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The only characters that do not play with words are the Forester and Lord Mercade. To them the poet gives the chance to say but a word, and they manage to say that word, simply and gravely, without a pun. The Forester, a bashful young man, country-bred, is awestruck by the Princess, perplexed and a little hurt by her punning upon his words. Lord Mercade, heavy with his message of death, delivers it with tender gravity. (V., ii., 726.)

Sir Nathaniel, the country-preacher, ventures shyly upon his single pun. He asks his idol, Holofernes, "where he will find men worthy enough to present the nine worthies." (V., i., 131.) Jaquenetta's pun is a somewhat ingenious play on Armado's love-making. The Don proposes to her an assignation at the lodge. That's hereby," she says. (I., ii., 141.) She means hereby to put him off without a serious answer; but Armado takes the adverb locally.

Longaville is Shakespeare's type of the tall, handsome, stupid soldier, the guardsman. of later fiction. He is honest and dull, the winner of woman's love by his good looks. He tries to catch from his society the fashion of word-play, but his puns are heavy and far-fetched, or utterly commonplace. When Biron inveighs so learnedly against learning, Longaville says:

"He weeds the corn and still lets grow the weeding." (I., i., 95.) When Katharine twits him, in the masquerade. with his stupid silence, he explains his own lack of tongue by saying:

"You have a double tongue within your mask." (V., ii., 244.)

And, when she calls him calf, he answers with the coarse eld play on horns:

"Look how you butt yourself in these sharp mocks! Will you give horns, chaste lady?" (V., ii., 251–2.)

Of course, as Longaville was big and handsome and stupid, his Maria, who was not beautiful, was clever. Theirs was the sort of union by contraries that serves, in Galtonian phrase, to keep up among mankind its average of mediocrity. All Maria's puns are good. When Dumain offered her himself and his sword, she replied, dropping into French,

"No point, quoth I." (V., ii., 277.)

When Rosaline taunts old Boyet with his domestic misfortunes, Maria tells him :

"You still wrangle with her, Boyet, and she strikes at the brow." (V., i., 119.)

When Boyet tries to kiss her,

"Taking pasture on her lips,"

she flashes out refusal :

"My lips are no common, though several they be." (II., i., 223.) Finally, in taking leave of her tall lover, she makes on the double meaning of long a kind of half pun that is very tender and graceful. Her lover says of the twelvemonth's waiting: "I'll stay with patience, but the time is long,"

and she replies:

"The liker you, few taller are so young." (V., ii., 846.)

Among this gay company of lords and ladies, bred to such skill in the use and abuse of words, Dull is type of the stolid and illiterate rustic, to whom words are a trouble and a snare. He is far from being a fool, a man of sane and direct understanding. But language is too much for him, and, when he has to use language, he gets his syllables badly mixed. Hence his puns

are all of the illiterate kind. He misses the word he aims at, and sometimes he stumbles upon one that has a grotesque unfitness for its place. He reprehends, instead of represents, the person of the King. (I., i., 184.) He orders Costard to be punished by cutting him off in prison from all penance. (I., ii., 134.) He takes Holofernes' Latin Haud credo for some kind of

wild animal. (IV., ii., 12.) He turns Holofernes' learned allusion into collusion and pollusion. (IV., ii., 43, 6.) Only once is there conscious fun in him. When Sir Nathaniel praises the "rare talent" of Holofernes, Dull says: "If a talent (=talon) be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent.* (IV., ii., 65.) (=To claw, to tickle, to delight.)

The puns of Dumain represent in Shakespeare's art a man of thin and poor character. He is pert and impudent, always ready with his small wit, but destitute of real humor and echoing and prolonging the jokes of more original minds. puns obscenely, yard (V., ii., 674); once, when backed up by the King, he dares to gibe feebly at Biron:

"Proceeded well, to stop all good proceeding." (I., i., 94.)

All the rest of his puns are discharged at his inferiors, sure mark of a mean character. Holofernes says:

"Judas I am, ycliped (=called) Maccabæus,"

and Dumain breaks in with,

"Judas Maccabæus clipt is plain Judas." (V., ii., 603.)

Judas, when called Jude,

"stays for the latter end (ass) of his name." (V., ii., 630.) When Armado, playing Hector, is complimented on having too big a leg for his part, Dumain cries, "More calf certain." (V., ii., 644.) And when Armado, in playing his part, distorts his countenance, Dumain mocks him :

"He's a god or a painter, for he makes faces." (V., ii., 649.)

And Hector's "lemon stuck with cloves" is for Dumain "a cloven lemon " (V., ii., 655), surely the feeblest pun extant. Dumain was in love with Katharine, and their taste in puns was such as to make them a well-mated pair. For, although Katharine puns more freely than Dumain, her puns themselves are for the most part as superficial and feeble-minded as his.

* Talon and talent merged in sound by apocope of the final consonant (t after n), so common in English speech.

Popular Appellations, often referred to in Literature and Conversation. By William A. Wheeler. Nineteenth edition, with appendix by Charles G. Wheeler. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Cloth, pp. 440.

(34) ENGLISH MEN OF ACTION SERIES. Henry the Fifth. By Rev. J. A. Church. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. Cloth, pp. 155.

(35) SIR ANTHONY SHERLEY THE AUTHOR OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. By Scott Surtees. London: Henry Gray. Cloth, pp. 42.

(36) SHAKESPEARE'S PROVINCIALISMS. Words used in Sussex. By Scott Surtees. Densdale-on-Tees. Paper, pp. 8.

No. LXVII.

JULY, 1889.

VOL. VI.

SHAKESPEARE'S GRAND MARCH IN "LEAR." DEDICATED TO THE SHAKESPEARE SOCIETY OF NEW YORK.

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