We may remark that the expression, "O, how the wheel becomes it!" is meant to imply the popularity of the song, that
"The spinsters and the knitters in the sun
Do use to chaunt it,"
a custom which, as exercised in the winter, is beautifully exemplified by Mr. Malone, in a passage from Sir Thomas Overbury's characters, 1614:—"She makes her hands hard with labour, and her head soft with pittie; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheele, she sings a defiance to the giddy wheele of fortune."[591:C]
In the church-yard scene of this play, one of the grave-diggers, after amusing himself and his companion by queries, which, as Mr. Steevens observes, "perhaps composed the chief festivity of our ancestors by an evening fire[591:D];" sings three stanzas, though somewhat corrupted either by design or accident, of "A dyttie or sonet made by the lord Vaus, in the time of the noble quene Marye, representing the image of death."[591:E] This poem was originally published in Tottel's edition of Surrey and Wyat, and the Poems of Uncertain Authors; the earliest poetical miscellany in our language, and first printed in 1557 under the title of "Songes and sonettes by the right honourable Henry Howard, late earl of Surrey, and other." To this very popular collection, which underwent many editions during the sixteenth
century[592:A], Slender alludes, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, where he exclaims, "I had rather than forty shillings, I had my book of Songs and Sonnets here[592:B];" from which we may conclude that this was the fashionable manual for lovers in the age of Elizabeth. Lord Vaux's lines have been reprinted by Dr. Percy, who remarks on the apparent corruptions of Shakspeare's transcript, that they were "perhaps so designed by the poet himself, the better to suit the character of an illiterate clown."[592:C]
No fragment of our minstrel poetry has been introduced by Shakspeare with greater beauty and effect, than the melancholy ditty which he represents Desdemona as singing, under a presentiment of her approaching fate:
"Des. My mother had a maid call'd—Barbara;
She was in love; and he, she lov'd, prov'd mad,
And did forsake her: she had a song of—willow,