Act V Sc. 2
“But I am now, sir, muddied in Fortune’s mood.”
Warburton’s conjecture of moat for ‘mood’ is very specious, but, I fear, nothing more. ‘Muddied’ and ‘mood’ form what is termed a paronomasia.
“I do pity his distress in my smiles of comfort.”
The Cambridge editors adopt Warburton’s reading similes. I doubt if either was the poet’s word.
“You beg more than one word then.”
It was the 3rd folio that supplied one.
Sc. 3
“Natural rebellion done in the blade of youth,
When oil and fire,” etc.
The context would suggest blaze to any one, as it did to Theobald.
“The nature of his great offence is dead.”
He means Helena, but I do not see how ‘nature’ applies to her. Perhaps we should read motive; or some other word.
“I am not a day of season.”
Something seems evidently lost here; for the address to Bertram is too abrupt. I would read ‘seasonable weather.’ We have, ‘Like an unseasonable stormy day (Rich. II. iii. 2); and there was in the Liturgy, at that time, “a prayer for seasonable weather.” The phrase ‘day of season,’ I believe, occurs nowhere else. Lower down—probably in the same page of the MS.—there appears to be an effacement of the same kind, and the loss of an entire line.
“The daughter of this lord.—
Admiringly, my liege. At first * * * sight of her. (?)
I stuck my choice upon her. Ere my heart
Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue,
Where the impression of mine eye infixing,” etc.
Is it not amazing that no one seems ever to have perceived that a line must have been lost between the last two lines? It may have been of this kind, “Another object met my wandering fancy.” Capell, I find, read ‘At the first sight.’
“The last that ere I took her leave at court.”
I read ‘last time’ and e’er for ’ere.’ Rowe read e’er she; but the text is right.
“And that even here thou takest
As from my death-bed, my last living leave.”
—Rich. II. 5.
“He needs not our mistrust.”—Macb. iii. 3.
“I bade her if her fortunes ever stood,” etc.
The proper word would seem to be told, not ‘bade’; but bid was used in the sense of tell or say, as in “bid farewell,” etc.
“And bade me if I had a friend that lov’d her;
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her.”
—Othel. i. 3.
“Now I, to comfort him, bid him ’a should not think of God.”—Hen. V. ii. 3.
“I stood ingaged.”
As ‘ingaged’ is usually the same as engaged, a sense which would be absurd here, we might venture to read ‘ungaged,’ or ‘uningaged. (See on Com. of Err. ii. 2.)
“I’ll buy me a son-in-law in a fair, and toll him.”
So Steevens also reads.
“I wonder, sir, sir wives are monsters to you.”
The second ‘sir’ is an evident error. The 2nd folio omits it, and reads ‘are such.’ I read, as Tyrwhitt had done, since.
“Come hither, Count. Do you know these women here”?
“Than in my thought it lies now.—Good, my lord.”
“He blushes, and ’tis hit.”
For ‘hit,’ which is probably wrong, Capell read it; Pope, who is generally followed, his. It is very hard to choose; as each makes good sense, each is a natural printer’s error.
“Her insuit coming with her modern grace.”
I accept without hesitation the excellent correction of Collier’s folio, and of Sidney Walker, infinite cunning. In Tr. and Cr. iii. 2, we read ‘coming in dumbness,’ where Pope made the proper correction cunning.
“You, that have turned off a first so noble wife,
May justly diet me.”
As I can make little sense of ‘diet,’ I read deny.
“Do you not know he promised me marriage?”
The negative is required for both sense and metre.