SHAKSPEARE NOTES.
Who was the editor of The Poems and Plays of William Shakspeare, eight vols. 8vo., published by Scott and Webster in 1833?
In that edition the following passage from The Merchant of Venice, Act III. Sc. 2., is pointed in this way:—
"Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian; beauty's, in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest."
To which the anonymous editor appends the following note:—
"I have deviated slightly from the folio—the ordinary reading represents ornament as 'the beauteous scarf veiling an Indian beauty,' a sentence which by no means serves to illustrate the reflexion which Bassanio wishes to enforce. Sir Thomas Hanmer proposed to read dowdy for beauty!"
My object in this quotation is not that of commending the emendation, but of affording an opportunity of recording the following reasons which induce me to reject it; not only as no improvement to the sense, but as a positive injury to it.
1st. The argument of Bassanio is directed against the deceptiveness of ornament in general, of which seeming beauty is only one of the subordinate illustrations. These illustrations are drawn from law, religion, valour, and beauty; all of which are finally summed up in the passage in question, beginning "Thus ornament," &c. and still further concentrated in the phrase "in a word." Therefore this summing up cannot refer singly to beauty, no more than to any other of the subordinate illustrations, but it must have general reference to adventitious ornament, against which the collected argument is directed.
2ndly. The word beauty is necessarily attached to Indian as designative of sex: "an Indian," unqualified by any other distinction, would imply a male; but an "Indian beauty" is at once understood to be a female.
3rdly. The repetition, or rather the opposition, of "beauteous" and "beauty," cannot seriously be objected to by any one conversant with the phraseology of Shakspeare. Were it at all necessary, many similar examples might be cited. How the anonymous annotator, already quoted, could say that the sentence, as it stands in the folio, "by no means serves to illustrate Bassanio's reflexion," I cannot conceive. "The beauteous scarf" is the deceptive ornament which leads to the expectation of something beneath it better than an Indian beauty! Indian is used adjectively, in the sense of wild, savage, hideous—just as we, at the present day, might say a Hottentot beauty; or as Shakspeare himself in other places uses the word "Ethiop:"
"Thou for whom Jove would swear
"Her mother was her painting."
—Cymbeline, Act III. Sc. 4.—I have read Mr. Halliwell's pamphlet upon this expression, noticed in "N. & Q." of the 10th of April (p. 358.) I would beg to suggest to that gentleman that he has overlooked one text in Shakspeare that would tell more for his argument than the whole of those he has cited. All his examples are drawn from the word father, metaphorically applied in the sense of creator to inanimate objects; and the same sense he extends, by analogy, to mother. But in the following lines from As You Like It (Act III. Sc. 5.), mother is directly used as a sort of warranty of female beauty! Rosalind is reproving Phebe for her contempt of her lover, and in derision of her beauty, she asks:
"Who might be your mother?
That you insult, exult, and all at once,
Over the wretched?"
Now if Phebe had been one who smothered her in painting, an appropriate answer to Rosalind's question might have been—her mother was her painting!
Most certainly, this latter phrase is the more graceful mode of expressing the idea—far more in unison with the language one would expect from the refined, the delicate, the bewitching Imogen—from her who wished to set "that parting kiss betwixt two charming words."
A. E. B.
Leeds.