To emend …

… or not to emend? That is the perennial question for the Shakespearean editor. I recently received a message from an avid reader of our edition of the Complete Works, asking whether there was an error in the third line of the following stanza in our text of Venus and Adonis:

They pointed out that all the other editions they had consulted read ‘prey’ instead of ‘pray’. The simile of feeding on prey would seem to fit better with the hunting imagery that pervades the poem (which is about hunter and hunted), and would be consistent with the overt image of a bird of prey in the previous stanza:

My initial instinct, in the haste of other work, was to check the definitive Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Poems and, yes, it reads ‘prey’ and there is no textual note suggesting that this is an emendation of the original 1593 First Quarto of Venus and Adonis. The Arden editors simply annotate prey with ‘See 55-8n’, a cross-reference to the note to the previous stanza, which glosses ‘sharp by fast’, ‘tires’ (‘tears flesh in feeding’), and ‘gorge be stuffed’ as imagery associated with birds and beasts of prey. So I capitulated, confessed to an error, thanked my eagle-eyed reader, and promised to correct in the next reprint.

But a nagging doubt remained: how could this error have crept into the text? When we prepared the RSC edition, I edited the narrative poems and sonnets, but I worked closely with associate editor Jan Sewell, and the text was checked by Eric Rasmussen, our even more eagle-eyed General Editor with primary responsibility for text—checked, too, by a very good copy editor and proof readers in both the UK and the USA. So I went to the original text, in order to compare lines 58 and 63:

‘Pray’ in both stanzas. Mystery solved? Because ‘prey’ was sometimes spelt ‘pray’ in Shakespeare’s time, and because the context in line 58 is definitely that of a bird of prey, editors modernize the spelling to ‘prey’. This is what we did in line 58. Our apparent mistake was not to follow other editors in also modernizing the spelling in line 63. What, then, were we thinking of? At this point, somewhat belatedly, I turned to our own edition and saw that we had provided a very different explanatory note from that in the Arden:

63 pray   prayer (puns on ‘prey’)

Then I remembered the rationale. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us the original (now obsolete) meaning of pray as a noun:

Look again at the context: yes, the imagery in the previous stanza is of hunting, but in this one it is of holiness: ‘heavenly moisture’, ‘air of grace’, not to mention those ‘distilling showers’ that are like dewdrops from Heaven in a psalm or prayer. The breath of Adonis is being compared to a prayer.

The prey/pray pun signals a shift from Venus thinking ‘I want to devour you (sexually)’ to a thought along the lines of ‘even though I am the goddess, you are a divine boy whose very breath is holy, giving of grace and life’—perhaps also ‘I want you to want me, I want you to be praying to make love to me instead of chasing that old boar’. It is a move that beautifully captures the double nature of desire—one part lustful rapacity, the other loving transcendence—that is so very much theme of the poem.

So we will not be emending in the next reprint of our edition. If there is any dereliction of editorial duty, it is to be found in those editions that do not alert readers to the pun. In our justification of our editorial procedures in creating the RSC edition, we cited the advice of that great editor and critic Dr Samuel Johnson, who wrote in the preface to his edition:

“To alter is more easy than to explain, and temerity is a more common quality than diligence … I have adopted the Roman sentiment, that  it is more honourable to save a citizen, than to kill an enemy, and have been more careful to protect than to attack.”

I believe that we were right to explain, indeed to save, ‘pray’ rather than have the temerity to change it to ‘prey’. In short, on the matter of emendation, when in doubt, don’t. Or, if the reading in the original text is defensible, then retain it.