ABSTRACT
Anyone who will listen carefully to ordinary conversation will come across abundant evidence of the way in which sentences are built up gradually by the speaker, who will often in the course of the same sentence or period modify his original plan of presenting his ideas, hesitate, break off, and shunt on to a different track. In written and printed language this phenomenon, anakoluthia, is of course much rarer than in speech, though instances are well known to scholars. As an illustration I may be allowed to mention a. passage in Shakespeare's King Lear (IV. 3. 19 ff.), which has baffled all commentators. It is given thus in the earliest quarto-the whole scene is omitted in the Folio-
Some editors give up every attempt to make sense of lines 20-1, while others think the words like a better way corrupt, and try to emend in various ways (" Were Iink'd a better way," "Were like a better day,"" Were like a better May," " Were like a wetter May," "Were like an April day," " Were like a bridal day," "Were like a bettering day," etc.-see the much fuller list in the Cambridge edition). But no emendation is necessary if we notice that the speaker here is a courtier fond of an affectedly refined style of expression. It is impossible for him to speak plainly and naturally in the two small scenes where we meet with him (Act III, sc. i'l and here); he is constantly on the look-out for new similes and dclighting in unexpected words and phrases. This, then, is the way in which I should read the passage in question, changing only the punctuation:
1 Other examples of this have been collected by C. Alphonso Smith, "The Short Circuit," in Studies in Engl. Syntax, p. 39.
