tion, that it may appear to those who are unacquainted with old books, what is the difficulty of revision, and what indulgence is due to those that endeavour to restore Corrupted passages." That these hot tears, that breake from me perforce, should make the worst blasts and fogs upon the untender woundings of a father's curse, peruse every sense about the old fond eyes, beweep this cause again," &c. P 243."--and shall find time From this enormous state,---seeking to give JOHNSON, Losses their remedies:] I confess I do not understand this passage, unless it may be considered as divided parts of Cordelia's letter, which he is reading to himself by moonlight: it certainly conveys the sense of what she would have said. In reading a letter, it is natural enough to dwell on those circumstances in it that promise the change in our affairs which we most wish for; and Kent having read Cordelia's assurances that she will find a time to free the injured from the enormous misrule of Regan, is willing to go to sleep with that pleasing reflection uppermost in his mind. But this is mere conjecture. STEEVENS. P. 244. Of Bedlam beggars.] Randle Holme, in his Academy of Arms and Blazon, has the following passage descriptive of this class of vagabonds: "The Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff, and a cow or ox-horn by his side; but his cloathing is more fantastick and ridiculous; for, being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with rubins, feathers, cuttings of cloth, and what not; to make him seem a mad-man, or one distracted, when he is no other than a dissembling knave." In the Bell-man of London, by Decker, 5th edit. 1640, is another account of one of these characters, under the title of an Abraham-Man: "------he sweares he hath been in Bedlam, and will talke frantickely of purpose: you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to, only to make you believe he is out of his wits. He calls himselfe by the name of Poore Tom, and comming near any body cries out, Poore Tom is acold. Of these Abraham-men, some be exceeding merry, and doe nothing but sing songs fashioned out of their own braines: some will dance, others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe: others are dogged, and so sullen both in loke and speech, that spying but a small company in a house, they boldly and bluntly enter, compell ing the servants through feare to give them what they demand." STEEVENS. P. 250. Corn. What trumpet's that? Reg. I know't, my sister's:] Thus, in Othello: "The Moore,---I know his trumpet." It should seem from both these passages, and others that might be quoted, that the approach of great personages was announced by some distinguishing note or tune appropriately used by their own trumpeters. Cornwall knows not the present sound; but to Regan, who had often heard her sister's trumpet, the first flourish of it was as familiar as was that of the Moor to the ears of Iago. STEEVENS. P. 285. There's your press-money.] It is evident from the whole of this speech, that Lear fancies himself in a battle: but, There's your press-money has not been properly explained. It means the money which was paid to soldiers when they were retained in the King's service; and it appears from some ancient statutes, and particularly 7 Henry VII. c. 1. and S. Henry VIII. c. 5. that it was felony in any soldier to withdraw himself from the King's service after receipt of this money, without special leave. On the contrary, he was obliged at all times to hold himself in readiness. The term is from the French "prest," ready. It is written prest in King Henry VIIth's Book of household expences still preserved in the Exchequer. This may serve also to explain the following passage in Act V. sc. ii: "And turn our imprest lances in our eyes ;" and in Hamlet, Act I. sc. i: "Why such impress of ship. wrights?" DOUCE. P. 287. This a good block?] Upon the king's saying, I will preach to thee, the poet seems to have meant him to pull off his hat and keep turning it and feeling it in the attitude of one of the preachers of those times, (whom I have seen so represented in ancient prints,) till the idea of felt, which the good hat or block was made of, raises the stratagem in his brain of shoeing a troop of horse with a substance soft as that which he held and moulded between his hands. This makes him start from his preachment. Block anciently signified the head part of the hat, or the thing on which a hat is formed, and sometimes the hat itself. See Much Ado about Nothing: "He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it changes with the next block." STEEVENS. VOL. X. HAMLET. P. 11. as, by the same co-mart,] Co-mart is, I suppose, a joint bargain, a word perhaps of our poet's coinage. A mart signifying a great fair or market, he would not have supled to have written -to mart, in the sense of to make a bargain. In the preceding speech we find mart used for bargain or purchase. MALONE. P. 41. And all we mourn for.] The ridicule of this character is here admirably sustained. He would not only be thought to have discovered this intrigue by his own sagacity, but to have remarked all the stages of Ilamlet's disorder, from his sadness to his raving, as regularly as his physician could have done; when all the while the madness was only feigned. The humour of this is exquisite from a man who tells us, with a confidence peculiar to small politicians, that he could find Where truth was bid, though it were hid indeed "Within the centre." WARBURTON. P. 46. an aiery of children, &c.] Relating to play houses then contending, the Bankside, the Fortune, &c. played by the children of his majesty's chapel. POPE. It relates to the young singing men of the chapel royal, or St. Paul's, of the former of whom perhaps the earliest mention occurs in an anonymous puritanical pamphlet, 1569, entitled The Children of the Chapel stript and whipt: Plaies will neuer be supprest, while her maiesties unfledged minions flaunt it in silkes and sattens. They had as well be at their popish seruice in the deuil's garments," &c.--Again, ibid: "Euen in her maiesties chapel do these pretty upstart youthes profane the Lordes day by the lasciuious writhing of their tender limbes, and gorgeous decking of their apparell, in feigning bawdie fabies gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets," &c. STEEVENS. P. 54. To be, or not to be,] Of this celebrated soliloquy, which bursting from a man distracted with contrariety of desires and overwhelmed with the magnitude of his own purposes, is connected rather in the speaker's mind, than on his tongue, I shall endeavour to discover the train, and to show how one sentiment produces another. Hamlet, knowing himself injured in the most enormous and atrocious degree, and seeing no means of redress, but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard, meditates on his situation in this manner: Before I can form any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to decide, whether, after our present state, we are to be, or not to be. That is the question, which, as it shall be answered, will determine, whether 'tis nobler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take arms against them, and by opposing end them, though perhaps with the loss of life. If to die, were to sleep no more, and by a sleep to end the miseries of our nature, such a sleep were devoutly to be wished; but if to sleep in death, be to dream, to retain our powers of sensibility, we must pause, to consider, in that sleep of death what dreams may come. This con. sideration makes calamity so long endured; for who would bear the vexations of life, which might be ended by a bare bodkin, but that he is afraid of something in unknown futurity? This fear it is that gives efficacy to conscience, which, by turning the mind upon this regard, chills the ardour of resolution, checks the vigour of enterprize, and makes the current of desire stagnate in inactivity. We may suppose that he would have applied these general observations to his own case, but that he discovered Ophelia. JOHNSON. Dr. Johnson's explication of the first five lines of this passage is surely wrong. Hamlet is not deliberating whether after our present state we are to exist or not, but whether he should continue to live, or put an end to his life: as is pointed out by the second and the three following lines, which are manifestly a paraphrase on the first: "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer, &c. or to take armis." The question concerning our existence in a future state is not considered till the tenth line :--"To sleep! perchance, to dream;" &c. MALONE. P. 61. The dumb show follows,] and appears to contain every circumstance of the murder of Hamlet's father. Now there is no apparent reason why the Nsurper should not be as much affected by this mute representation of his crimes, as e is afterwards when the same action is accompanied by words. I once conceived this might have been a kind of direction to the players, which was from mistake inserted in the editions; but the subsequent conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia, entirely destroys such a notion. PYE. I cannot reconcile myself to the exhibition in dumb show, preceding the inter lude, which is injudiciously introduced by the author, and should always be omitted on the stage as we cannot well conceive why the mute representation of his crime should not affect as much the conscience of the King, as the scene that follows it. M. MASON. P. 85. ------the owl was a baker's daughter.] This is a common story amongst the vulgar in Gloucestershire, and is thus related: "Our Saviour went into a baker's shop where they were baking, and asked for some bread to eat. The mistress of the shop immediately put a piece of dough into the oven to bake for him; but was reprimanded by her daughter, who insisting that the piece of dough was too large, reduced it to a very small size. The dough, however, immediately afterwards began to swell, and presently became of a most enormous size. Whereupon the baker's daughter cried out, Heugh, heugh, heugh,' which owi-like noise probably induced our Saviour for her wickedness to transform her into that bird." This story is often related to children, in order to deter them from such illiberal behaviour to poor people. DOUCE. P. 86. Like to a murdering piece,] The small cannon, which are, or were used in the forecastle, half-deck, or steerage of a ship of war, were within this century, called murdering-pieces. MALONE. Perhaps what is now, from the manner of it, called a swivel. It is mentioned in Sir T. Roes Voiage to the E. Indies, at the end of Della Valle's Travels, 1665. "--the East India company had a very little pinnace---mann'd she was with ten men, and had only one small murdering-piece within her." Probably, it was never charged with a single ball, but always with shot, pieces of old iron, &c. RITSON. P. 88. There's rosemary, that's for remembrance ;---and there is pansies, that's for thoughts.] Pansies is for thoughts; because of its name, Pensees; but why rosemary indicates remembrance, except that it is an ever-green, and carried at funerals, I have not discovered. JOHNSON. Rosemary was anciently supposed to strengthen the memory, and was not only carried at funerals, but worn at weddings. STEEVENS. P. 89. There's fennel for you, and columbines:] Greene, in his Quip for an Up start Courtier, 1620, calls fennel, women's weeds: "fit generally for that sex, sith while they are maidens, they wish wantonly." STEEVENS. Columbine was an emblem of cuckoldom on account of the horns of its nectaria, which are remarkable in this plant. It was also emblematical of forsaken lovers. WHITE. MALONE. P. 29. -----there's rue for you ;] Ophelia means, I think, that the Queen may with peculiar propriety on Sundays, when she solicits pardon for that crime which she has so much occasion to rue and repent of, call her rue, herb of grace. Ophelia, after having given the Queen rue to remind her of the sorrow and contrition she ought to feel for her incestuous marriage, tells her, she may wear it with a difference, to distinguish it from that worn by Ophelia herself; because her tears flowed from the loss of a father, those of the Queen ought to flow for her guilt. MALONE. P. 89. There's a daisy :] Greene, in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier, has explained the significance of this flower: "---Next them grew the dissembling daisie, to warne such light-of-love wenches not to trust every faire promise that such amorous bachelors make them." HENLEY. The violet is thus characterized in an old collection of Sonnets: "Violet is for faithfulnesse, "Hoping likewise that from your heart "You will not let it slide." MALONE. P. 98. to play at loggats with them?] This is a game played in several parts of England even at this time. A stake is fixed into the ground; those who play, throw loggats at it, and he that is nearest the stake, wins: I have seen it played in different counties at their sheep-shearing feasts, where the winner was entitled to a black fleece, which he afterwards presented to the farmer's maid to spin for the purpose of making a petticoat, and on condition that she knelt down on the fleece to be kissed by all the rusticks present. STEEVENS. A loggat ground, like a skittle ground, is strewed with ashes, but is more extensive. A bowl much larger than the jack of the game of bowls is thrown first. The pins, which I believe are called loggats, are much thinner, and lighter at one extremity than the other. The bowl being first thrown, the players take the pins up by the thinner and lighter end, and fling them towards the bowl, VOL. X. 21 02 and in such a manner that the pins may once turn rouna in the air, and slide with the thinner extremity foremost towards the bowl. The pins are about one or two and twenty inches long. BLOUNT. P. 99. -the age is grown so picked] So smart, so sharp, says Sir T. Hanmer, very properly; but there was, I think, about that time, a picked shoe, that is, a shoe with a long pointed toe, in fashion, to which the allusion seems likewise to be made. Every man now is smart; and every man now is a man of fashion. JOHNSON. This fashion of wearing shoes with long pointed toes was carried to such excess in England, that it was restrained at last by proclamation so long ago as the fifth year of Edward IV. when it was ordered, "that the beaks or pykes of shoes and boots should not pass two inches, upon pain of cursing by the clergy, and forfeiting twenty shillings, to be paid, one noble to the king, another to the cordwainers of London, and the third to the chamber of London:---and for other countries and townes the like order was taken.---Before this time, and since the year 1482, the pykes of shoes and boots were of such length, that they were fain to be tied up to the knee with chains of silver, and gilt, or at least silken laces." STEEVENS. P. 104. mutines in the bilboes.] The bilboes is a bar of iron with fetters annex ed to it, by which mutinous or disorderly sailors were anciently linked together. The word is derived from Bilboa, a place in Spain where instruments of steel were fabricated in the utmost perfection. To understand Shakespeare's allusion completely, it should be known, that as these fetters connect the legs of the offenders very close together, their attempts to rest must be as fruitless as those of Hamlet, in whose mind there was a kind of fighting that would not let him sleep. Every motion of one must disturb his partner in confinement. The bilboes are still shown in the Tower of London, among the other spoils of the Spanish Armada. STEEVENS. P. 111. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Let us review for a moment the behaviour of Hamlet, on the strength of which Horatio founds this eulogy, and recommends him to the patronage of angels. Hamlet, at the command of his father's ghost, undertakes with seeming alacrity to revenge the murder; and declares he will banish all other thoughts from his mind. He makes, however, but one effort to keep his word, and that is, when he mistakes Polonius for the king. On another occasion, he defers his purpose till he can find an opportunity of taking his uncle when he is least prepared for death, that he may insure damnation to his soul. Though be assassinated Polonius by accident, yet he deliberately procures the execution of his school-fellows, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who appear not, from any circumstances in this play, to have been acquainted with the treacherous purposes of the mandate they were employed to carry. To embitter their fate, and hazard their punishment beyond the grave, he denies them even the few moments necessary for a brief confession of their sins. Their end (as he declares in a subsequent conversation with Horatio) gives him no concern, for they obtruded themselves into the service, and he thought he had a right to destroy them. From his brutal conduct toward Ophelia, he is not less accountable for her distraction and death. He interrupts the funeral designed in honour of this lady, at which both the King and Queen were present; and, by such an outrage to decency, renders it still more necessary for the usurper to lay a second stratagem for his life, though the first had proved abortive. He insults the brother of the dead, and boasts of an affection for his sister, which, before, he had denied to her face; and yet at this very time must be considered as desirous of supporting the character of a madman, so that the openness of his confession is not to be imputed to him as a virtue. He apologizes to Horatio afterwards for the absurdity of this behaviour, to which, he says, he was provoked by that nobleness of fraternal which, indeed, he ought rather to have applauded than condemned. Dr. Johnson has observed, that to bring about a reconciliation with Laertes, he has availed himself of a dishonest fallacy; and to conclude, it is obvious to the most careless spectator or reader, that he kills the King at last to revenge himself, and not his father. The late Dr. Akenside once observed to me, that the conduct of Hamlet was every way unnatural and indefensible, unless he were to be regarded as a young man whose intellects were in some degree impaired by his own misfortunes; by the death of his father, the loss of expected sovereignty, and a sense of shame resulting from the hasty and incestuous marriage of his mother. STEEVENS. Some of the charges here brought against Hamlet, appear to me questionable at least, if not unfounded. In the novel on which this play is constructed, the ministers who by the king's order accompanied the young prince to England, and car. ried with them a packet in which his death was concerted, were apprized of its contents; and therefore we may presume that Shakespeare meant to describe their representatives, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as equally criminal; as combining with the King to deprive Hamlet of his life. His procuring their execution there. före does not with certainty appear to have been unprovoked cruelty, and might have been considered by him as necessary to his future safety; knowing, as he must have known, that they had devoted themselves to the service of the King in whatever he should command, I do not perceive that he is accountable for the madness of Ophelia. He did not .mean to kill her father, when concealed behind the arras, but the King; and still less did he intend to deprive her of her reason and her life: her subsequent distraction therefore can no otherwise be laid to his charge, than as an unforeseen consequence from his too ardently pursuing the object recommended to him by his father. He appears to have been induced to leap into Ophelia's grave, not with a design to insult Laertes, but from his love to her, (which then he had no reason to conceal.) and from the bravery of her brother's grief, which excited him (not to condemn that brother, as has been stated, but) to vie with him in the expression of affection and sorrow. When Hamlet says, "the bravery of his grief did put me into a towering passion," I think, he means, into a lofty expression (not of resentment, but) of sorrow. I may also add, that he neither assaulted nor insulted Laertes. till that noblemar. had cursed him, and seized him by the throat. MALONE. OTHELLO. P. 121. A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife] That Cassio was married is not sufficiently implied in these words, since they mean, according to lago's licentious manner of expressing himself, no more than a man "very near being married." This seems to have been the case in respect of Cassio.-Act IV. sc. i, Iago speaking to him of Bianca, says-" Why, the cry goes, that you shall marry her." Cassio acknowledges that such a report had been raised, and adds, "This is the monkey's own giving out: she is persuaded I will marry her, out of her own love and selfflattery, not out of my promise." Iago then, having heard this report before, very naturally circulates it in his present conversation with Roderigo. If Shakespeare, however, designed Bianca for a courtezan of Cyprus, (where Cassio had not yet been, and had therefore never seen her,) Iago cannot be supposed to allude to the report concerning his marriage with her, and consequently this part of my argument must fall to the ground. Had Shakespeare, consistently with Iago's character, meant to make him say that Cassio was "actually danin'd in being married to a handsome woman," he would have made him say it outright, and not have interposed the palliative almost. Whereas what he says at present amounts to no more than that (however near his marriage) he is not yet complety damned, because he is not absolutely married. The succeeding parts of Iago's conversation sufficiently evince that the poet thought no mode of conception or expression too brutal for the character. STEEVENS. P. 126. As double as the duke's] The double voice of Brabantio refers to the opinion, which (as being a magnifico, he was no less entitled to, than the duke himself) either, of nullifying the marriage of his daughter, contracted without his consent; or, of subjecting Othello to fine and imprisonment, for having seduced an heiress. HENLEY. P. 133. Wherein of antres vast, &c.] Whoever ridicules this account of the pro gress of love, shows his ignorance, not only of history, but of nature and manners It is no wonder that, in any age, or in any nation, a lady, recluse, timorous, and delicate, should desire to hear of events and scenes which she could never see, and should admire the man who had endured dangers, and performed actions, which, however great, were yet magnified by her timidity. JOHNSON. P. 133. Of the cannibals that cach other eat,] These lines have been considered by Pope, and others, as the interpolation of the players, or at least vulgar trash, which Shakespeare admitted merely to humour the lower part of his audience. But the case was probably the very reverse, and the poet rather meant to recommend his play to the more curious and refined among his auditors, by aliuding here to some of the most extraordinary passages in Sir Walter Raleigh's celebrated voyage to Guiana, performed in 1595: in which nothing excited more universal attention, than the accounts which he brought from the new world of the cannibals, Amazons, and especially of the nation -whose heads "Do grow beneath their shoulders." Hear his own solemn relation: "Next unto the Arvi" [a river, which he says falls into the Orenoque or Oronoko] "are two rivers, Atoica and Caora; and on that branch, which is called Caora, are a nation of people, whose heads appear not above their shoulders; which though it may be thought a mere fable, yet for mine own part I am resolved it is true, because every childe in the province of Arromia and Canuri affirme the same: they are called Ewaipanoma; they are reported to have |