Cant. ... Also king Lewis the tenth.
Shakspeare having here adopted Holinshed's error in substituting Lewis the Tenth for Lewis the Ninth, Mr. Malone has faithfully discharged his editorial duty in permitting it to remain. It was sufficient to point out the mistake in a note; and therefore Mr. Ritson's genealogy, designed to vindicate the text, but manifestly erroneous, should be omitted.
Scene 2. Page 291.
Cant. They have a king, and officers of sorts.
Sorts, if the true reading, rather means portions or companies, than of different kinds, according to Mr. Steevens; and such is the sense of the word in Mr. Reed's quotation, "drummes and sortes of musicke," though adduced in support of Mr. Steevens. In that much disputed verse 13 of the 68th psalm, the Greek word cleros, very strangely introduced into the Vulgate translation, is rendered by Wicliffe sortis; and in another old translation, lottes.
Scene 2. Page 295.
K. Hen. ... or else our grave
Like Turkish mute, shall have a tongueless mouth,
Not worship'd with a waxen epitaph.
The question is whether paper, the reading of the quarto, or waxen of the folio, should be adopted. Mr. Malone very justly remarks that the passage has been misunderstood, and, not finding any construction of waxen that agrees with the sense required, seems disposed to give the preference to paper of which epithet he has offered a very ingenious explanation. The alteration in the folio was doubtless occasioned by some dissatisfaction with the former word, and made with a view to improvement: but no satisfactory meaning can be gathered from the term waxen, as connected with the noun wax; and the passages adduced by Mr. Steevens afford a sense entirely opposite to what is required. It seems to have been forgotten that waxen is the participle to wax, to grow, to increase, to expand. Thus in Hamlet, Act I. Scene 3, we have,
"... but as this temple waxes,
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withall——"
In A Mids. N. Dream, Act II. Scene 1,