Act v. sc. 3. "Hot. The king hath many marching in his coats." "This is intelligible, and does not positively require change; but the old corrector substitutes a word for 'marching' (the forces, at this time, were fighting, not marching), which seems much better adapted to the place : 'The king hath many masking in his coats.'" Collier's Notes and Emendations, &c. p. 240. Surely, the Manuscript-corrector was perfectly right when he made this alteration. In Tamburlaine, Part First, act v. sc. 2, a line used to stand thus,— “And march in cottages of strowed reeds,”— till, in my edition of Marlowe's Works, i. 99, I altered "march" to "mask." SECOND PART OF HENRY IV. Act ii. sc. 3. "The time was, father, that you broke your word, Here "endear'd" is equivalent to-engaged, bound. The word is used much in the same sense by Day; "You did indeare him to society Of carelesse wantons," &c. Law-Trickes, 1608, sig. H 2. Act ii. sc. 3. "it [i. e. his honour] stuck upon him, as the sun In the grey vault of heaven." To modern readers there is perhaps something coarse in this expression; but it was not so to those of Shakespeare's days; "While Lucifer fore-shewes Auroras springs, And Arctos stickes aboue the earth vnmou'd," &c. "No black-eyed star must sticke in vertues spheare." Dekker's Satiromastix, 1602, sig L 2. N Act ii. sc. 4. "Then, death, rock me asleep, abridge my doleful days! It can hardly be doubted, I think, that, in this rant of Pistol, Shakespeare had an eye to the following passage of Buckingham's Complaynt, written by Sackville; "But what may boote to stay the Sisters three, Here "carraways" is rightly explained by Warburton (though his explanation has been ignorantly questioned), 66 a comfit or confection so called in our author's time,"the said carraways being made, of course, with carraway seeds. In Shadwell's Woman-Captain, carraway-comfits are mentioned as no longer fit to appear at fashionable tables; "the fruit, crab-apples, sweetings and horse-plumbs; and for confections, a few carraways in a small sawcer, as if his worship's house had been a lowsie inn." Works, iii. 350. SECOND PART OF HENRY VI. Act i. sc. 3. "1 Pet. My masters, let's stand close: my lord Protector will come this way by and by, and then we may deliver our supplications in the quill.” 666 Much has been written about "in the quill." Mr. Hunter (New Illustr. of Shakespeare, ii. 66) says that quill' means here the narrow passage through which the Protector was to pass;" and he infers this meaning from the following lines in Sylvester's Du Bartas (The Ark, p. 114, ed. 1641); "And th' endlesse, thin ayre (which by secret quils Had lost it selfe within the winds-but hils," &c. But if we turn to the original French, it will be seen that no light is thrown on "quill" in Shakespeare by "quils" in Sylvester, who used the word merely because he was translating literally; "Et puis l'air infini, qui par secrets tuyaux, Rare, c'estoit perdu dans les sombres caueaux In a later part of the same work (The Tropheis, p. 201) Sylvester has, the original of which is, 66 or dans un sec tuyau Pousses, comme Cedron, vn petit filet d'eau." ("Tuyau. A pipe, quill, cane, reed, canell." Cotgrave's Dict.) "The several petitioners," says Mr. Collier, "were to. deliver their supplications to Suffolk in succession, one after another, and the quill' ought, indisputably, to be sequel, used ignorantly for sequence." Notes and Emendations, &c. p. 280. But why should Peter, whose language is elsewhere correct enough, "use" a word "ignorantly" on this one occasion? Besides, when a dramatist puts a wrong word into the mouth of a comic character, there is always something ludicrous, or inclining to the ludicrous, in the mistake of the speaker: according to the Manuscript - corrector's alteration, there is nothing of the kind here. Read "in the quoil”=coil (i.e. the stir which will take place when the Protector comes). |