A punishment, or trial? Yes; no wonder, When rich ones scarce tell true: To lapse in fulness Is sorer than to lie for need; and falsehood My hunger's gone; but even before I was Are master of the feast: Cadwal, and I, Gui. Gui. There is cold meat i' the cave; we'll Whilst what we have kill'd be cook'd. Bel. Stay; come not in: [Looking in. a It is scarcely necessary to affix a very precise meaning to words which are meant to be spoken under great trepidation. The poor wanderer entering the cave, which she fears is "some savage hold," exhorts the inhabitant to speak if civil -if belonging to civilized life. This is clear. But we doubt whether she goes on to ask the savage to take a reward for his food or to lend it; for, in that case, she would address ideas to the savage which do not belong to his condition. Yet this is the general interpretation of the passage. The take or lend more belong to the civilized being that may dwell in the cave, than to the savage one. We have, therefore, ventured to point the passage as if the expression, if savage, were merely the parenthetical whisper of her own fears"If anything that's civil, speak; take or lend." The if savage is interposed, when no answer is returned to speak. Johnson suggested a transposition of the sentence "If any thing that's civil, take or lend, If savage speak." But that it eats our victuals I should think Here were a fairy. Gui. What's the matter, sir? Bel. By Jupiter, an angel! or, if not, An earthly paragon!-Behold divineness No elder than a boy ! Enter IMOGEN. b Resty. So the original (restie). Steevens, by one of his dashing corrections; changed the word to restive. Resty, reasty, raisty, is rancid-a provincial expression, generally applied to bacon spoiled by long keeping; which the Londoners have changed into rusty. Reasty and rusty are most probably the same words, meaning, spoiled for want of use. Imo. Good masters, harm me not: I have stolen nought; nor would not, though I had found Gold strew'd i' the floor. Here's money for my meat : I would have left it on the board, so soon Imo. Imo. To Milford-Haven. Bel. What is your name? Imo. Fidele, sir: I have a kinsman who Is bound for Italy; he embark'd at Milford; To whom being going, almost spent with hunger, I am fallen in this offence. Bel. Prithee, fair youth, Think us no churls; nor measure our good minds By this rude place we live in. Well encounter'd! 'Tis almost night: you shall have better cheer Ere you depart; and thanks, to stay and eat it. Boys bid him welcome. Gui. Were you a woman, youth, I should woo hard but be your groom.-In honesty, I bid for you as I do buy. Aro. I'll make 't my comfort, He is a man; I'll love him as my brother :And such a welcome as I'd give to him After long absence, such is yours:a—Most welcome! Be sprightly, for you fall 'mongst friends. To thee, Posthumus. [Aside. a Such is yours. So the folio. Some modern editions read, such as yours, thereby spoiling the sense. Bel. He wrings at some distress. Or I; whate'er it be, Bel. [Whispering. That had a court no bigger than this cave, That nothing gift of differing multitudes)," Bel. It shall be so. Boys, we'll go dress our hunt.-Fair youth, come in: Discourse is heavy, fasting; when we have supp'd, What pain it cost, what danger! Gods! Hark, boys. Imo. Thanks, sir. I pray, draw near. [Exeunt. SCENE VII.-Rome. Enter Two Senators and Tribunes. 1 Sen. This is the tenor of the emperor's writ: That since the common men are now in action 'Gainst the Pannonians and Dalmatians, And that the legions now in Gallia are Full weak to undertake our wars against The fallen-off Britons, that we do incite The gentry to this business. He creates Lucius pro-consul: and to you the tribunes, For this immediate levy, he commands His absolute commission. Long live Cæsar! Tri. Is Lucius general of the forces? 2 Sen. Ay. Tri. Remaining now in Gallia ? 1 Sen. With those legions Which I have spoke of, whereunto your levy Must be supplyant: The words of your com [Well, madam, we must take a short farewell.] [Exeunt. [Coin of Augustus.] ILLUSTRATIONS OF ACT III. 1 SCENE I." The fam'd Cassibelan, who was once at point (0, giglot fortune 1) to master Cæsar's sword, Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright.” · MALONE has the following observation upon this passage: "Shakspere has here transferred to Cassibelan an adventure which happened to his brother Nennius. The same historie (says Holinshed) also maketh mention of Nennius, brother to Cassibelane, who in fight happened to get Cæsar's sword fastened in his shield, by a blow which Cæsar struck at him." Malone has here fallen into an error, from a too literal acceptance of Shakspere's words. To be once at point to master Cæsar's sword, is to be once nearly vanquishing Cæsar. We can put our finger upon the passage in Holinshed's Chronicle which Shakspere had in view: "Our histories far differ from this (Caesar's account), affirming that Cæsar, coming the second time, was by the Britains with valiancy and martial prowess beaten and repelled, as he was at the first, and specially by means that Cassibelane had pight in the Thames great piles of trees, piked with iron, through which his ships, being entered the river, were perished and lost. And after his coming a land he was vanquished in battle, and constrained to flee into Gallia with those ships that remained. For joy of this second victory (saith Galfrid) Cassibelane made a great feast at Loudon, and there did sacrifice to the gods." The victory and the rejoicing are exactly in the same juxta-position as in Shakspere. The Lud's town of the old chroniclers is London. They considered that London was the town of Lud; and, in a similar manner, that Lud-gate was the gate of Lud. The tradition that Lud rebuilt the ancient Troinovant is given in Spenser : [Fairy Queen, canto x. book ii.] "He had two sons, whose eldest, called Lud, Left of his life most famous memory, And endless monuments of his great good. The ruin'd walls he did re-edify Of Troinovant, 'gainst force of enemy, But Verstegan, in his very amusing 'Restitution of Decayed Intelligence concerning Britain,' objects to the connexion both of Lud's town and Lud-gate with King Lud: "As touching the name of our most ancient, chief, and famous city, it could never of Lud'stown take the name of London, because it had never anciently the name of Lud's-town, neither could it, for that town is not a British, but a Saxon word; but if it took any appellation after King Lud, it must then have been called Caer-Lud, and not Lud's-town; but, considering of how little credit the relations of Geffery of Monmouth are, who from Lud doth derive it, it may rather be thought that he hath imagined this name to have come from King Lud, because of some nearness of sound, for our Saxon ancestors, having divers ages before Geffery was born called it by the name of London, he, not knowing from whence it came, might straight imagine it to have come from Lud, and therefore ought to be Caer-Lud, or Lud's town, as after him others called it; and some also of the name of London, in British sound made it L'hundain, both appellations, as I am persuaded, being of the Britains first taken up and used after the Saxons had given it the name of London. "But here I cannot a little marvel how Tacitus (or any such ancient writers) should call it by the name of Londinum (that having been, as it should seem, the Latin name thereof since it hath been called London), which appellation he could never have from the ancient Britains, seeing they never so called it. Julius Cæsar seemed not to know of the name of Londinum, but nameth the city of the Trinobants; and a marvel it is, that, between the time of Cæsar and Tacitus, it should come to get the new naine of Londinum, no man can tell how. To deliver my conjecture how this may chance to have happened, I am loth, for that it may peradventure be of some disallowed, and so, omitting it, I will leave the reader to note that the reign of King Lud, from whom some will needs derive the name of London, was before Julius Caesar came into Britain, and not after, for Cæsar first entered Britain in the time of Cassibelan, who was brother unto Lud, and succeeded next after him; and in all likelihood, if Lud had given it after himself the new name of Caer-Lud, or, as some more fondly have supposed, of Lud's-town, Julius Cæsar, who came thither so soon after his death, could not have been so utterly ignorant of the new naming of that city, but have known it as well as such writers as came after him. "Evident it is, that our Saxon ancestors called it Lunden, (in pronunciation sounded London) sometimes adding thereunto the ordinary termination which they gave to all well-fenced cities, or rather such as had forts or castles annexed unto them, by calling it Lundenbirig, and Lundenceaster, that is, after our latter pronunciation, Londonbury or London-chester. This name of Lunden, since varied into London, they gave it in regard and memory of the ancient famous metropolitan city of Lunden, in Sconeland or Sconia, sometime of greatest traffic of all the east parts of Germany. “And I fiud in Crautzius that Eric, the fourth of that name, King of Denmark, went in person to Rome to solicit Pope Paschal the Second that Denmark might be no longer under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishop of Hambrough, but that the Archbishop of Lunden should be the chief Prelate of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the which in fine was granted. As for the name of Ludgate, which some will needs have so to have been called of King Lud, and accordingly infer the name of the city, I answer, that it could never of Lud be called Ludgate, because gate is no British word, and, had it taken name of Lud, it must have been Ludporth, and not Ludgate. But how cometh it that all the gates of London, yea, and all the streets and lanes of the city, having English names, Ludgate only must remain British, or the one half of it, to wit, Lud,-gate, as before hath been said, being English? This surely can have proceeded of no other cause than of the lack of heed that men have taken unto our ancient language; and Geffery of Monmouth, or some other as unsure in his reports as he, by hearing ouly of the name of Ludgate, might easily fall into a dream or imagination that it must needs have had that name of King Lud. There is no doubt but that our Saxon ancestors (as I have said), changing all the names of the other gates about London, did also change this, and called it Ludgate, otherwise also written Leodgeat; Lud and Leod is all one, and, in our ancient language, folk or people, and so is Ludgate as much to say as Porta populi, the gate or passage of the people. And if a man do observe it, he shall find that, of all the gates of the city, the greatest passage of the people is through this gate; and yet must it needs have been much more in time past before Newgate was builded, which, as Mr. John Stow saith, was first builded about the reign of King Henry the Second. And therefore the name of Leod-gate, was aptly given in respect of the great concourse of people through it." 2 SCENE I." Mulmutius made our laws," &c. According to Holinshed,.Mulmutius, the first King of Britain who was crowned with a golden "made many good laws, which were long crown, after used, called Mulmutius' laws, turned out of the British speech into Latin, by Gildas Priscus, and long time after translated out of Latin into English, by Alfred, King of England, and mingled in his statutes." 3 SCENE I." Thy Cæsar knighted me." Shakspere still follows Holinshed literally :"This man was brought up at Rome, and there was made knight by Augustus Cæsar." Douce objects to the word knight as a downright anachronism; as well as to another similar passage, where Cymbeline addresses Belarius and his sons: "Bow your knees: Arise my knights o' the battle." Both Holinshed and Shakspere, in applying a term of the feudal ages to convey the notion of a Romau dignity, did precisely what they were called upon to do. They used a word which conveyed a distinct image much more clearly than any phrase of stricter propriety. They translated ideas as well as words. 4 SCENE II." A franklin's housewife." The franklin, in the days of Shakspere, had become a less important personage than he was in those of Chaucer: "A Frankelein was in this compagnie; An housholder, and that a grete was he; At sessions ther was he lord and sire. 66 But, a century and a half later than Chaucer, he was still a dignified member of the landed aristocracy. 'England is so thick spread and filled with rich and landed men, that there is scarce a small village in which you may not find a knight, an esquire, or some substantial householder, commonly called a frankleyne; all men of considerable estates." This is the description of Sir John Fortescue, in the reign of Henry VI. The franklin in the time of Shakspere had, for the most part, gone upward into the squire, or downward into the yeorian; and the name had probably become synouymous with the small freeholder and cultivator. "A franklin's housewife" would wear 66 no costlier suit" than Imogen desired for concealment. Latimer has described the farmer of the early part of the sixteenth century:-"My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year, at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine." 5 SCENE III." The sharded beetle." There is a controversy about the meaning of the word shard as applied to a beetle. In Hamlet, the priest says of Ophelia "Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her." A shard here is a thing divided; and it is used for something worthless,-fragments. Mr. Tollet says that shard signifies dung; and that "the shardborn beetle" in Macbeth is the beetle born in dung. This is certainly only a secondary meaning of shard. We cannot doubt that Shakspere, in the passage before us, uses the epithet sharded as applied to the flight of the beetle. The sharded TRAGEDIES.-VOL. I. Q beetle, the beetle whose scaly wing-cases are not formed for a flight far above the earth,-is contrasted with the full-wing'd eagle. The shards support the insect when he rises from the ground; but they do not enable him to cleave the air with a bird-like wing. The shard-borne beetle of Macbeth is therefore, the beetle supported on its shards. "SCENE IV. "And, for I am richer than to be hang'd by the walls, I must be ripp'd." Steevens has an interesting note upon this passage : "To 'hang by the walls' does not mean, to be converted into hangings for a room, but to be hung up, as useless, among the neglected contents of a wardrobe. So, in Measure for Measure: That have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall! "When a boy, at an ancient mansion-house in Suffolk I saw one of these repositories, which (thanks to a succession of old maids!) had been preserved with superstitious reverence for almost a century and a half. "Clothes were not formerly, as at present, made of slight materials; were not kept in drawers, or given away as soon as lapse of time or change of fashion had impaired their value. On the contrary, they were hung upon wooden pegs in a room appropriated to the sole purpose of receiving them; and, though such cast-off things as were composed of rich substances were occasionally ripped for domestic uses (viz. mantles for infants, vests for children, and counterpanes for beds), articles of inferior quality were suffered to hang by the walls till age and moths had destroyed what pride would not permit to be worn by servants or poor relations' " 225 |
