To answer from our home; the several messengers
From hence attend dispatch. Our good old friend,
Lay comforts to your bosom and bestow
Your needful counsel to our businesses,

Which craves the instant use.

Glou.

I serve you, madam.—

Your graces are right welcome.

125

[Flourish. Exeunt. 129

SCENE II. Before Gloucester's castle.

Enter KENT and OSWALD, severally.

Osw. Good dawning to thee, friend; art of this house?
Kent. Ay.

124. home] hand Q,

126-128. Lay...use.] Two lines, the first ending counsell, Qq.

127. businesses] Ff+, Ec. Knt, Del. Dyce i, Sch. businesse Qq et cet.

128. craves] crave Rowe +, Ec. Knt, Del. Dyce i.

[Exeunt. Q. Exit. Q2 128, 129. I serve...welcome.] One line, Qq.

129. [Flourish. Exeunt.] Exeunt. Flourish. F,. Exeunt. F,F,F. Om. Qq. SCENE II.] Scena Secunda Ff (Scæna

F). SCENE V. Pope+, Jen. The Scene continued by Rowe, Theob. SCENE III. Ec.

Before...] Before the Castle. Cap. Enter......] Coll. Enter Kent, and Steward feverally. Ff, Sch. Enter Kent, and Steward. Qq.

1, 3, &c. Osw.] Coll. Steward. or Stew. QqFf, Sch.

1. dawning] euen Qq, Cap. Jen. Ec. evening Pope, Theob.

this] the Qq, Cap. Jen. Mal. Steev. Bos. Sing. Ktly.

to stand for thought fit than for thought it fit.' [The space is suspiciously large between though' and 'it,' and looks to me as though a letter had dropped out. The presence or absence of 'it' need not affect the scansion.-ED.]

124. from our home] JOHNSON: Not at home, but at some other place. [Compare From thence,' Macb. III, iv, 36, or see ABBOTT, § 41. This meaning the phrase does not bear if WRIGHT's reading of least from Q, be adopted.—ED.]

124. messengers] WALKER (Vers. 200): This is frequently a quasi-dissyllable. See also ABBOTT, § 468.

127. businesses] If business of the Q be adopted, it must be pronounced as a trisyllable, for which authority will be found in WALKER (Vers. 171) or ABBOTT, 8479.

1. dawning] WARBURTON: The time is apparently night. We should read, 'Good downing, i. e. good rest, the common evening salutation of that time. CAPELL: And here [line 28] we see the time of this scene-that 'tis night; but late in it, and drawing towards morning. MASON: Lines 129 and 130 of this scene show that the time was very early in the morning. MALONE: It is clear that the morning is just beginning to dawn, though the moon is still up, and though Kent,

Osw. Where may we set our horses?

Kent. I' th' mire.

3

5

Osw. Prithee, if thou lovest me, tell me.
Kent. I love thee not.

Osw. Why then I care not for thee.

Kent. If I had thee in Lipsbury pinfold, I would make thee care for me.

Osw. Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not.
Kent. Fellow, I know thee.

Kent. A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats;

4. I' th']. Ith Q. Ith FFF In the Q2

5. Prithee] Prythee F.FF. Prethee QqF2

lovest] lovft Ff. loue Qq, Cap. Steev. Mal. Ec. Bos. Coll.

ΙΟ

8. Lipsbury] Lipfburie Q. Ledbury Jen. conj. Finsbury Coll. iii (MS). I would] Corrected to I'd by Cap. (Notes, i, 230.)

9. [Striking him. Coll. iii.

early in the scene, calls it still night. Towards the close of it he wishes Gloucester good morrow, and immediately after calls on the sun to shine that he may read a letter. DELIUS: It is night, and as, in Sh., that time of day which is approaching is given by way of greeting, and not that which is then present, Oswald wishes Kent, whom he does not recognize in the dark, a good dawning.

5. if thou lovest me] DELIUS: A conventional phrase before a question or request, but which Kent here takes literally.

8. Lipsbury pinfold] What CAPELL said a hundred years ago is still true: 'It is not come to knowledge, where that Lipsbury is,' but what he adds is questionable: This we may know, and with certainty, that it was some village or other, fam'd for boxing; that the boxers fought in a ring or enclos'd circle, and that this ring was call'd" Lipsbury pinfold."' FARMER suggests that it may be a cant phrase with some corruption, taken from a place where the fines were arbitrary. STEEVENS surmised that it might import the same as Lob's Pound; with which it seems to have no more connection than that 'pinfold' means Pound' and 'Lob' and Lipsbury' begin with the same letter. Lob's Pound,' as is well known, means a place of confinement, whether a prison or the stocks. NARES's guess is perhaps as happy as any: It may be,' he says, 'a coined name, and it is just possible that it might mean the teeth, as being the pinfold within the lips.' COLLIER'S MS gives Finsbury, where, says that editor, there must have been a pinfold, well known to Shakespeare's audiences; and this word, through mishearing or misprinting, was corrupted to Lipsbury.' HALLIWELL simply cites Nares; and DYCE says merely: A pinfold is a pound; but what the commentators have written about the name Lipsbury is too unsatisfactory to be cited.' WRIGHT thinks Nares's explanation the most probable which has yet been given, and adds: Similar names of places, which may or may not have any local existence, occur in proverbial phrases, such, for instance, as 'Needham's Shore,' Weeping Cross.'

a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred

14. three-suited thread-suited Anon.* three-suited, hundred-pound]

three fhewted hundred pound Qq. three

14

14. three-suited] FARMER: This should be third-suited, wearing clothes at third hand. STEEVENS: This might mean, one who had no greater change of raiment than three suits would furnish him with. So in Jonson's Silent Woman [IV, ii, p. 447, ed. Gifford]: thou wert a pitiful poor fellow,. . . and hadst nothing but three suits of apparel;' or it may signify a fellow thrice-sued at law, who has three suits for debt standing out against him. DELIUS: This cannot refer to his poverty, but, rather, like glass-gazing,' signifies foppishness, changing his suits that many times, or else wearing them all at the same time. When Edgar describes his former wealthy state, he says of himself [III, iv, 129], 'who hath had three suits to his back.' WRIGHT: If the terms of agreement between master and servant in Shakespeare's time were known, they would probably throw light upon the phrase. It is probable that three suits of clothes a year were part of a servant's allowance. In Jonson's Silent Woman, III, i, Mrs Otter, scolding her husband, whom she treats as a dependant, says, Who gives you your maintenance, I pray you? Who allows you your horse-meat and man's-meat, your three suits of apparel a year? your four pair of stockings, one silk, three worsted?' [According to the CAMBRIDGE EDITORS, 'Q, Bodl. 1,' has the misprint snyted, which is corrected in the other Qq to shewted. From this circumstance, WRIGHT inferred not only that the enumeration of the Qq in the Cam. ed. was wrong, and that what he and his fellow-editor had there called Q2 was in reality the earliest impression of all, but that suit' in Shakespeare's day was pronounced shoot. He supposes that while the edition was in course of printing the error, snyted, was discovered, and the correction communicated verbally to the compositor, who inserted it according to his own notions of spelling.'-Ellis's E. E. Pronunciation, p. 217. This hypothesis (which is certainly as old as Steevens), in regard to the pronunciation of suit, Wright thinks is strengthened by the puns on suitor and shooter in Love's Lab. Lost, IV, i, 109, &c., and also in Rowley's Match in the Dark (1633), II, i; but ELLIS (p. 217) doubts whether these instances are enough to decide the point with certainty. Hurried corrections, whether of print or manuscript, frequently introduce additional errors, and hence there is no guarantee that the compositor who substituted shewted for snyted did not himself put shewted when he meant to have inserted sewted,' 'which would be a legitimate orthography for suited. In the present day we have a joke of an Irish shopman telling his customer to shoot himself, meaning suit himself. The Irish pronunciation, however, only shows an English pronunciation of the XVIIth century. In England at the present day, shoot for suit would be vulgar, but the joke would be readily understood, though few persons use, or have even heard, the pronunciation. Might not this have been the case in Shakespeare's time? At any rate, there is no authority for supposing that such a pronunciation could have been used seriously by Sh. himself. In his essay on English Pronunciation in the Elizabethan Era (Sh. Works, xii, p. 430), WHITE says: 'S before a vowel had often the sound of sh, as it now has in sugar and sure. Such was its sound in sue, suit, and its compounds, and I believe in super and its compounds, and in supine and supreme. . . . S was also sometimes aspirated before o and i; of which, and of the o sound of ew, see phonographic evidence in the pronunciation of sewer,

0

pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action- 15 taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son

which was pronounced shore in the Elizabethan era, and thence down to the beginning of the present century. . . . Hence, too, shekels was spelled sickels. Both spellings expressed the same sound.']

14. hundred-pound] STEEVENS: A term of reproach; see Middleton's Phanix [IV, iii, p. 393, ed. Dyce]: How's this? am I used like a hundred-pound gentleman?' DELIUS suggests that it may mean one who weighs only a hundred pounds, and is therefore tolerably light; but the quotation from Middleton, cited also by Delius, seems conclusive.

15. worsted-stocking] STEEVENS: The stockings in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth were remarkably expensive, and scarce any other kind than silk were worn, even, as says Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses [p. 57, ed. Furnivall], by those who had not above forty shillings a year wages. So in Tailor's The Hog hath Lost his Pearl [I. i]: 'Good parts, without habiliments of gallantry, are no more set by in these times than a good leg in a woollen stocking.' Again in Beau. and Fl.'s The Captain [III, iii]: serving-men with woollen stockings.' MALONE: See also Middleton's Phanix [IV, ii, p. 389, ed. Dyce]: Metreza Auriola keeps her love with half the cost I am at: her friend can go a' foot like a good husband, walk in worsted stockings, and inquire for the six-penny ordinary.'

15. lily-livered] See Macb. V, iii, 15. WRIGHT: Compare 2 Hen. IV: IV, iii, III: The second property of your excellent sherris is, the warming of the blood; which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice.'

15. action-taking] MASON: A fellow who, if you beat him, would bring an action for the assault, instead of resenting it like a man of courage.

16. glass-gazing] ECCLES: One who wastes his time in gazing at his own person in a looking-glass.

16. superserviceable] JOHNSON: Over-officious. WRIGHT: It must also signify one who was above his work. See Oswald's character as drawn by Edgar, IV, vi, 251.

17. one-trunk-inheriting] JOHNSON, supposing that trunk' here refers to trunk-hose, explains this as a 'wearer of old cast-off clothes, an inheritor of torn breeches.' STEEVENS defines it as a fellow the whole of whose possessions are confined to one coffer, and that too inherited from his father. SCHMIDT sustains Steevens's definition, but qualifies it by showing that inherit' also means simple possession, as in IV, vi, 125: But to the girdle do the gods inherit.'

and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into 20 clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

Osw. Why, what a monstrous fellow art thou, thus to rail on one that is neither known of thee nor knows thee!

Kent. What a brazen-faced varlet art thou, to deny 25 thou knowest me! Is it two days since I tripped up thy heels and beat thee before the king? Draw, you rogue! for, though it be night, yet the moon shines; I'll make a sop o' th' moonshine of you, you whoreson cullionly barber-monger, draw.

20. one] Om. Qg.

Bos. Sing. Ktly.

denie Q

21. clamorous] clamours FF, Rowe. deniest] denyft Ff.

30

29. sop] fop Theob. conj. (withdrawn).

o' th'] oth' FF, of the Qq. of you] a' you Qq.

you whoreson] Ff+, Knt, Sch.

draw, you whorfon Qq et cet.

cullionly] cullyonly Qq. Cullyenly FF, cully only Q, Culleinly FF, Rowe, Pope.

Qq.

barber-] Barbar- FFF ̧. 30. [Drawing his sword. Rowe. barber-monger] barber-munger

22. addition] Title; see Macb. I, iii, 106; Ham. I, iv, 20; II, i, 47. 29. sop o' th' moonshine] CAPELL: A ludicrous phrase, importing that he would lay [Oswald] upon his back on the earth, like a 'sop' in a dripping-pan, for the moonbeams to baste him. FARMER: Perhaps here an equivoque was intended. In The Old Shepherd's Kalendar, among the dishes recommended for Prymetyne, 'One is egges in moneshine.' NARES: This probably alludes to some dish so called. There was a way of dressing eggs, called eggs in moonshine.' [Nares here gives a receipt from May's Accompl. Cook, p. 437, to which I refer the enthusiastic student. It is sufficient to say that the eggs are fried in oyl or butter,' covered with slices of onions and seasoned with verjuice, nutmeg and salt; to be eaten with what appetite you may. A simpler receipt is given in N. & Qu. 4th S., xii, 19 July, 1873; and, in the same volume, on p. 84, ROYLE ENTWISLE says that Nares's explanation is 'as constrained and shallow as his resort to a cookery-book''is ridiculous and unnecessary; and it was evidently arrived at without a thought being expended on Shakespeare's ideal knowledge of the orb of night, as revealed in his other allusions to it, notably in Macb. III, v, 23, 24.' Plainly, Kent's intention is to make a "sop" of him in the sense of steeping him, in his own blood, by the consenting light of the moon.']

4

29. cullionly] WRIGHT: Florio gives, Coglione, a cuglion, a gull, a meacocke;' and in his Worlde of Wordes, Coglione, a noddie, a foole, a patch, a dolt, a meacock.' 30. barber-monger] FARMER: This may mean a dealer in the lower tradesmen;