The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [2405]
II.ii.91 (136,1) [your child that shall be] The distinction between boy and son is obvious, but child seems to have some meaning, which is now lost.
II.ii.166 (138,3) [Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer table, which doth suffer to swear upon a book] Mr. Theobald's note is as obscure as the passage. It may be read more than once before the complication of ignorance can be completely disentangled. Table is the palm expanded. What Mr. Theobald conceives it to be cannot easily be discovered, but he thinks it somewhat that promises a full belly.
Dr. Warburton understood the word, but puzzles himself with no great success in the pursuit of the meaning. The whole matter is this: Launcelot congratulates himself upon his dexterity and good fortune, and, in the height of his rapture, inspects his hand, and congratulates himself upon the felicities in his table. The act of expounding his hand puts him in mind of the action in which the palm is shewn, by raising it to lay it on the book, in judicial attestations. Well, says he, if any man in Italy have a fairer table, that doth offer to swear upon a book——Here he stops with an abruptness very common, and proceeds to particulars.
II.ii.194 (140,5) [Something too liberal] Liberal I have already shewn to be mean, gross, coarse, licentious.
II.ii.205 (141,9) [sad ostent] Grave appearance; shew of staid and serious behaviour.
II.vi.5 (146,1) [O, ten times faster Venus' pigeons fly] [W: widgeons] I believe the poet wrote as the editors have printed. How it is so very high humour to call lovers widgeons rather than pigeons. I cannot find. Lovers have in poetry been alway called Turtles, or Doves, which in lower language may be pigeons.
II.vi.51 (148,3) [a Gentile, and no Jew] A jest rising from the ambiguity of Gentile, which signifies both a Heathen, and one well born.
II.vii.8 (149,4) [This third, dull lead, with warning all as blunt]
That is, as gross as the dull metal.
II.vii.69 (151,5) [Gilded tombs do worms infold] In all the old editions this line is written thus:
Gilded timber do worms infold.
From which Mr. Rowe and all the following editors have made
Gilded wood may worms infold.
A line not bad in itself, but not so applicable to the occasion as that which, I believe, Shakespeare wrote,
Gilded tombs do worms infold.
A tomb is the proper repository of a death's-head.
II.vii.72 (151,6) [Your answer had not been inscrol'd] Since there is an answer inscrol'd or written in every casket, I believe for your we should read this. When the words were written y'r and y's, the mistake was easy.
II.vii.79 (151,7) [chuse ce so] The old quarto edition of 1600 has no distribution of acts, but proceeds from the beginning to the end in an unbroken tenour. This play therefore having been probably divided without authority by the publishers of the first folio, lies open to a new regulation, if any more commodious division can be proposed. The story is itself so wildly incredible, and the changes of the scene so frequent and capricious, that the probability of action does not deserve much care; yet it may be proper to observe, that, by concluding the second act here, time is given for Bassanio's passage to Belmont.
II.viii.42 (153,8) [Let it not enter in your mind of love] So all the copies, but I suspect some corruption.
II.viii.52 (153,9) [embraced heaviness] [W: enraced] Of Dr. Warburton's correction it is only necessary to observe, that it has produced a new word, which cannot be received without necessity.
When I thought the passage corrupted, it seemed to me not improbable that Shakespeare had written entranced heaviness, musing, abstracted, moping melancholy. But I know not why any great efforts should be made to change a word which has no uncommodious or unusual sense. We say of a man now, that he hugs his sorrows, and why might not Anthonio embrace heaviness.
II.ix.46 (155,2) [How