In Promos and Cassandra, Dalia swears by Gys; and in Gammer Gurton's needle and some other old plays, the same expression occurs. Mr. Ridley's conjecture that Jesus is the corrupted word is the true one; but the corruption is not in the way that he has stated. The letters IHS would not be pronounced Gis, even by those who understood them as a Greek contraction.
ACT V.
Scene 1. Page 297.
2 Clo. ... therefore make her grave straight.
Dr. Johnson thought this meant "From East to West, in a direct line parallel to the church; not from North to South, athwart the regular line." The frequency of the above mode of expression in Shakspeare's plays sufficiently indicates that if he had alluded to the mode of burial contended for by Dr. Johnson, he would have adopted some other. It has occurred upwards of a hundred times already in the sense of immediately. Nor would it be easy to show that to make a grave straight, or in a direct line, was to make it East and West; or that it was the designation of Christian burial. The first clown rather adverts to the place where the grave should be made than to its form. Suicides were buried on the North side of the church, in ground purposely unconsecrated.
Much of this scene has been imitated in the Valiant Welshman, by R. A. [q. Robert Armin] 1663. See Act IV.
Scene 1. Page 299.
2. Clo. If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been bury'd out of Christian burial.
We have here a manifest satire on the partial verdicts of coroners' juries, where the suicide has been above the common condition of life. Judge Blackstone has hinted at them in his Commentaries. Nothing, however, but the partiality is reprehensible; the rest is an amiable tenderness towards the living, calculated to resist a law that justly deserves to be abhorred for a savage and impotent revenge so far as it regards the dead.
Scene 1. Page 299.