Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners: / with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare; on a Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris dance.

by Francis Douce

ACT III.

Scene 2. Page 82.

Ros. I'll graff it with you, and then I shall graff it with a medlar: then it will be the earliest fruit in the country, for you'll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that's the right virtue of the medlar.

On this Mr. Steevens observes that Shakspeare had little knowledge of gardening, the medlar being one of the latest fruits, and uneatable till the end of November. But is not the charge, at least in this instance, unfounded; and has not the learned commentator misunderstood the poet's meaning? It is well known that the medlar is only edible when apparently rotten. This is what Shakspeare calls its right virtue. If a fruit be fit to be eaten when rotten and before it be ripe, it may in one sense be termed the earliest. The inaccuracy seems to be in making the medlar rotten before it is ripe, the rottenness being, as it is conceived, the ripeness.

Scene 2. Page 93.

Orl. I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly.

This very much resembles the sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuum, in one of Martial's epigrams, lib. i. ep. 39, of which the following translation was made by Timothy Kendall, in his Flowers of epigrammes, 1577, 12mo:

"The booke which thou doest read, it is
Frende Fidentinus myne;
But when thou ill doest read it, then
Beginns it to bee thyne."

Scene 4. Page 111.

Cel. He hath bought a pair of cast lips of Diana: a nun of winter's sisterhood kisses not more religiously; the very ice of chastity is in them.

Theobald explains cast lips "a pair left off by Diana." It is not easy to conceive how the goddess could leave off her lips; or how, being left off, Orlando could purchase them. Celia seems rather to allude to a statue cast in plaister or metal, the lips of which might well be said to possess the ice of chastity.

As to the "nun of winter's sisterhood," Warburton might have contented himself with censuring the dullness of Theobald. His own sisterhoods of the seasons are by much too refined and pedantic, and in every respect objectionable. Shakspeare poetically feigns a new order of nuns, most appropriate to his subject, and wholly devoid of obscurity.

Scene 5. Page 115.

Sil. ... The common executioner
Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck.

There is no doubt that the expression to fall the axe may with propriety refer to the usual mode of decapitation; but if it could be shown that in the reign of Elizabeth this punishment was inflicted in England by an instrument resembling the French guillotine, which though merciful in the discharge of its office, has justly excited abhorrence from the number of innocent victims that have suffered by it, the expression would perhaps seem rather more appropriate. Among the cuts to the first edition of Holinshed's chronicle such a machine is twice introduced; and as it does not appear that in either instance there was any cause for the particular use of it, we may reasonably infer that it was at least sometimes adopted. Every one has heard of the Halifax gibbet, which was just such another instrument, and certainly introduced into that town, for reasons that do not appear, long before the time in which Holinshed was printed. It is said that the Earl of Morton, the Scotish regent, saw it at Halifax, and that he introduced it into Scotland, where it was used for a considerable time afterwards.[14] In that country it was called the maiden, and Morton himself actually suffered by it, when condemned as an accomplice in the murder of Lord Darnley. In the best edition of Holinshed, Thynne's continuation of Hector Boethius's history is printed, in which there is an account of the conference between the Earl and the Ministers of Edinburgh, under the title of The examination and answers of the Earl of Morton before his death, but after his condemnation. Thynne seems to say that the above account was delivered over to him, but he has omitted to state the particulars. In a manuscript of this conference, written at the time, and in the possession of the author of these observations, it is called The some of all the conferrence that was betweene the Earle Morton and John Dury and Mr. Walker the same daye that he suffered which was the 2 June 1581, and differs in several places from the other. In both, at the end, there is an account of the Earl's last moments, in which it is stated (the MS. being here quoted) that he "layde his head under the axe, his handes being unbounde, Mr. Walker cried in his eare, Lord Jesus receive thy spirite, he saide Jesus receive my sowle, which wordes he was speaking while the axe fell on his necke." This extract would alone be sufficient to decide on the mode in which Morton was beheaded; but in the MS. there is a neat drawing of the machine itself, resembling the cut in the earliest edition of Holinshed, except that in the latter the axe is suspended to the top of the frame by a string which the executioner cuts with a knife, whilst in the other, a peg, to which the string is attached, is drawn out of one of the sides.

It may be worth adding that in King Henry VI. part 2, Eleanor says to her husband the duke of Gloucester,

"But be thou mild, and blush not at my shame,
Nor stir at nothing, till the axe of death
Hang over thee——"

Scene 5. Page 118.

Ros. ... What though you have more beauty
(As by my faith, I see no more in you
Than without candle may go dark to bed)

The old copy reads no beauty. Mr. Malone substitutes mo, i. e. more, and supports his alteration by making Rosalind allow that Phœbe had more beauty than her lover; but she soon afterwards asserts the contrary in the most positive terms. The omission of the disputed monosyllable, which in the old copy might have caught the compositor's eye in the ensuing line and occasioned the mistake, will certainly correct the present redundancy in the line, and perhaps restore the author's original language. As in the next line appears to have the power of though; a word that could not be used on account of its introduction in the preceding line.