"LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST (Act II. Scene 1.).
"It is odd that Shakspeare should make Dumain inquire after Rosaline, who was the mistress of Biron, and neglect Katharine, who was his own. Biron behaves in the same manner.—Perhaps all the ladies wore masks.—Steevens.
"They certainly did."—Malone.
"And what if they did?"—Query.
In what possible way can the circumstance of the ladies wearing masks lessen the inconsistency pointed out by Steevens?
Rosaline has been immediately singled out by her former admirer—
"Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?"
—a circumstance quite inconsistent with uncertain identity afterwards.
But if the gentlemen really did mistake the identity of their ladies, Boyet's answers must have misled them into a similar mistake in their names: so that the natural consequence would have been, that each lover would afterwards address his
poetical effusion nominally to the wrong lady! which does not appear to have been the case.
Therefore, even if the masking be admitted, it can in no way lessen the inconsistency of the cross questions, which to me appears to have arisen from a most palpable instance of clerical or typographical transposition.
Steevens was on the right scent, although he rejected it in the same breath, when he said,—