And from my false hand cut the wedding-ring, I know thou can'st; and therefore, see, thou do it. My blood is mingled with the crime of lust 9: I do digest the poison of thy flesh, Being strumpeted' by thy contagion. Keep then fair league and truce with thy true bed; I live dis-stain'd, thou undishonoured 2. 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; Luc. Fye, brother! how the world is chang'd with you: When were you wont to use my sister thus ? *First folio, wants. 9 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 66 - with the grime of lust: i. e. the stain, smut. So, again, in this play,-"A man may go over his shoes in the grime of it." WARBURTON. 'Being STRUMPETED] Shakspeare is not singular in his use of this verb. So, in Heywood's Iron Age, 1632: 66 By this adultress basely strumpeted." STEEVENS. 2 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. ANT. S. By Dromio ? DRO. S. By me? ADR. By thee; and this thou didst return from That he did buffet thee, and, in his blows Deny'd my house for his, me for his wife. ANT. S. Did you converse, sir, with this gentlewoman? What is the course and drift of your compact ? Did'st thou deliver to me on the mart. DRO. 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 *. 3 3-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— "To shew rash vows cannot bind destiny, "Lady, behold the rocks transported be. "Hard-hearted Dorigen! yield, lest for contempt 66 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. Exempt, as defined by Bullokar in his English Expositor, 8vo. 1616, "free or privileged from any payment of service;" but Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine : Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion this is the forensick, not the colloquial sense of the word: and therefore I think, with Dr. Johnson, that it is used by Shakspeare in the sense of separated or parted; which appears to have been the usual meaning of the word in his time. So, in a letter written by the Earl of Nottingham, in 1600, in favour of Edward Alleyn : "Forasmuche as he hath bestowed a grate some of money not onelie for the title of a plott of grounde, scituate in a verie remote and exempte place, neere Goulding lane," &c. MALONE. 4 But WRONG not that WRONG with a more contempt.] So, in the Rape of Lucrece : "To wrong the wronger till he render right." Adriana means to say-Add not another wrong to that which I suffer already; do not both desert and despise me. 5 Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine ;] 66 Lenta, qui, velut assitas "Vitis implicat arbores, 66 So Milton, Par. Lost, b. v. : 66 66 they led the vine "To wed her elm. Catul. 57. MALONE. She spous'd, about him twines "Her marriageable arms." MALONE. Thus, in Ovid's tale of Vertumnus and Pomona : "Ulmus erat contra, spatiosa tumentibus uvis : Quam socia postquam pariter cum vite probavit ; "At si staret, ait, cœlebs, sine palmite truncus, "Nil præter frondes, quare peteretur, haberet. "Hæc quoque, quæ juncta vitis requiescit in ulmo, Si non nupta foret, terræ acclinata jaceret." STRONGER state,] The old copy has-stranger. rected by Mr. Rowe. MALONE. 6 66 STEEVENS. Cor as in 7 Usurping ivy, BRIAR, &c.] The word briar here, many other places, is employed as a monosyllable. MALONE. IDLE Moss:] Moss that produces no fruit. So, in Othello: antres vast, and desarts idle." STEEVENS. 66 ANT. S. To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme: What, was I marry'd to her in my dream? I'll entertain the offer'd fallacy 9. 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, spight of spights!We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprights1; 9 - the OFFER'D fallacy.] The old copy has the free'd fallacy." This conjecture is from an anonymous correspondent. We talk with goblins, OwLs, and ELVISH Sprights;] 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 ouphes, 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 Italians called witches, who were supposed to be in like manner mischievously bent against children, strega from strix, the screech-owl. 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, 66 Carpere dicuntur luctantia viscera rostris, "Est illis strigibus nomen : "Et plenum poto sanguine guttur habent. Fast. lib. vi. WARBURTON. "Ghastly owls accompany elvish ghosts," in Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar for June. So, in Sheringham's Disceptatio de Anglo If we obey them not, this will ensue, They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue. rum 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 Cornucopiæ, or Pasquil's Night-cap, or Antidote for the Headach, 1623, p. 38: "Dreading no dangers of the darksome night, "No oules, hobgoblins, ghosts, nor water-spright." STEEVENS. Owls was changed by Mr. Theobald into ouphes; and 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." 66 Again, in A Fig for Fortune, by A. C. [i. e. Antony Copley] 4to. 1596, p. 63: "There was no savage shape or larval hue, “No bug, no bale, nor horrid owlerie, "But all that there was, was sincere and true," &c. 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. This is certainly no proper place for discussing the demerits of that adulterate copy of our author's plays. I have elsewhere shewn that the person who revised it was equally unacquainted with Shakspeare's language and metre; and, in consequence of that ignorance, almost every page of that book abounds in the grossest corruptions. To talk of his having authority for his innovations (I suppose we are to understand manuscript authority) is very idle. I have proved that he never looked into the printed |
