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KING HENRY IV. PART II.

INDUCTION.

Rum. This have I rumour'd through the peasant

towns

Between that royal field of Shrewsbury

And this worm-eaten hold of ragged stone.

The last line as given in the quartos and the first folio is this:

'And this worm-eaten hole of ragged stone.'

Theobald's emendation of 'hold' for 'hole' has been generally accepted. Now 'worm-eaten' might be applied to any old structure made of wood, but not, I presume, to a stone building. Surely Shakespeare wrote:

And this war-beaten hold of ragged stone.

This word 'war-beaten' not only substitutes an appropriate and poetical image for one mean and discordant, but gives a significance to the expression 'ragged stone,' which it does not otherwise possess. The stone is ragged because the building has been beaten by cannonade and other engines of war. With this change the line seems worthy of its author. 'War-beaten' would have been spelt by Shakespeare, as it is spelt in the quarto edition of Richard II., 'warre-beaten,' which would easily be mistaken for 'worme-eaten.' In Holinshed occur the following passages: 'After that the Duke had

North.

Let order die.

And let this world no longer be a stage,
To feed contention in a lingering act ;
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead.

'And darkness be the burier of the dead.'] The conclusion of this noble speech is extremely striking. There is no need to suppose it exactly philosophical. 'Darkness' in poetry may be the absence of eyes, as well as privation of light, yet we may remark that by an ancient opinion it had been held that if the human race, for whom the world was made, were extirpated, the whole system of sublunary nature would cease. JOHNSON.

Johnson did not fully apprehend the imagery of this passage, in which there is no want of perfect and literal fidelity to the truth.

And let this world no longer be a stage
To see contention in a lingering act;
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reign in all bosoms, that each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!

The metaphor is one drawn from the stage in which tragedies were exhibited, as the words 'stage,' 'act,' and 'scene' intimate; and it is perfectly sustained from beginning to end. He prays that the world may become a stage for the exhibition, not of a prolonged contention, but of such a truculent and furious death-struggle as will rapidly culminate in the catastrophe of a vast slaughter, and that the dead lying on the ground may be buried out of sight by a darkness which will envelope everything. It is certain that during performance the stage was artificially lighted, and the rest of the theatre also; and it is probable that these lights were extinguished immediately on the close of the performance. The parallelism of the actual atrocity wished for to the tragical

representation by which it is illustrated is sustained into the 'darkness' which ends both. The imagery of the last line and a half strongly confirms the emendation 'see.' Two of the three parts of Henry VI. placed upon the stage before Henry IV. were entitled 'The Contention of the Houses of York and Lancaster.'

To feed contention in a lingering act'] Is 'feed contention' here applicable? I doubt. Possibly we ought to

read

'To see contention in a lingering act.

Mor. For that same word, rebellion, did divide The action of their bodies from their souls; And they did fight with queasiness, constrained, As men drink potions; that their weapons only Seem'd on our side, but, for their spirits and souls, This word, rebellion, it had froze them up, As fish are in a pond.

'This word, rebellion, it had froze them up.'] On the use of the pronoun 'it,' like that of the personal pronouns 'he' 'she' and 'they,' as quite common in the sixteenth century although quite superfluous for any purpose but that of giving emphasis, I have remarked, with illustrations, on a preceding page.

Mor.

But now the bishop

Turns insurrection to religion:

Suppos'd sincere and holy in his thoughts,
He's follow'd both with body and with mind;
And doth enlarge his rising with the blood

Of fair King Richard, scraped from Pomfret stones.

'Doth enlarge his rising.'] Warburton amended ‘enlarge' by 'enlard;' coarsely as it seems to me. His rising' may mean the force which he makes to rise' and this interpolation

To speak a truth. If he be slain, say so :
The tongue offends not, that reports his death:
And he doth sin, that doth belie the dead;

Not he, which says the dead is not alive.

Johnson saw the discrepancy between the first line of Northumberland's speech, and the six lines which follow in support of it. He therefore assigned the first line to Morton, the rest to Northumberland. The first verse in fact urges Lord Morton to forbear from telling Percy's death, while the six latter show the impropriety of this reticence. But this amendment is unsuitable. Lord Morton is the person bringing the intelligence-not Northumberland, to whom, therefore, the injunction 'Yet say not that Percy's dead' would be misdirected. It was not for Northumberland either to say, or to leave unsaid; nor was it for Morton, who knew the death, to deprecate the announcement of it, as Johnson's amendment would make him do. The line is, in fact, wrongly printed. The true line is, I doubt not:

You for all this say not that Percy's dead.

Morton had as good as said that Percy was dead; yet he had shrunk from a direct assertion of it in terms. This squeamishness Northumberland exposes and rebukes. Nothing could be more natural than that Northumberland having already said once, and said in vain, 'Yet speak, Morton,' should now begin :

'You for all this say not that Percy's dead.'

The quartos omit 'say so' after 'slain,' which all the folios. give. The motive for this omission must, I think, have been a desire to avoid contradiction between 'yet for all this say not' and 'if he be slain, say so.' But even by this omission the inconsistency is not cured, for all that follows is but in effect an exhortation to 'say so.' Seymour's 'indeed' for 'say so' is equally ineffectual.

But the sentence is in another point out of any sense, or perversive of proper significancy. I would read it thus:

The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more than that I invent, or is invented on me.

There is a similar turn of phrase in Hen. IV. pt. i.:
'I did that I did not this seven yeare before,

'I blushed.'-Act ii. sc. 4.

The similarity of 'than' to 'that' probably occasioned the omission of the latter word, which is indispensable here.

Fal. I was never mann'd with an agate till now; but I will set you neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel, and send you back again to your master, for a jewel; the juvenal, the prince your master, whose chin is not yet fledged. I will sooner have a beard grow in the palm of my hand, than he shall get one on his cheek; and yet he will not stick to say, his face is a face-royal God may finish it when he will, it is not a hair amiss yet: he may keep it still as a face-royal, for a barber shall never earn sixpence out of it; and yet he will be crowing, as if he had writ man ever since his father was a bachelor. He may keep his own grace, for he is almost out of mine, I can assure him.

'I will set you neither in gold nor silver.'] This is the reading substituted by the editors of the first folio and adopted by nearly all subsequent editors and writers for that of the first four quartos, 'I will inset you neither in gold nor silver.' But although 'inset' is a word not to be found in Shakespeare elsewhere-yet it is an unlikely misprint for 'set.' I prefer therefore to amend the quartos thus:

But I will insert you neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel.