Act II Sc. 1
“And now you are so metamorphosed with a mistress.”
A just and necessary addition of Collier’s folio.
“And you, being in love, cannot see to put on your hose.”
For ‘hose,’ apparently suggested by what went before, I should incline to read, with the Cambridge editors, shoes; or clothes might be better.
“Nay, take them again—Madam, they are for you.”
Sc. 3
“Oh, that she could speak now like a wood woman!”
For ‘she’ Blackstone proposed shoe; better the shoe, as I have given it.
Sc. 4
“Come, go with me. Once more, new servant, welcome.”
“She is alone.—Then let her be alone.”
“So the remembrance of my former love
Is, by a newer object, quite forgotten.”
It seems to me that the best way to give sense to this passage is to take ‘by’ in the sense of beside, near. See Index s. v.
“It is mine or Valentine’s praise?”
So it stands in the original. It need hardly be observed that the two first words must be transposed. It is also plain to me that a substantive has been lost after ‘mine,’ and none seems so likely to be the right word as eye, the conjecture of Warburton, and which seems to be omitted in the same manner in the last line of Son. cxiii.
“As love is full of unbefitting strains
* * * * *
Form’d by the eye, and therefore like the eye.”
L. L. L. v. 2.
“I know there is no beauty,
Till our eyes give it ’em, and make ’em handsome.”
Fletch. Maid in Mill, i. 2.
See also his Love’s Pilgrimage, ii. 3. Steevens and others read ‘her mine,’ taking the latter as mien, a term not Shakespearian. (See on Mer. Wives, i. 3.) As there is still a syllable wanting, I would read ‘Valentinès,’ a mode of forming the genitive not unusual in our author’s early plays.
Sc. 5
“Launee, by mine honesty, welcome to Padua.”
That ‘Padua’ was the poet’s word is proved by the metre, and the editors had no right to change it to Milan. ‘By mine honesty’ occurs in exactly the same manner in the play of Damon and Pitheas, with which Shakespeare was familiar.
“If thou wilt go with me to the ale-house, so; if not.”
The 2nd folio added so, which is required both by sense and metre.
Sc. 7
“And instances of infinite of love.”
The 2nd folio reads ‘as infinite,’ which may be right, but ‘infinite’ seems to be made a substantive here.