ACT III. SCENE I. A Room in the Prison. Enter Duke, CLAUDIO, and Provost. DUKE. So, then you hope of pardon from lord CLAUD. The miserable have no other medicine, But only hope: I have hope to live, and am prepar❜d to die. DUKE. Be absolute for death;* either death, or life, Shall thereby be the sweeter. life, Reason thus with If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, * Be absolute for death:] Be determined to die, without any hope of life. Horace, "The hour which exceeds expectation will be welcome.” JOHNSON. 5 That none but fools would keep :] But this reading is not only contrary to all sense and reason, but to the drift of this moral discourse. The Duke, in his assumed character of a friar, is endeavouring to instil into the condemned prisoner a resignation of mind to his sentence; but the sense of the lines in this reading, is a direct persuasive to suicide: I make no doubt, but the poet wrote That none but fools would reck: i. e. care for, be anxious about, regret the loss of. So, in the tragedy of Tancred and Gismund, Act IV. sc. iii: Not that she recks this life." 64 And Shakspeare, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Recking as little what betideth me." WARBURTON, 6 (Servile to all the skiey influences,) That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, And yet run'st toward him still: Thou art not noble ; The meaning seems plainly this, that none but fools would wish to keep life; or, none but fools would keep it, if choice were allowed. A sense which, whether true or not, is certainly innocent. JOHNSON. Keep, in this place, I believe, may not signify preserve, but care for. "No lenger for to liven I ne kepe," says Æneas, in Chaucer's Dido, Queen of Carthage; and elsewhere: "That I kepe not rehearsed be;" i. e. which I care not to have rehearsed. Again, in The Knightes Tale, Tyrwhitt's edit. ver. 2240: "I kepe nought of armes for to yelpe." Again, in Amery Jeste of a Man called Howleglass, bl. 1. no date: "Then the parson bad him remember that he had a soule for to kepe, and he preached and teached to him the use of confession," &c. Again, in Ben Jonson's Volpone: "Faith I could stifle him rarely with a pillow, "As well as any woman that should keep him.” i. e. have the care of him. STEEVENS. Mr. Steevens's explanation is confirmed by a passage in The Dutchess of Malfy, by Webster, (1623,) an author who has frequently imitated Shakspeare, and who perhaps followed him in the present instance: "Of what is't fools make such vain keeping? "Their death a hideous storm of terror." See the Glossary to Mr. Tyrwhitt's edit. of The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, v. kepe. MALONE. • That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st;] Sir T. Hanmer changed dost to do, without necessity or authority. The construction is not," the skiey influences that do," but, a breath thou art, that dost," &c. If "Servile to all the skiey influences," be inclosed in a parenthesis, all the difficulty will vanish. 7 merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun, PORSON. And yet run'st toward him still:] In those old farces called For all the accommodations that thou bear'st, Are nurs'd by baseness: Thou art by no means valiant; Moralities, the fool of the piece, in order to show the inevitable approaches of death, is made to employ all his stratagems to avoid him; which, as the matter is ordered, bring the fool, at every turn, into his very jaws. So that the representations of these scenes would afford a great deal of good mirth and morals mixed together. And from such circumstances, in the genius of our ancestors' publick diversions, I suppose it was, that the old proverb arose, of being merry and wise. WARBurton. Such another expression as death's fool, occurs in The Honest Lawyer, a comedy, by S. S. 1616: "Wilt thou be a fool of fate? who can STEevens. It is observed by the editor of The Sad Shepherd, 8vo. 1783, p. 154, that the initial letter of Stow's Survey, contains a representation of a struggle between Death and the Fool; the figures of which were most probably copied from those characters as formerly exhibited on the stage. REED. There are no such characters as Death and the Fool, in any old Morality now extant. They seem to have existed only in the dumb Shows. The two figures in the initial letter of Stow's Survey, 1603, which have been mistaken for these two personages, have no allusion whatever to the stage, being merely one of the set known by the name of Death's Dance, and actually copied from the margin of an old Missal. The scene in the modern pantomime of Harlequin Skeleton, seems to have been suggested by some playhouse tradition of Death and the Fool. RITSON. See Pericles, Act III. sc. ii. STEEVENS. Are nurs'd by baseness:] Dr. Warburton is undoubtedly mistaken in supposing that by baseness is meant self-love, here assigned as the motive of all human actions. Shakspeare only meant to observe, that a minute analysis of life at once destroys that splendour which dazzles the imagination. Whatever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by baseness, by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill, all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornament dug from among the damps and darkness of the mine. JOHNSON. . For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork This is a thought which Shakspeare delights to express. Again: 9 66 our dungy earth alike "Feeds man as beast.' "Which sleeps, and never palates more the dung, the soft and tender fork STEEVENS. Of a poor worm:] Worm is put for any creeping thing or serpent. Shakspeare supposes falsely, but according to the vulgar notion, that a serpent wounds with his tongue, and that his tongue is forked. He confounds reality and fiction; a serpent's tongue is soft, but not forked nor hurtful. If it could hurt, it could not be soft. In A Midsummer-Night's Dream he has the same notion: "With doubler tongue "Than thine, O serpent, never adder stung." JOHNSON. Shakspeare mentions the "adders fork" in Macbeth; and might have caught this idea from old tapestries or paintings, in which the tongues of serpents and dragons always appear barbed like the point of an arrow. STEEVENS. 1 Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more.] Evidently from the following passage of Cicero: "Habes somnum imaginem mortis, eamque quotidie induis, & dubitas quin sensus in morte nullus sit, cum in ejus simulacro videas esse nullum sensum.' But the Epicurean insinuation is, with great judgment, omitted in the imitation. WARBURTON. Here Dr. Warburton might have found a sentiment worthy of his animadversion. I cannot without indignation find Shakspeare saying, that death is only sleep, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the Friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet trite and vulgar. JOHNSON. This was an oversight in Shakspeare; for in the second scene For thou exist❜st on many a thousand grains tain; For thy complexion shifts to strange effects,3 of the fourth Act, the Provost speaks of the desperate Barnardine, as one who regards death only as a drunken sleep. STEEVENS. I apprehend Shakspeare means to say no more, than that the passage from this life to another is as easy as sleep; a position in which there is surely neither folly nor impiety. MALONE. 2 Thou art not thyself;] Thou art perpetually repaired and renovated by external assistance, thou subsistest upon foreign matter, and hast no power of producing or continuing thy own being. JOHNSON. 3 strange effects,] For effects read affects; that is, affections, passions of mind, or disorders of body variously affected. So, in Othello: "The young affects." JOHNSON. When I consider the influence of the moon on the human mind, I am inclined to read with Johnson-affects instead of effects. We cannot properly say that the mind "shifts to strange effects." M. MASON. like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,] This simile is far more ancient than Shakspeare's play. It occurs in T. Churchyard's Discourse of Rebellion, &c. 1570: "Rebellion thus, with paynted vizage brave, "Leads out poore soules (that knowes not gold from glas) * "Who beares the packe and burthen like the asse." STEEVENS. serpigo,] The serpigo is a kind of tetter. STEEVENS. |