14 The English Dialect Dictionary records the following vernacular contractions of devil: deel, deil, dewl, diel, doul, dowl, dule. In The Tragedy of Hamlet: a Critical Edition of the Second Quarto, 1604 (Princeton, 1938), T. M. Parrott and H. Craig emend deale (138) to deule, explaining ea as a misprint of eui (the Folio has Diuell here). A similar emendation is proposed for eale (94), which is rendered euile in the text, in the belief that 'Shakespeare wrote something like “the dram of euile”.' Both emendations are unsatisfactory and unnecessary. Metrically the contracted form eale (which is no more remarkable than e'en for even) is just as good as euile, if not better, and there is thus no justification for altering the text here. Note that the easy confusion of ill and eale caused the former to be written euille in Q1: 'Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue'; in my opinion the pirate misheard ills as eales and rendered it by his shorthand symbol for evil. The proposed reading deule is phonetically ambiguous: does it represent [dju:l] (cf. the dialectal forms above) or is it a syncopated form dev'l? In either case deule is no improvement, for the line in question is still metrically imperfect: ‘May be a deale, and the deale hath power.‘ Either both cases of deale should, as in the Folio, be emended to devil, which will make it necessary in reading to slur the second syllable of the second devil, or they should both be allowed to remain intact; in the latter case a pause after the first deale will supply the missing unstressed half-foot. Alternatively it is perhaps possible that the manuscript had deuil in the first instance and deale in the second, but that the compositor by mistake generalized deale.
