Coriolanus
Act I Sc. 1
2 Cit. “Our business is not unknown to the Senate.”
So it stands in the folio here and in the subsequent speeches; but as Malone rightly saw, it should be 1 Cit.
“But, since it serves my purpose, I will venture
To scale it a little more.”
All attempts to make sense of ‘scale’ having been most complete failures, it only remains to read, with Theobald, stale.
“I’ll not stale the jest
By my relation.”
Massinger, Unnat. Comb. iv. 2.
“Our disgrace with a tale. But an’t please you deliver it.”
“Even to the court of the heart, to the seat of the brain.”
So perhaps it were better to read.
“With every minutes you do change a mind.”
The your, for ‘a,’ of Collier’s folio seems preferable.
“Of their own choice. One’s Junius Brutus, another.”
“The present wars devour him! He is grown
Too proud to be so valiant.”
Such also is the punctuation of Warburton. ‘To be’ to be in being. See Introd. p. 70.
Sc. 2
“What ever have been thought on in this state.”
We should either read hath for ‘have,’ or we for ‘been.’
Sc. 3
“At Grecian sword contenning...”
So the folio reads; an evident misprint for contemning. The aposiopesis removes all need of alteration. The usual reading is contending, that of 2nd folio.
“Catched it again; or whether his fall enraged him.”
The usual substitution of or for and.
Sc. 4
“No, nor a man that fears you less than he,
That’s lesser than a little.”
I read, with Johnson, but for ‘nor.’
“Fool-hardiness! not I.—Nor I.—Nor I.”
“And, when it bows, stands up. Thou art left, Marcius...
A carbuncle entire, as big as thou art,
Were not so rich a jewel.”
A line at least has, I think, been left out after the first; or there may be an aposiopesis.
Sc. 6
“The Roman gods
Lead their successes,” etc.
It is evident from the context that the poet wrote Ye, not ‘The,’ as in Ant. and Cleop. v. 2. They were written alike.
“The mouse ne’er shunn’d the cat as they did budge
From rascals worse than they.”
‘Budge’ in its present sense seems to be a very feeble term; but in Cole’s Dictionary we have “To budge, pedem referre;” and in 3 Hen. VI. i. 4,
“With that we charg’d again; but out, alas!
We bodg’d again.”
There seems to be an allusion to deer in ‘rascals.’ We had the same allusion above in
“Thou rascal, that art worst in blood to run,
Leadest first to win some vantage.”
“And four shall quickly draw out my command
Which men are best inclined.”
I read forth for ‘four’; ‘command’ is the nom. to ‘draw.’
Sc. 7
“Hence, then, and shut your gates upon us.”
Sc. 8
“That was the whip of your bragg’d progeny.”
Here ‘bragg’d’ is, bragged of, that you brag of; ‘progeny’ progenitors, and ‘whip’ the implement with which they scourged their foes. Chaucer (Tr. and Cr. ii.) terms Hector the “Grekis yerd.”
Sc. 9
“When steel grows
Smooth as the parasite’s silk, let him be made
An overture for the wars.”
By ‘him’ in the second line can only be meant the parasite, and what is the meaning of his being an ‘overture for the wars’? I feel convinced that it is a printer’s error for a noun; and I read pipes, which might be thus mistaken. The meaning then would be, when things are so, let pipes and tabors, not trumpets and drums, be used in our armies, grown thus effeminate.
“My throat of war be turn’d,
Which quired with my drum, into a pipe
Small as a eunuch’s,” etc.—iii. 2.
“At a poor man’s house; he used me very kindly.”
Sc. 10
“Where I find him, were it
At home, upon my brother’s guard, even there,
Against the hospitable canon, would I
Wash my fierce hand in his heart.”
With the fullest conviction I read for ‘brother’s guard’ household hearth; for that was the very place where he did find him. “He got him up straight to the chimney hearth, and sate him down” (North’s Plutarch, p. 232). Besides, we never hear that Aufidius had a brother; and it should be under, not upon, the guard; a man is, or stands, on his own not on another’s guard. In Rich. II. iv. 1 we have “under his household roof;” and household hearth occurs in Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming, iii. 17.