Note XVII.
V. 3. 3, 4. Mr Staunton prints as follows:
[Reads.] TIMON IS DEAD!—who hath outstretch'd his span,—
Some beast—read this; there does not live a man.
He regards these lines as the only part of the inscription which the soldier could read, the rest being in some different language. But this explanation introduces a fresh difficulty. The difficulty would be lessened by supposing the legible lines to be inscribed not on the tomb but on the rock beside it, and the epitaph proper to be written not in a different language but in a different character: a notion which might be suggested to the author by the Gothic letters commonly found on ancient monuments.
In the Globe edition we adopted the emendation 'rear'd' because, with the change of a single letter, it yields something approaching to a satisfactory sense. But we incline to think that the words were originally intended as an epitaph to be read by the soldier. The author may have changed his mind and forgotten to obliterate what was inconsistent with the sequel, or the text may have been tampered with by some less accomplished playwright. Anyhow the close of the play bears marks of haste, or want of skill, and the clumsy device of the wax cannot have been invented and would scarcely be adopted by Shakespeare.
In the epitaph given in the next scene two inconsistent couplets are combined into a quatrain.