385 about me, I cannot so conjure up the spirit of love in her, that he will appear in his true likeness. BUR. Pardon the frankness of my mirth, if I answer you for that. If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle: if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind. Can you blame her then, being a maid yet rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were, my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to. K. HEN. Yet they do wink, and yield, as love is blind and enforces. BUR. They are then excused, my lord, when they see not what they do. K. HEN. Then, good my lord, teach your cousin to consent winking. BUR. I will wink on her to consent, my lord, if you will teach her to know my meaning: for maids, well summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on. K. HEN. This moral ties me over to time and a hot summer; so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end, and she must and be blind too. BUR. As love is, my lord, before it loves. K. HEN. It is so: and you may, some of you, thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city, for one fair French maid that stands in my way. K. CHA. Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid; for they are all girdled with maiden walls, that war hath never* entered. K. HEN. Shall Kate be K. CHA. So please you. my wife? K. HEN. I am content; so the maiden cities you talk of, may wait on her: so the maid that stood in the way for my wish, shall show me the way to my will. K. CHA. We have consented to all terms of reason. K. HEN. Is it so, my lords of England? His daughter, first; and then,† in sequel, all, According to their firm proposed natures. EXE. Only, he hath not subscribed this:-Where your majesty demands, that the king of France, having any occasion to write for matter of grant, shall name your highness in this form and with this addition, in French-Notre très cher fils Henri roi d'Angleterre, héritier de France; and thus in Latin,-Præclarissimus filius noster Henricus, rex Angliæ, et hæres Francia. (*) Old copy omits, never. (†) Old copy omits, then. Notre très cher fils,and thus in Latin,-Præclarissimus filius-] In the preamble of the original treaty of Troyes, Henry is correctly styled Præcarissimus; the mistake, however, did not originate with Shakespeare, it occurs in Holinshed as well as in previous historians VOL. II. cc K. CHA. Nor this I have not, brother, so denied, But your request shall make me let it pass. K. HEN. I pray you then, in love and dear alliance, Let that one article rank with the rest, And, thereupon, give me your daughter. K. CHA. Take her, fair son; and from her blood raise up Issue to me; that the contending kingdoms Of France and England, whose very shores look pale With envy of each other's happiness, May cease their hatred; and this dear conjunction In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance His bleeding sword 'twixt England and fair France. K. HEN. Now, welcome, Kate:-and bear me witness, all, Q. ISA. God, the best maker of all marriages, ALL. Amen! K. HEN. Prepare we for our marriage;-on which day, And may our oaths well kept and prosperous be! Enter CHORUS. Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen, Mangling by starts the full course of their glory. Henry the sixth, in infant bands crown'd king Of France and England, did this king succeed; Whose state so many had the managing, [Flourish. [Exeunt. That they lost France, and made his England bleed: [Exeunt. The paction of these kingdoms,-] The old text has Pation, which was altered by Theobald. ILLUSTRATIVE COMMENTS. ACT I. (1) SCENE II.-Then hear me, gracious sovereign,—and you peers.] This speech is taken almost verbatim from Holinshed; and as it may interest the reader to observe the facility with which Shakespeare converted prose into verse, we subjoin a few parallel lines. "By Charles the Great is meant the Emperor Charlemagne, son of Pepin: Charlemain is Charlechauve, or Charles the Bald, who, as well as Charles le Gros, assumed the title of Magnus. See Goldasti Animadversiones in Einhardum. Edit. 1711, p. 157. But then Charlechauve had only one daughter, named Judith, married, or, as some say, only betrothed, to our king Ethelwulf, and carried off, after his death, by Baldwin the Forester, afterwards Earl of Flanders, whom it is very certain Hugh Capet was neither heir to, nor any way descended from. This Judith, indeed, had a great grand-daughter, called Luitgarde, married to a Count Wichman, of whom nothing further is known. It was likewise the name of Charlemagne's fifth wife; but no such female as Lingare is to be met with in any French historian. In fact, these fictitious personages and pedigrees seem to have been devised by the English heralds, to 'fine a title with some show of truth,' which in pure truth was corrupt and naught.' It was manifestly impossible that Henry, who had no hereditary title to his own dominions, could derive one by the same colour, to another person's. He merely proposes the invasion and conquest of France, in prosecution of the dying advice of his father: (3) SCENE II. Whiles his most mighty father on a hill Alluding to the battle of Cressy, fought 26th August, 1346: the incident in the text is thus described by Holinshed:-"The earle of Northampton, and others sent to the king, where he stood aloft on a windmill hill, requiring him to advance forward, and come to their aid, they being as then sore laid to of their enimies. The king hereupon demanded if his sonne were slaine, hurt, or felled to the earth. No, (said the knight that brought the message,) but he is sore matched. Well, (said the king,) returne to him and them that sent you, and saic to them that they send no more to me for any adventure that falleth, as long as my son is alive, for I will that this iournie be his, with the honor thereof. With this answer the knight returned, which greatlie incouraged them to doo their best to win the spurs, being half abashed in that they had so sent to the king for aid. * The slaughter of the French was great and lamentable." (4) SCENE II. For government, though high, and low, and lower, Concent, a term in music, signifies consonance of harmony; whence we use consent to express, by metaphor, concord or agreement. The foundation of the simile, Theobald conjectured, was borrowed from Cicero's "De Republica," lib. ii.; but, as a correspondent of Mr. Knight's suggests, the thought was more probably derived from a passage in the fourth book of Plato's "Republic:"-"It is not alone wisdom and strength which make a state simply wise and strong, but it (Order), like that harmony called the Diapason, is diffused throughout the whole state, making both the weakest and the strongest, and the middling people concent the same melody." Again : harmonic power of political justice is the same as that musical concent which connects the three chords, the octave, the bass, and the fifth." The (5) SCENE II.— this mock of his Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones.] One of the most familiar charges of armorial ensigns is the circular figure called a Roundle, the name of which, in English heraldry, varies according to the metal or colour of which it is composed. Black Roundles are call Pellets, Ogresses, or Gunstones, the first and last of which terms readily convey the idea of shot for ordnance; and the second is supposed to be derived from the medieval Latin word Agressus, which was considered to be synonymous with the old French Agresser, to attack. The ancient use of stone-shot for cannon, before the introduction of iron balls, both explains the reason why these roundles were always black, and also discovers a stern concealed satire in this line of Henry's speech. Tennis balls were covered with white leather, but gun-stones became black from being discoloured by the powder and smoke of the cannon. And such a change Henry hints that he would certainly effect. In illustration of this passage Steevens quotes "The Brut of England," in which it is said that, when Henry the Fifth, before Hare-flewe, received a taunting message from the Dauphin of France, and a ton of tennis-balls by way of contempt, "he anone lette make tennis-balls for The Dolfyn (Henry's ship) in alle the haste that they might; and they were great gunne-stones for the Dolfyn to playe withall. But this game at tennis was too rough for the besieged, when Henry played at the tennis with his hard gunnestones." The provision of this kind of ammunition, made by the king, is mentioned by Grose in his "History of the English Army," i. p. 400, as stated in a writ directed to the Clerk of the Ordnance and John Bonet, mason, of Maidstone, to cut 7,000 stoneshot in the quarries at that place. As Henry's gun-stones were all to be transported across the sea, they were probably not very large; but when Mahomet the Second besieged Constantinople in 1453, he battered the walls with stone-shot, and some of his pieces were of the calibre of 1,200 lbs.; but they could not be fired more than four times in the day. The well-known circumstance of the tennis-balls, which Shakespeare has introduced into this scene, is noticed by several contemporaneous historians; but the probability of it is questioned by Hume. For an examination into the truth of the story, see Sir N. H. Nicolas's "History of the Battle of Agincourt," pp. 8—13. ACT II. (1) SCENE I.-Pish for thee, Iceland dog! thou prick-ear'd cur of Iceland! The Iceland, or Island dog, as the name is often spelt by our old authors, was a shag-haired animal, imported in great numbers from Iceland, which it was the fashion for ladies to carry about with them.-"Use and custome hath entertained other Dogs of an Outlandish kinde, but a few and the same being of a pretty bigness, I mean Island Dogs, curled and rough all over, which by reason of the length of their hair make shew neither of face nor of body: And yet these Curs, forsooth, because they be so strange, are greatly set by, esteemed, taken up, and many times in the room of the Spaniel gentle or comforter."-TOPSEL'S History of Four-footed Beasts, 1658. It is mentioned in the play of "Ram-Alley, or Merry Tricks," 1611: you shall have jewels, A baboon, a parrot, and an Izeland dog." And again in the Masque of "Britannia Triumphans," 1636: (2) SCENE III-A made a finer end, and went away, an it had been any christom child.] The chrisom, so called from chrism, the holy oil which was anciently used in baptism, was a white cloth, placed on the child's head, and always worn by it for seven days afterwards. After the Reformation the sacred oil was no longer used, but the chrisom was retained, the child wearing it until the purification of the mother by the rite of churching. If an infant died before this latter ceremony, the chrisom formed its shroud, from which circumstance, probably, children, in the old bills of mortality, are denominated chrisoms. (3) SCENE III.-'A parted even just between twelve and one, even at the turning o' the tide.] The opinion that animals, more particularly man, die only at the ebb of tide is of great antiquity, and was not peculiar to the profane vulgar. In the short chapter in which Pliny notices the marvels of the sea, he says that Aristotle affirms "that no living creature dieth but in the reflux and ebb of the sea. This is much observed in the Gallic Ocean, but is found true, in experience, only as to man."-Hist. Nat., lib. ii. c. xcviii. Dr. Mead, in his Tract, On the Influence of the Sun and Moon on Bodies, originally published in 1704, chap. ii., enters into an elaborate examination of this question, in which, having shown the moon's power over the tides when new and full, he illustrates his inquiry by several cases, ancient and modern, of great and fatal changes having taken place at those periods. If, at the present day, any importance is to be attributed to those seasons as critical times, it is probably on the principle that a great external disturbance, whether meteorological or otherwise, unduly excites and quickens the nervous-action, to bring on a more rapid crisis; and, in the case of dying persons, unnaturally agitates and expends those vital powers which were already nearly exhausted. ACT III. (1) SCENE V. And teach lavoltas high, and swift corantos.] Lavolta, a dance of Italian origin, appears by the description given of it in Thoinot Arbeau's "Orchesographie," and in Florio's World of Words," to have somewhat resembled the modern "Polka." It is frequently mentioned by our earlier writers, and was evidently much in vogue about Shakespeare's time: "So may you see by two Lavalto danced, An old-fashioned Love. Poem by J. T. 1594. This description we find Topsel has borrowed from Abraham Fleming's translation of "Caius de Canibus," 1576, "Of English Dogges." |