Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

might perhaps be possible, by certain violent processes, to reduce it to the rude semblance of a line of verse, or to break it up, as has also been attempted, into something like a pair of hemistichs; but it is far better to regard it as never having been intended for verse at all, like many other brief utterances of the same level kind interspersed in this and all the other Plays.

[ocr errors]

174. Which is a great way, etc. The commentators, who flood us with their explanations of many easier passages, have not a word to say upon this. Casca means that the point of sunrise is as yet far to the south (of east), weighing (that is, taking into account, or on account of) the unadvanced period of the year.

[ocr errors]

That is, all

The commenta

175. Give me your hands all over. included. The idiom is still common. 177. If not the face of men. tors are all alive here, one proposing to read fate of men, another faith of men, another faiths (as nearer in sound to face). There seems to be no great difficulty in the old reading, understood as meaning the looks of men. It is preferable, at any rate, to anything which it has been proposed to substitute. [Dyce, Hudson, and White have face.]

177. The time's abuse. - The prevalence of abuse generally, all the abuses of the time.

177. Hence to his idle bed. That is, bed of idleness, or in which he may lie doing nothing (not vacant or unoccupied bed, as some would understand it). [Compare the expression, " a sick bed."]

177. So let high-sighted tyranny. - High-looking, proud. Some modern editions have rage, instead of range, probably by an accidental misprint.

177. Till each man drop by lottery. That is,

[ocr errors]

probably, as if by chance, without any visible cause why he in particular should be struck down or taken off; or there may be an allusion to the process of decimation.

177. Than secret Romans. secrecy.

Romans bound to

To palter means to speak unsteadily or It is best

177. And will not palter ? shuffle, to equivocate, to act or dubiously with the intention to deceive.

explained by the well-known passage in Macbeth (v. 7):

And be these juggling fiends no more believed,

That palter with us in a double sense;

That keep the word of promise to our ear,

And break it to our hope.

177. Or we will fall for it? - Will die for it. 177. Men cautelous. Cautelous is given to cautels, full of cautels. A cautel, from the Roman law-term cautela (a caution, or security), is mostly used in a discreditable sense by our old English writers. The caution has passed into cunning in their acceptation of the word; it was natural that caution should be popularly so estimated ; — and by cautels they commonly mean craftinesses, deceits. Thus we have in Hamlet (i. 3),

--

And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch

The virtue of his will.

And in the passage before us cautelous is cautious and wary at least to the point of cowardice, if not to that of insidiousness and trickery.

177. Old feeble carrions.- Carrions, properly masses of dead and putrefying flesh, is a favorite term of contempt with Shakespeare.

177. Such suffering souls, etc. See the note on that gentleness as in 44. In the present speech we

[ocr errors]

have both the old and the new phraseology;- such ... that in one line, and such. . . as in the next. Suffering souls are patient, all-enduring souls. 177. The even virtue of our enterprise. The even virtue is the firm and steady virtue. The our is emphatic.

177. Nor the insuppressive mettle. The keenness and ardor incapable of being suppressed (however illegitimate such a form with that sense may be thought to be). So we have in As You Like It (iii. 2), "The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she." And even Milton has (Lycidas, 176), “ And hears the unexpressive nuptial song." [So "With unexpressive notes," Hymn on the Nativ. 116.] - For mettle see 102.

66

[ocr errors]

177. To think that. - That is, so as to think. 177. Is guilty of a several bastardy. The etymology of the word bastard is uncertain. Shakespeare probably took his notion of what it radically expressed from the convertible phrase base-born. Thus, in Lear, i. 2, Edmund soliloquizes-"Why bastard? Wherefore base?" By a several bastardy here is meant a special or distinct act of baseness, or of treason against ancestry and honorable birth. For several see 443.

178. But what of Cicero? etc. - Both the prosody and the sense direct us to lay the emphasis on him. 178. He will stand very strong. He will take

part with us decidedly and warmly.

181. It shall be said, his judgment, etc.— Dr. Guest, in the paper "On English Verbs," in the Second Volume of the Proceedings of the Philological Society, which has been already referred to, adduces some examples to show that the primary sense of shall is to owe. Hence the use of should,

which is still common in the sense of ought.

66

"The

use of shall to denote future time," Dr. Guest continues, may be traced to a remote antiquity in our language; that of will is of much later origin, and prevailed chiefly in our northern dialects. Writers, however, who paid much attention to their style, generally used these terms with greater precision. The assertion of will or of duty seems to have been considered by them as implying to a certain extent the power to will or to impose a duty. As a man has power to will for himself only, it was only in the first person that the verb will could be used with this signification; and in the other persons it was left free to take that latitude of meaning which popular usage had given to it. Again, the power which overrides the will to impose a duty must proceed from some external agency; and consequently shall could not be employed to denote such power in the first person. In the first person, therefore, it was left free to follow the popular meaning, but in the other two was tied to its original and more precise signification. These distinctions still continue a shibboleth for the natives of the two sister kingdoms. Walter Scott, as is well known to his readers, could never thoroughly master the difficulty.”

In the Third Edition of Dr. Latham's English Language, pp. 470-474, may be found two other explanations; the first by the late Archdeacon Julius Charles Hare (from the Cambridge Philological Museum, II. 203), the second by Professor De Morgan (from the Proceedings of the Philological Society, IV. 185; No. 90, read 25th Jan. 1850). [See also additional remarks in the Fifth Edition of Latham's work, pp. 624-626. Compare Marsh, Lectures, First Series, p. 659.]

The manner of using shall and will which is now

so completely established in England, and which
throughout the greater part of the country is so per-
fectly uniform among all classes, was as yet only
growing up in the early part of the seventeenth cen-
tury. This was very well shown some years ago by a
writer in Blackwood's Magazine, by comparing many
passages of the authorized version of the Scriptures,
published in 1611, with the same passages in the
preceding translation, called the Bishops' Bible,
which had appeared in 1568. The old use of shall,
instead of will, to indicate simple futurity, with the
second and third persons, as well as with the first, is
still common with Shakespeare. Here, in this and
the next line, are two instances: "It shall be said;'
"Shall no whit appear." So afterwards we have, in
187, "This shall mark our purpose necessary; in
238, "Cæsar should be a beast without a heart;
350, "The enemies of Cæsar shall say this;
619, "The enemy, marching along by them, By
them shall make a fuller number up." We have
occasionally the same use of shall even in Claren-
don: "Whilst there are Courts in the world,
emulation and ambition will be inseparable from
them; and kings who have nothing to give shall be
pressed to promise" (Hist., Book xiii). In some
rare instances the received text of Shakespeare gives
us will where we should now use shall; as when
Portia says, in The Merchant of Venice, iii. 4,—
I'll hold thee any wager,

When we are both accoutred like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

in

in

But here we should probably read "I prove." [?] 181. Shall no whit appear. Whit is the Saxon wiht, anything that exists, a creature. It is the same word with wight, which we now use only for a man,

« ПредишнаНапред »