Explanatory Notes. The Explanatory Notes in this edition have been specially selected and adapted, with emendations after the latest and best authorities, from the most eminent Shakespearian scholars and commentators, including Johnson, Malone, Steevens, Singer, Dyce, Hudson, White, Furness, Dowden, and others. This method, here introduced for the first time, provides the best annotation of Shakespeare ever embraced in a single edition. ACT FIRST. Scene I. 5. in ward:-Under the old feudal law of England, and until comparatively recent times, the heirs of great fortunes were wards of the sovereign. The same was also the case in some parts of France, and Shakespeare but extends such a law over the whole nation. 19, 20. O, that had'! etc. :-Clarke says:-" The Countess's parenthetical exclamation concisely pictures all the calamitous circumstances involved in that one word had-the lost parent, the young girl's orphanhood, her own dead husband, her son's past dwelling with her at home, and his imminent departure." 66 47 et seq. in her they are the better, etc. :-"Her virtues," observes Johnson, are the better for their simpleness; that is, her excellencies are the better because they are artless and open, without fraud, without design." Johnson continues: "The learned commentator [Warburton] has well explained virtues, but has not, I think, reached the force of the word traitors, and therefore has not shown the full extent of Shakespeare's masterly observation. Estimable and useful qualities, joined with an evil disposition, give that disposition power over others, who, by admiring the virtue, are betrayed to the malevolence. The Tatler, mentioning the sharpers of his time, observes that some of them are men of such elegance and knowledge that 'a young man who falls into their way is betrayed as much by his judgement as his passions.' Clarke's explanation of the passage is: We commend such ex 66 999 cellencies with regret that they should be so good in themselves, yet treacherous in their combination and effects; and then the Countess goes on to say that Helena's merits are the better for their pure source, since she derives her integrity of nature from her father, and achieves her excellence herself." 59. I do affect, etc. :-"In these, the first words she utters," as Clarke interprets, "Helena uses the veiled language which marks her diction throughout this opening Scene. She is brooding over her secret thoughts, letting them but so indistinctly be seen as to be undivined by those around her, and only so far perceived by the reader as to enable him to gather what the dramatist intends to indicate. The sorrow Helena affects is that for her father's death; the sorrow she says I have is for the inauspiciousness of her love, and for Bertram's approaching departure." 62, 63. If the living, etc.:-" This speech," says Hudson, "enigmatical enough at best, is rendered quite unintelligible, both in the original and in modern editions, by being put into the mouth of the Countess. We therefore concur with Tieck and Knight in assigning it to Helena. It is in the same style of significant obscurity as her preceding speech; and we can see no meaning in it apart from her state of mind, absorbed, as she is, with a feeling which she dare not show and cannot suppress. Of course she refers to Bertram, and means that the grief of her unrequited love for him makes mortal, that is, kills the grief she felt at her father's death. The speech is so mysterious that none but the quick, sagacious mind of Lafeu is arrested by it: he at once understands that he does not understand the speaker. Coleridge says, 'Bertram and Lafeu, I imagine, both speak together.' Whether this be the case or not, there can be no doubt that Lafeu's question refers to what Helena has just said." "Tieck," says Rolfe, "(followed by many editors) assigns this speech to Helena; and it must be admitted that it is in the veiled and enigmatical style she uses here. But, on the other hand, it seems a natural antithetical comment for any one to make on Lafeu's antithetical speech, and therefore may be left to the Countess, as in the Folio. We think there is also some force in White's objection that if this speech be assigned to Helena, Lafeu's question, excited by its quibbling nature, is not put until after Bertram has turned the attention of the audience by addressing another person, to wit, the Countess, whom he asks for her blessing; in which case Lafeu's query is presuming and discourteous, and the dramatic effect awkward. But if the Countess be the last speaker, this is avoided."" 80, 81. The best wishes, etc.:-That is, may you be mistress of your wishes, and have power to bring them to effect. 104, 105. my idolatrous fancy, etc.:-Herford says: "Helen's passion for Bertram seems to spring, not from any flaw in her clear and penetrating mind, but from something fundamentally irrational in the nature of love itself. Christian idealism sees the peculiar glory of love in its power of transcending and ignoring distinctions of merit, and pouring itself forth on the mean and lowly. Modern Romanticism, from a kindred but distinct point of view, has delighted to picture the salvation of a worthless man by a woman's devoted love. But neither of these transcendent ways of looking at love is anywhere suggested in Shakespeare. Helen's love is an idolatry, and finds its highest expression in adoring self-subjection." 117. Are you meditating on virginity?—“It is very characteristic of the English renaissance," says Brandes, "and of the public which Shakespeare had in view in his early plays, that he should make this noble heroine take part with Parolles in the long and jocular conversation on the nature of virginity, which is one of the most indecorous passages in his works. This dialogue must certainly belong to the original version of the play. We must remember that Helena, in that version, was in all probability very different from the high-souled woman she became in the process of revision. She no doubt expressed herself freely, according to Shakespeare's youthful manner, in rhyming reveries on love and fate. Or else he made her pour forth multitudinous swarms of images, each treading on the other's heels, like those in which she forecasts Bertram's love adventures at the court of France." Some editors pronounce the whole conversation on virginity (118173) spurious. 239. and will not leave me :-Clarke remarks: "The noble mixture of spirited firmness and womanly modesty, fine sense and true humility, clear sagacity and absence of conceit, passionate warmth and sensitive delicacy, generous love and self-diffidence, with which Shakespeare has endowed Helena, renders her in our eyes one of the most admirable of his female characters. Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Mrs. Jameson have each eloquently contributed to do homage to the beauty of Helena's charactera beauty the more conspicuous from the difficulties of the story: which demanded the combination of the utmost ardour in passion with the utmost purity and delicacy, the utmost moral courage and intelligence of mind with the utmost modesty of nature, to complete the conformation of its heroine." Shakespeare," says Brandes, "has worked out the figure of Helena with the tenderest partiality. Pity and admiration in concert seem to have guided his pen. We feel in his portraiture a deep compassion for the pangs of despised love-the compassion of one who himself has suffered-and over the whole figure of Helena he has shed a Raphael-like beauty. She wins all, charms all, wherever she goes -old and young, women and men-all except Bertram, the one in whom her life is bound up. The King and the old Lafeu are equally captivated by her, equally impressed by her excellences. Bertram's mother prizes her as if she were her daughter; more highly, indeed, than she prizes her own obstinate son. The Italian widow becomes so devoted to her that she follows her to a foreign country in order to vouch for her statement and win her back her husband." [Enter Scene III. Clown.] The Clown in this comedy is a domestic fool of the same kind as Touchstone in As You Like It. Such fools were, in the Poet's time, maintained in great families to keep up merriment in the house. Cartwright, in one of the copies of verses prefixed to the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, censures such dialogues as this, and that between Olivia and the Clown in Twelfth Night : 66 Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies Old-fashion'd wit, which walk'd from town to town Douce classes the Clown of this comedy amongst the domestic fools. Of this genus the same writer gives us three species, the mere natural, or idiot; the silly by nature, yet cunning and sarcastical; the artificial. Of this latter species, to which it appears that the Clown before us belongs, Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesie, has defined the characteristics: "A buffoon, or counterfeit fool, to hear him speak wisely, which is like himself, it is no sport at all. But for such a counterfeit to talk and look foolishly it maketh us laugh, because it is no part of his natural." Of the real domestic fools of the artificial class-that is, of the class of clever fellows who were content to be called fools for their hire, Gabriel Harvey has given us some minor distinctions: 66 "Scoggin, the jovial fool; or Skelton, the melancholy fool; or Elderton, the bibbing fool; or Will Sommer, the choleric fool." Shakespeare's fools each united in his own person all the peculiar qualities that must have made the real domestic fool valuable. He infused into them his wit and his philosophy, without taking them out of the condition of realities. They are the interpreters, to the multitude, of many things that would otherwise lie too deep for words. 57, 58. joul horns, etc. ::—It used to be thought in Shakespeare's time that the Puritans and Papists stood so far apart as to meet round on the other side, as extremes are apt to do. 96 et seq. Though honesty, etc. :-The controversy touching such things as kneeling at the Communion and wearing the surplice was raging quite fiercely in Shakespeare's time; everybody was interested in it; so that the allusion in the text would be generally understood. The Puritans would have compelled every one to wear the black gown, which was to them the symbol of Calvinism. Some of them, however, conformed so far as to wear the surplice over the gown, because their conscience would not suffer them to officiate without the latter, nor the law of the Church without the former. It is hard to conceive why they should have been so hot against these things, unless it were that the removing of them was only a pretence, while in reality they aimed at other things. And we learn from Jeremy Collier, that when Sir Francis Walsingham offered in the queen's name to concede so far, they replied, "Ne ungulam esse relinquendam ; they would not leave so much as a hoof behind." How the war was kept up may be judged from what Jeremy Taylor wrote sixty years later: "But there are amongst us such tender stomachs that cannot endure milk, but can very well digest iron; consciences so tender, that a ceremony is greatly offensive, but rebellion is not; a surplice drives them away as a bird affrighted with a man of clouts: but their consciences can suffer them to despise government, and speak evil of dignities, and curse all that are not of their opinion, and disturb the peace of kingdoms, and commit sacrilege, and account schism the character of saints." 142 et seq. "The scene," says Mrs. Jameson, "in which the Countess extorts from Helena the confession of her love is perhaps the finest in the whole play, and brings out all the striking points of Helena's character. Though the acknowledgement is wrung from her with an agony which seems to convulse her whole being, yet when once she has given it solemn utterance, she re |