Shakespeare’s Tempest Line 1786: “Wise” or “Wife”

Abstract

In 1709, Nicholas Rowe emended the last word in line 1786 to “Wife” (1:47), thus starting a heated dispute of more than 300 years over whether this word should be “wise” or “wife”. Jeanne Addison Roberts sets forth very clearly and detailedly and chronologically the editorial history of this word and the different views of editors and scholars from 1709 to 1974 in her 1978 article “‘Wife’ or ‘Wise’—The Tempest l. 1786”. It can be seen in the article that “wife” is preferred by some editors and scholars, “wise” by some others, and a few editors even waver between “wise” and “wife”, adopting “wife” in one edition and then changing it back to “wise” in another, or contrariwise (203–205). After checking all the First Folios in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Roberts discovered two copies (#’s 73 and 6) with “clear examples of ‘wife’” (206) and five copies (#’s 2, 12, 18, 54, and 62) whose “f ’s” show “damage on the right side of the crossbar” (207), and she also found that “among copies in which the letter looks like long ‘s,’ there are at least twelve cases of what appear to be fragments of a broken crossbar on the right side of the letter” (207). Depending on this discovery, she concludes in the same article “that the letter, originally an ‘f,’ was bent or broken in the process of printing, thus transforming the original ‘wife’ to ‘wise’” (207). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.2013149