There would have been little reason for dissenting from Mr. Henley's ingenious note, in which he supposes that this expression refers to the pillory, but for the subsequent remark by Lucio, "this may prove worse than hanging." It seems therefore more probable that "hang'd an hour" alludes to the time usually allotted for torturing the miserable object of the barbarous punishment by suspension, which is justly execrated by Randle Holme as "a dog's death," and always excites in the spectator a strange mixture of ludicrous and shocking sensations. It dishonours the living more than it degrades the criminal. The Turkish bowstring were much less offensive to the feelings of humanity: but the more solemn and decorous infliction of death, (if inflicted it must be,) would, as in military cases, be the stroke of the bullet, provided such a measure could be adopted without offending the soldier's honour. The pre-eminent mercy of the English law disdains to augment the horrors of premature dissolution by personal pain and torture; its object is to prevent or diminish the commission of the crime. On this principle, one could wish that, on the close of the usual necessary and consolatory preparation for death, some mode of stupefying the offender were adopted; that no sensation of torture on his part might be felt, nor any other on that of the spectator, than a satisfaction that the sentence of the law had been fulfilled. For this digression no apology can be necessary. As to Mr. Daines Barrington's supposition, that "the criminal was suspended in the air by the collistrigium or stretch-neck," a very little reflection will suffice to show that it is founded in error. Such a process would in half an hour's time most effectually prevent a repetition of the ceremony. The collistrigium was so called from the stretching out or projection of the neck through a hole made in the pillory for that purpose, or through an iron collar or carcan that was sometimes attached to the pillar itself. No punishment has been inflicted in so many different ways as that of the pillory; and therefore the following varieties of it have been thought worth exhibiting.
The first is from a manuscript of the Chronicle of Saint Denis, in the British Museum, Bibl. Reg. 16. G. vi. It was written in the thirteenth century. The second occurs in a manuscript of Froissart, preserved in the same collection. The third is copied from a print in Comenius's Orbis pictus, and furnishes a specimen of the carcan, the woman being confined to the pillar by an iron ring or collar. The fourth is from a table of the standard of ancient weights and measures in the exchequer, and shows the mode of punishing a forestaller or regrator in the time of Henry the Seventh. The fifth exhibits Robert Ockam in the pillory for perjury. The fact happened in the reign of Henry the Eighth, but the cut is copied from Fox's Martyrs, published long afterwards. The sixth and last figure represents an ancient pillory that formerly stood in the market-place of the village of Paulmy in Touraine. It is copied from a view of the castle of Paulmy in Belleforest's Cosmographie universelle, 1575, folio. Not long since there was remaining in the Section des halles at Paris an old hexangular building of stone, with open Gothic windows, through which appeared an iron circle or carcan, with holes for placing the hands and necks of several persons at the same time, in like manner as in the first and last figures. There is an engraving of it in Millin's Antiquités nationales, tom. iii. no. 34.
Scene 1. Page 378.
Duke. Being criminal in double violation
Of sacred chastity, and of promise-breach.
Mr. Malone thinks double refers to Angelo's conduct to Mariana and Isabel; but surely, however inaccurate the expression, it alludes to Angelo's double misconduct to Isabella, in having attempted her chastity, and violated his promise with respect to her brother. Thus in Promos and Cassandra:
"Thou wycked man, might it not thee suffice
By worse than force to spoyle her chastitie,
But heaping sinne on sinne against thy othe,
Hast cruelly her brother done to death."
In Cinthio Giraldi's novel, it is "Vous avez commis deux crimes fort grans, l'un d'avoir diffamé cette jeune femme, par telle tromperie que l'on peut dire que vous l'avez forcée: l'autre d'avoir fait mourir son frere contre la foy à elle donnée." Transl. by Chappuys, 1584.