1871-2 scorne her own...pressure]
Bailey (1866, pp.7-9): <p.7> “A favorite passage, known as Hamlet’s Instructions to the Players, contains, besides some other disputable phrases to be hereafter considered, an expression about the genuineness of which the commentators differ, but which they seem inclined to explain rather than to alter. ‘The
age of the
time,’ says Dr.
Johnson, ‘can hardly pass.’ He might have gone farther, and designated it, as it really is, destitute of meaning. Even if we take
age not to be connected with time by the preposition
of, we obtain only a weak and awkward pleonasm. The Doctor judiciously proposed to read ‘the very
face and body of the time,’ which is a great improvement, and seems exposed </p.7><p.8>to no objections but the superfluousness of
very, and the difficulty of perverting
face into
age. The emendation I have to suggest is at once equivalent to his import, and free from these objections. I propose to read ‘the
visage and body of time.’
Visage and
very age are so near in their component letters, that the transition from the first to the second is easily conceivable. If any one demur to the phrase
visage of the time, which really forms an excellent counterpart to
body, I must turn him over to Hotspur’s father, who, addressing his wife and daughter-in-law, says to them: ‘Put not you on the
visage of the times.’
Henry IV. Part II. Act.ii.sc.3. Besides this very obvious error, there is further misprint, which is less manifest, and which indeed may not strike others as it does me. Why should Hamlet speak of the
pressure of the body of the time? Dr.
Johnson tells us that it signifies resemblance as in a
print, but surely this is not a very felicitous meaning. If the word, moreover, were taken in this sense, it would include
form (since the latter mainly constitutes the imprint of any object), and would thus create a pleonasm. The interpretation of the passage, according to Dr.
Johnson, would really be ‘to show the face and body of the time (in the mirror), both its form and resemblance, as in spirit,’ just as if these were two distinct things. </p.8><p.9>