FIRST PART OF KING HENRY IV. ACT I. SCENE I. London. A Room in the Palace. Enter KING HENRY, WESTMORELAND, SIR WALTER BLUNT, and Others. King Henry. So shaken as we are, so wan with care, 1 Strands, banks of the sea. 2 Upon this passage the reader is favoured with three pages of notes in the Variorum Shakspeare. Steevens adopted Monk Mason's bold conjectural emendation, and reads— No more the thirsty Erinnys of this soil.' Which, in my opinion, does not make the passage clearer, to say nothing of the improbability of such a corruption as entrance for Erinnys. Mr. Douce proposed to read entrails instead of entrance; and Steevens once thought that we should read entrants. I am satisfied with the following explanation of the text, modified from that of Malone:-' No more shall this soil have the lips of her thirsty entrance (i. e. surface) daubed with the blood of her own chil Which,-like the meteors of a troubled heaven, Shall now, in mutual, well beseeming ranks, (Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross But this our purpose is a twelve-month old, dren.' The soil is personified, and called the mother of those who live upon her surface; as in the following passage of King Richard II.: sweet soil, adieu, My mother and my nurse, that bears me yet.' The thirsty earth was a common epithet in the poet's age. Thus, in his own King Henry VI. Part III. :— Thy brother's blood the thirsty earth hath drunk.' And in the old play of King John: Is all the blood y-spilt on either part, Grown to a love-game, and a bridal feast?' It is true, as Malone remarks, that Shakspeare seldom attends to the integrity of his metaphors; and why therefore should we suspect this passage to be corrupt, because it offers a trifling difficulty of that kind? 3 To levy a power to a place has been shown by Mr. Gifford to be neither unexampled nor corrupt; but good authorized English. Scipio, before he levied his force to the walls of Carthage, gave his soldiers the print of the city on a cake to be devoured.'-Gosson's School of Abuse, 1587, E. 4. And bootless 'tis to tell you-we will go; 5 West. My liege, this haste was hot in question, And many limits of the charge set down But yesternight: when, all athwart, there came A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news; Whose worst was,-that the noble Mortimer, Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight Against the irregular and wild Glendower, Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken, And a thousand of his people butchered: Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse, Such beastly, shameless transformation, By those Welshwomen done, as may not be, Without much shame, re-told or spoken of. K. Hen. It seems then, that the tidings of this broil Brake off our business for the Holy Land. West. This, match'd with other, did, my gracious For more uneven and unwelcome news At Holmedon met, 4 Expedition. 5 Limits here seem to mean appointments or determinations. 6 See Thomas of Walsingham, p. 557, or Holingshed, p. 528. 7 i. e. September 14th. 8 This Harry Percy was surnamed, for his often pricking, Henry Hotspur, as one that seldom times rested, if there were anie service to be done abroad.-Holinshed's Hist. of Scotland, p. 240. 9 Archibald Douglas, Earl Douglas. VOL. V. M Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour; And shape of likelihood, the news was told; K. Hen. Here is a dear and true-industrious friend, Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse, Stain'd 10 with the variation of each soil Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours; Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights, To beaten Douglas 12, and the earls of Athol, 10 No circumstance could have been better chosen to mark the expedition of Sir Walter. It is used by Falstaff in a similar manner, to stand stained with travel,' &c. 11 Balk'd in their own blood is heaped, or laid on heaps, in their own blood. A balk was a ridge or bank of earth standing up between two furrows; and to balk was to throw up the earth so as to form those heaps or banks. It was sometimes used in the sense of monceau, Fr. for a heap or hill. Pope has a similar thought in the Iliad 'On heaps the Greeks, on heaps the Trojans bled, And thickening round them rise the hills of dead.' 12 Mordake earl of Fife, who was son to the duke of Albany, regent of Scotland, is here called the son of Earl Douglas, through a mistake, into which the poet was led by the omission of a comma in the passage from whence he took this account of the Scottish prisoners. 13 This is a mistake of Holinshed in his English History, for in that of Scotland, pp. 259. 262. 419, he speaks of the earl of Fife and Menteith as one and the same person. West. In faith, It is a conquest for a prince to boast of. K. Hen. Yea, there thou mak'st me sad, and mak'st me sin In envy that my lord Northumberland A son, who is the theme of honour's tongue; Of my young Harry. O, that it could be prov'd, West. That is his uncle's teaching, this is Wor- Malevolent to you in all aspects 15; Which makes him prune 16 himself, and bristle up The crest of youth against your dignity. 14 Percy had an exclusive right to these prisoners, except the earl of Fife. By the law of arms, every man who had taken any captive, whose redemption did not exceed ten thousand crowns, had him clearly to himself to acquit or ransom at his pleasure. But Percy could not refuse the earl of Fife to the king; for being a prince of the royal blood (son to the duke of Albany, brother to King Robert III.), Henry might justly claim him, by his acknowledged military prerogative. 15 An astrological allusion, Worcester is represented as a malignant star that influenced the conduct of Hotspur. 16 The metaphor is borrowed from falconry. A hawk is said to prune herself when she picks off the loose feathers and smooths |