Lucio. Your brother and his lover.
This term was applied to the female sex not only in Shakspeare's time, but even to a very late period. Lady Wortley Montagu in a letter to her husband, speaking of a young girl who forbade the bans of marriage at Huntingdon, calls her lover. See her works, vol. i. p. 238.
ACT II.
Scene 1. Page 216.
Escal. Let us be keen, and rather cut a little
Than fall and bruise to death.
On the very plausible authority of a passage in As you like it, where the executioner is said to "fall his axe," the present metaphor has been supposed to refer also to the punishment of decapitation. If it be so, there is a manifest impropriety in the expression "cut a little," as we are not to imagine that Escalus would intend to chop off a criminal's hand, or to deprive him of his ears; both modes of punishment, which though frequently practised in the reign of Elizabeth, seem exclusively adapted to a community of barbarians. May not the metaphor be rather borrowed from the cutting down of timber, and Escalus mean to say, "Is it not better to lop off a few branches, than to fall the whole tree?"
Scene 1. Page 217.
Ang. The jury, passing on the prisoner's life
May, in the sworn twelve, have a thief or two, &c.
We have here one of Shakspeare's trips; an English jury in a German court of justice.
Scene 1. Page 223.