Although each is a document
of the highest importance in determining the text, few of the editors
of the poem have had the means of consulting more than one or two of
them. The volumes are to be found united only in the Library of the
British Museum, and it is but a few years that even that great
collection has included them all. They were printed originally between
1470 and 1480 at Foligno, Jesi, Mantua, and Naples; and their chief
value arises from the fact that they present the various readings of
three, if not four, early and selected manuscripts. The doubt whether
four manuscripts are represented by them is occasioned by the
similarity between the editions of Foligno and Naples, which are of
such a sort (for instance, correspondence in the most unlikely and odd
misprints) as to prove that one must have served as the basis of the
other. But at the same time there are such differences between them as
indicate a separate revision of each, and possibly the consultation by
their editors of different codices.
Unfortunately, there is no edition of the "Divina Commedia" which can
claim any special authority,--none which has even in a small degree
such authority as belongs to the first folio of Shakspeare's plays. The
text, as now received, rests upon a comparison of manuscripts and early
printed editions; and as affording to scholars the means of an
independent critical judgment upon it, a knowledge of the readings of
these earliest editions is indispensable.
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