might even be said that Arden—located in the middle of England by the intrepid expedition of Q and his friend— crystallizes into a sunlit memory of a pre-war Liberal England sadly regretted, damply yearned for.

Shakespeare has long been the fatal Cleopatra of those in thrall to such visions and one of the projects to which Q firmly committed himself at Cambridge was his joint editorship (with John Dover Wilson) of the “New Shakespeare,’’ to be published by the University Press. Superseding the older “Cambridge Shakespeare,” this was to be a series of single-volume editions of the plays, based on A.W.Pollard’s “new scientific method—critical Shakespearean bibliography,” on Percy Simpson’s views of “play-house punctuation,” and on Sir Edward Maunde Thompson’s ideas about Shakespeare’s handwriting. Thus armed, the editors hoped at times to be able to “creep into the compositor’s skin and catch glimpses of the manuscript through his eyes” and in consequence begin to penetrate to the heart of the “great national Poet.” The project began in 1921 with an edition of The Tempest (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson [eds] 1921:xxix–xxx, xv).

IV No holds bard

The “New Shakespeare” edition of As You Like It appeared in 1926.5 Q’s “Introduction” deploys all his characteristic (if by now slightly dated) charm. Despite that, it almost founders on submerged metaphors in which the absence of Quarto editions of the play and the fact that its only text is the First Folio of 1623 seem to link the editing of the New Shakespeare with his early exploratory probes down the river Avon to Stoneleigh. He begins:

In As You Like It—the very title is auspicious—an Editor may take holiday and, after winning through Quarto thicket after thicket obedient to the Folio order, feel that he has earned a right to expatiate, enjoy his while in Arden and fleet the time carelessly.

(Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:vii)

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