Were Hamlet an Editor

By Geoffrey Hart (with apologies to Shakespeare)

To stet, or not to stet, that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the draft to condemn

The slings and arrows of outrageous grammar.

Or to take Word against a sea of typos,

And by spellchecking end them.

To let dangling participles lie, to sleep

Yet more; and by sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

Editors are heir to? 'Tis a redaction

Devoutly to be wished. To let lie, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to revise later;

Aye, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of reason, what infelicities may come,

When we’ve shuffled off this manuscript,

Must give us pause. There's the respect

That makes Calamity of so long an MS:

For who would bear the publisher’s whips and scorns,

The authors wronged, the proud wordsmith’s contumely,

The pangs of despised advice, the proofing delayed,

The insolence of authors, and the spurns

That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,

When we ourselves might their quietus make

With a bared Sharpie? Who would this burden bear,

To grunt and sweat beneath a weary edit,

But that the dread of something after publication,

The undiscovered typo, from whose bane

No editor returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those infelicities we have,

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus proofreading doth make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of a monitor’s greater resolution

Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Word

And enterprises of great pitch and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of perfection. Soft you now,

The fair Webster? Nymph, in thy etymologies

Be all my sins remember'd.

Author's note

Though it could be argued "Sharpie" rings a false note because few of us still edit on paper, it was simply impossible for me to change "bared bodkin" to anything else.