having taken place? Mr. Collier's MS. annotator, it is to be presumed, approves or accepts the "did neigh" of the Second Folio. 233. And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets. It is rare to find Shakespeare coming so near upon the same words in two places as he does here and in again dealing with the same subject in Hamlet, i. 1: "In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead 233. Beyond all use.-We might still say "beyond all use and wont.' 234. Whose end is purposed, etc.-The end, or completion, of which is designed by the gods. 236. What say the augurers.—Vid. 194.—The preceding stage direction is in the original edition "Enter a Servant." 238. In shame of cowardice.-For the shame of cowardice, to put cowardice to shame. 238. Cæsar should be a beast.-We should now say Cæsar would be a beast. It is the same use of shall where we now use will that has been noticed at 181. Yet the fashion of saying It should appear, or It should seem (instead of It would), which has come up with the revived study of our old literature, is equally at variance with the principle by which our modern employment of shall and will is regulated. The use of shall and should to indicate simple futurity with the second and third persons is still a characteristic of the provincial English of Ireland; as, on the other hand, the tendency to employ will in that sense even M with the first person continues to mark the Scottish dialect. 238. We are two lions.—The old reading, in all the Folios, is We heare (or hear in the Third and Fourth). Nobody, as far as I am aware, has defended it, or affected to be able to make any sense of it. Theobald proposed We were, which has been generally adopted. But We are, as recommended by Upton, is at once nearer to the original and much more spirited. It is a singularly happy restoration, and one in regard to which, I conceive, there can scarcely be the shadow of a doubt. It is adopted, I see, by Mr. Collier in his one-volume edition of the Plays; but he ought to have told us in his Notes and Emendations whether it is one of the corrections made by his MS. annotator, or how the passage, indisputably corrupt and unintelligible as it stood in the printed text before him, is treated by that individual. 239. Is consumed in confidence.-As anything is consumed in fire. 240. For thy humour.-For the gratification of thy whim or caprice. Vid. 205. Mr. Collier's MS. annotator directs that Cæsar should here raise Calphurnia, as he had that she should deliver the last line of her preceding speech kneeling. 241. Cæsar, all hail!-Hail in this sense is the A. Saxon hael or hál, meaning hale, whole, or healthy (the modern German heil). It ought rather to be spelled hale. Hail, frozen rain, is from haegl, haegel, otherwise hagol, hagul, or haegol (in modern German hagel). 242. To bear my greeting.—To greet in this sense is the A. Saxon gretan, to go to meet, to welcome, to salute (the grüssen of the modern German). The greet of the Scotch and other northern dialects, which is found in Spenser, represents quite another A. Saxon verb, greotan, or graetan, to lament. 244. To be afeard. The common Scotch form for afraid is still feared, or feard, from the verb to fear, taken in the sense of to make afraid; in which sense it is sometimes found in Shakespeare; as in Measure for Measure, ii. 1: "We must not make a scarecrow of the law, And in Antony and Cleopatra, ii. 6: "Thou canst not fear us, Pompey, with thy sails." 246. That is enough to satisfy the senate.-Not (as the words might in other circumstances mean) enough to ensure their being satisfied, but enough for me to do towards that end. 246. She dreamt to night she saw my statue.-The word statue is of frequent occurrence in Shakespeare; and in general it is undoubtedly only a dissyllable. In the present Play, for instance, in the very next speech we have "Your statue spouting blood in many pipes." And so likewise in 138, and again in 378. Only in one line, which occurs in Richard the Third, iii. 7, "But like dumb statües or breathing stones," is it absolutely necessary that it should be regarded as of three syllables, if the received reading be correct. In that passage also, however, as in every other, the word in the First Folio is printed simply statues, exactly as it always is in the English which we now write and speak. On the other hand, it is certain that statue was frequently written statua in Shakespeare's age; and it is not impossible that its full pronunciation may have been always trisyllabic, and that it became a dissyllable only by the two short vowels, as in other cases, being run together so as to count prosodically only for one. "From authors of the times," says Reed, in a note on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 4, "it would not be difficult to fill whole pages with instances to prove that statue was at that period a trisyllable." But unfortunately he does not favour us with one such instance. Nor, with the exception of the single line in Richard the Third, the received reading of which has been suspected for another reason (breathing stones. being not improbably, it has been thought, a misprint for unbreathing stones), has any decisive instance been produced either by Steevens, who refers at that passage to what he designates as Reed's "very decisive note," or by any of the other commentators anywhere, or by Nares, who also commences his account of the word in his Glossary by telling us that it "was long used in English as a trisyllable." The only other lines in Shakespeare in which it has been conceived to be other than a word of two syllables are the one now under examination, and another which also occurs in the present Play, in 424 : "Even at the base of Pompey's statue." These two lines, it will be observed, are similarly constructed in so far as this word is concerned; in both the supposed trisyllable concludes the verse. Now, we have many verses terminated in exactly the same manner by other words, and yet it is very far from being certain that such verses were intended to be accounted verses of ten syllables, or were ever so pronounced. in First, there is the whole class of those ending with words in tion or sion. This termination, it is true, usually makes two syllables in Chaucer, and it may do so sometimes, though it does not generally, Spenser ; it is frequently dissyllabic, in indisputable instances, even with some of the dramatists of the early part of the seventeenth century, and particularly with Beaumont and Fletcher; but it is never other than monosyllabic, I believe, in the middle of the line with Shakespeare, or only on the rarest occasions. Is it, then, to be supposed that he employed it habitually as a dissyllable at the end of a line? It is of continual occurrence in both positions. For example, in the following line of the present speech, "But for your private satisfaction," can we think that the concluding word was intended to have any different pronunciation from that which it has in the line of Romeo and Juliet (ii. 2),— "What satisfaction canst thou have to night ?" or in this other from Othello (iii. 3),– "But for a satisfaction of my thought ?" Is it probable that it was customary then, any more than it is now, to divide tion into two syllables in the one case more than in the other? Secondly, there are numerous verses terminating |
