Tom, I am not used to using g-mail, or groups, or Chrome.
And I assume that you have read the whole paper. Copy is cheap, no?
In first versions of the article (mid-nineties) Van Dam got much more
space than here. He was the most able and brilliant of 20th-century
scholars and his contributions will someday be vindicated, I hope.
I do agree with Van Dam, but my analysis comes later. Cutting the
quote and my comment too much would leave the perceptive reader
hanging. Further, as simple as eyeskip seems, any restatement of
its features will help the reader. Most Shakespeare scholars have a
very shaky idea of it.
For example, a reader will grasp that misplacing the restoration is
not
as likely as proper correction, so I was obliged to note that.
However,
readers will not know that misplacing a restored line is actually easy
to do, for some reason. One (scribe, compositor, editor, reader) takes
for granted that the error is as easily undone as 'undo' -- but it
isn't.
Blayney cites an instance in F Lear where Theobald observes a line
transposition. Blayney explains, "The transposed lines both begin
with 'To', and it would have been extremely easy for for the
compositor
to omit one of them by eyeskip." But on restoration, "What he forgot
was that line B belonged between . . ." (Lear, 215). But that's an
awful lot of copy, so I cut it short. Blayney understands that eyeskip
(homoeoarchton in this case) can occur with either line, and that
correction may err. Van Dam is also unusually perceptive.
I quoted Melchiori's attempt at the crux. Van Dam's could not be
cited without pointing out some of his alterations. But I couldn't
explain them at that point without getting off topic. He knew that
almost all unmetrical verse is corrupt, or misapprehended by the
modern reader (e.g. 'ry't', not 'ri-ot'). He perceived that 'captain'
may have been added later by D because it is at the end of the
line and extra-metrical. I couldn't digress there either, but had
to note the emendation, which I justify later in the paper.
If the restoration had been properly placed the eyeskip may
have been credited long before now. But I didn't want to snip
too much of the key observation. If Hand D is transcription,
the credit goes to Van Dam, from whom I learned it. Jerry