I know thou canst; and therefore, see, thou do it. Keep then fair league and truce with thy true bed; ANT. S. Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not: In Ephesus I am but two hours old, As strange unto your town, as to your talk; I am possess'd with an adulterate blot; My blood is mingled with the crime of lust:] Both the integrity of the metaphor, and the word blot, in the preceding line, show that we should read: with the grime of lust: i. e. the stain, smut. So, again, in this play,-A man may go over shoes in the grime of it. WARBURTON. 9 Being strumpeted-] Shakspeare is not singular in his use of this verb. So, in Heywood's Iron Age, 1632: "By this adultress basely strumpeted." Again: "I have strumpeted no Agamemnon's queen." STEEVENS. 1 I live dis-stain'd, thou undishonoured.-] To distain (from the French word, destaindre) signifies, to stain, defile, pollute. But the context requires a sense quite opposite. We must either read, unstain'd; or, by adding an hyphen, and giving the preposition a privative force, read dis-stain'd; and then it will mean, unstain'd, undefiled. THEOBALD. I would read: I live distained, thou dishonoured. That is, As long as thou continuest to dishonour thyself, I also live distained. HEATH. Luc. Fye, brother! how the world is chang'd with you: When were you wont to use my sister thus? DRO. S. By me? ADR. By thee; and this thou didst return from him, That he did buffet thee, and, in his blows ANT. S. Did you converse, sir, with this gentlewoman? What is the course and drift of your compact? DRO. S. I, sir? I never saw her till this time. ANT. S. Villain, thou liest; for even her very words Didst thou deliver to me on the mart. DRÓ. S. I never spake with her in all my life. ANT. S. How can she thus then call us by our names, Unless it be by inspiration? ADR. How ill agrees it with your gravity, To counterfeit thus grossly with your slave, Abetting him to thwart me in my mood? Be it my wrong, you are from me exempt, But wrong not that wrong with a more contempt. 2 -you are from me exempt,] Exempt, separated, parted. The sense is, If I am doomed to suffer the wrong of separation, yet injure not with contempt me who am already injured. JOHNSON. Johnson says that exempt means separated, parted; and the use of the word in that sense may be supported by a passage in Beaumont and Fletcher's Triumph of Honour, where Valerius, in the character of Mercury, says→→→ 3 Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine: 5 Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion ANT. S. To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme: What, was I married to her in my dream; "To shew rash vows cannot bind destiny, "They fix you there a rock, whence they're exempt.' Yet I think that Adriana does not use the word exempt in that sense, but means to say, that as he was her husband she had no power over him, and that he was privileged to do her wrong. M. MASON. 3 Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine; &c.] Thus, in Ovid's tale of Vertumnus and Pomona: "Ulmus erat contra, spatiosa tumentibus uvis: "Lenta, qui, velut assitas So, Milton, Paradise Lost, B. V: They led the vine STEEVENS. "To wed her elm. She spous'd, about him twines MALONE. stronger state,] The old copy has-stranger. Corrected by Mr. Pope. MALONE. 5 idle moss;] i. e. moss that produces no fruit, but being unfertile is useless. So, in Othello: 66 ―antres vast and desarts idle." STEEVENS. Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this? I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy." Luc. Dromio, go bid the servants spread for dinner. DRO. S. O, for my beads! I cross me for a sinner. This is the fairy land;-O, spite of spites! "the offer'd fallacy.] The old copy has: -the free'd fallacy. Which perhaps was only, by mistake, for- This conjecture is from an anonymous correspondent. We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprites;] Here Mr. Theobald calls out, in the name of Nonsense, the first time he had formally invoked her, to tell him how owls could suck their breath, and pinch them black and blue. He therefore alters owls to ouphs, and dares say, that his readers will acquiesce in the justness of his emendation. But, for all this, we must not part with the old reading. He did not know it to be an old popular superstition, that the screech-owl sucked out the breath and blood of infants in the cradle. On this account, the Italianş called witches, who were supposed to be in like manner mischievously bent against children, strega from strix, the screechowl. This superstition they had derived from their pagan ancestors, as appears from this passage of Ovid: "Sunt avidæ volucres; non quæ Phineïa mensis "Nocte volant, puerosque petunt nutricis egentes, suis. Carpere dicuntur luctantia viscera rostris, "Est illis strigibus nomen : Lib. VI. Fast. WARBURTON. Ghastly owls accompany elvish ghosts, in Spenser's Shepherd's. If we obey them not, this will ensue, They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. Luc. Why prat'st thou to thyself, and answer'st not? Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot! Calendar for June. So, in Sheringham's Disceptatio de Anglorum Gentis Origine, p. 333: "Lares, Lemures, Stryges, Lamiæ, Manes (Gastæ dicti) et similes monstrorum, Greges, Elvarum Chorea dicebatur." Much the same is said in Olaus Magnus de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, p. 112, 113. TOLLET. Owls are also mentioned in Cornucopia, or Pasquil's Nightcap, or Antidote for the Headach, 1623, p. 38: 66 Dreading no dangers of the darksome night, STEEVENS. How, it is objected, should Shakspeare know that striges or screech-owls were considered by the Romans as witches? The notes of Mr. Tollet and Mr. Steevens, as well as the following passage in The London Prodigal, a comedy, 1605, afford the best answer to this question: "Soul, I think, I am sure cross'd or witch'd with an owl." MALONE. The epithet elvish is not in the first folio, but the second has-elves, which certainly was meant for elvish. STEEVENS. All the emendations made in the second folio having been merely arbitrary, any other suitable epithet of two syllables may have been the poet's word. Mr. Rowe first introduced elvish. MALONE. I am satisfied with the epithet-elvish. It was probably inserted in the second folio on some authority which cannot now be ascertained. It occurs again, in King Richard III: "Thou elvish-mark'd abortive, rooting hog." Why should a book, which has often judiciously filled such vacuities, and rectified such errors, as disgrace the folio 1623, be so perpetually distrusted? STEEVENS. Dromio, thou drone, &c.] The old copy reads STEEVENS. This verse is half a foot too long; my correction cures that fault: besides, drone corresponds with the other appellations of reproach. THEOBALD. |