“who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.”
In “Taming of the Shrew” (Induction, sc. i.), the Lord says:
“haply my presence
May well abate the over-merry spleen,
Which otherwise would grow into extremes.”
And Maria says to Sir Toby, in “Twelfth Night” (iii. 2): “If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me.”
Wits. With our early writers, the five senses were usually called the “five wits.” So, in “Much Ado About Nothing” (i. 1), Beatrice says: “In our last conflict four of his five wits went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one.” In Sonnet cxli., Shakespeare makes a distinction between wits and senses:
“But my five wits, nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.”
The five wits, says Staunton, are “common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, memory.” Johnson says, the “wits seem to have been reckoned five, by analogy to the five senses, or the five inlets of ideas.” In “King Lear” (iii. 4) we find the expression, “Bless thy five wits.”
According to a curious fancy, eating beef was supposed to impair the intellect, to which notion Shakespeare has several allusions. Thus, in “Twelfth Night” (i. 3), Sir Andrew says: “Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian, or an ordinary man has: but I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit.” In “Troilus and Cressida” (ii. 1), Thersites says to Ajax: “The plague of Greece upon thee, thou mongrel beef-witted lord!”
FOOTNOTES:
[898] See Bucknill’s “Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare,” p. 120.