[I, i, 55–6]. Your sable habit, with the hat and cloak ... haue power—the details of hat, cloak, and ribbons, interposed between subject and verb, have attracted the latter into the plural, to the violation of its agreement with its substantive.
[I, i, 70]. in that—i. e., in the fact that justice had no such guards.
[I, i, 73–7]. For the allusion to Cerberus and the sops, cf. Virgil’s picture of Aeneas’ journey to Hades (Aeneid, VI, 417–425): “Huge Cerberus makes these realms to resound with barking from his tripple jaws, stretched at his enormous length in a den that fronts the gate. To whom the prophetess, seeing his neck now bristle with horrid snakes, flings a soporific cake of honey and medicated grain. He, in the mad rage of hunger, opening his three mouths, snatches the offered morsel, and, spread on the ground, relaxes his monstrous limbs, and is extended at vast length over all the cave. Aeneas, now that the keeper [of Hell] is buried [in sleep], seizes the passage and swift overpasses the bank of that flood whence there is no return.”—Davidson’s trans.
[I, i, 75]. fertyle headed—many headed, fertyle is used in the now obsolete sense of abundant.
[I, i, 92]. such, whose—for the construction, cf. Shakespeare: “Such I will have, whom I am sure he knows not from the enemy.”—All’s Well, III, iv, 24.
[I, i, 99]. men religious—the adjective is regularly placed after its noun in Eliz. Eng. when the substantive is unemphatic and the modifier not a mere epithet, but essential to the sense. See Abbott, S. G. § 419.
[I, i, 137–8].—The thought of these lines is undeveloped, the phrasing being broken and disconnected. It is a scornful observation on the part of Romont that whether or not Novall takes papers depends on how the matter is brought before him—and he is about to add that there is a way in which Charalois can manage to gain his point, when he breaks off with the cry, “Follow him!” Conuayance = contrivance.
[I, i, 164]. parchment toils—snares in the shape of documents upon parchment, such as bonds, mortgages, etc.
[I, i, 166]. Luxury—used here in the modern sense,—not, as more commonly in Elizabethan times, with the meaning, laciviousness, lust. The thought of the somewhat involved period which ends with this line is, that the creditors prayed only on an occasion when they feared to lose their clutch on some rich spendthrift—on which occasion they would pray to the devil to invent some new and fantastic pleasure which would lure their victim back into the toils.
[I, ii, 11]. Dijon—the scene of the drama,—situated on the western border of the fertile plain of Burgundy, and at the confluence of the Ouche and the Suzon. It was formerly the capital of the province of Burgundy, the dukes of which acquired it early in the eleventh century, and took up their residence there in the thirteenth century. For the decoration of the palace and other monuments built by them, eminent artists were gathered from northern France and Flanders, and during this period the town became one of the great intellectual centers of France. The union of the duchy with the crown in 1477 deprived Dijon of the splendor of the ducal court, but to counterbalance this loss it was made the capital of the province and the seat of a parlement. To-day it possesses a population of some 65,000, and is a place of considerable importance.