Enemy is here used for the Devil. See before in p. [62], 63.
Scene 4. Page 260.
Isab. ... Sir, believe this,
I had rather give my body than my soul.
It is Isabella's purpose to give an evasive or ambiguous answer to Angelo's strange question, and she accordingly does so. Or, if it have any meaning, it may be "I would even consent to your terms if I could save my soul, or if my soul did not thereby incur perdition."
ACT III.
Scene 1. Page 272.
Duke. ... merely thou art Death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun,
And yet run'st toward him still.
And in Pericles, Act III. Scene 2, "to please the fool and death." One note may serve for both these passages.
Dr. Warburton had conceived an allusion in the first speech to certain characters of death and the fool in the old moralities, in which, most unquestionably, they are not to be found, at least, in any which now remain. It is in this place that the latter part of Mr. Steevens's note on the passage in Pericles should have been introduced, with the following additional circumstances that had probably escaped the learned commentator's recollection; that his informant concerning the skeleton character at the fair remembered also to have seen another personage in the habit of a fool: and that arriving when the performances at the booth were finished for the evening, he could not succeed in procuring a repetition of the piece, losing thereby the means of all further information on the subject. It is therefore probable that the remainder of Dr. Warburton's note is correct, although he may have erred in his designation of this mummery. What connection the subject in question has with the old initial letter of death and the fool, and the dance of death, is shown in a note to Love's labour lost, vol. v. p. 316, and in another on the passage in Pericles, both of which should have been incorporated with the present.
Mr. Ritson, in correcting a remark made by the ingenious continuator of Ben Jonson's Sad shepherd, has inaccurately stated that the figures in the initial letter were "actually copied from the margin of an old missal." The letter that occurs in Stowe's Survey of London, edit. 1618, 4to, is only an enlarged but imperfect copy from another belonging to a regular dance of death used as initials by some of the Basil printers in the sixteenth century, and which, from the extraordinary skill that accompanies their execution, will ever rank amongst the finest efforts in the art of engraving on blocks of wood or metal. Most of the subjects in this dance of death have undoubtedly been supplied by that curious pageant of mortality which, during the middle ages, was so great a favourite as to be perpetually exhibited to the people either in the sculpture and painting of ecclesiastical buildings, or in the books adapted to the service of the church: yet some of them but ill accord with those serious ideas which the nature of the subject is calculated to inspire. In these the artist has indulged a vein of broad and satirical humour which was not wholly reserved for the caricaturists of modern times; and in one or two instances he has even overleaped the bounds of decency. The letter in Stowe's Survey is the only one that appears to have been imitated from the above alphabet; and as it throws some light on that part of the Duke's speech which occasioned the present note, it is here very accurately copied. It is to be remembered that in most of the old dances of death the subject of the fool is introduced: and it is, on the whole, extremely probable that some such representation might have suggested the image before us.