July 9. 1853.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



29 



It is singular enough, and it says a great deal 

 for Theobald's common sense, that he saw what 

 the true intention of the allusion must be, although 

 be did not know how to reconcile it with the ex- 

 isting letter of the text. He wished to preserve the 

 epirit by the sacrifice of the letter, while Mr. Knight 

 preserves the letter but misinterprets the spirit. 



Theobald's word " shows," in the sense of ex- 

 ternals, is very nearly what Shakspeare meant by 

 ^hoes, except that shoes implies a great deal more 

 than shows, — it implies the assumption of the 

 ■character as well as the externals of Hercules. 



Out of five quotations from our old poets, given 

 hy Steevens in the first edition of his note, there is 

 not one in which the shoes are not provided with 

 jfeet. But Malone, to his immortal honour, was 

 the first to furnish them with hoofs : 



" Upon an ass ; i. e. upon the hoofs of an ass." 



Malone. 



But Shakspeare nowhere alludes to feet ! His 

 ass most probably had feet, and so had Juvenal's 

 verse (when he talks of his " satyra sumente co- 

 thurnum ") ; but neither Shakspeare nor Juvenal 

 dreamed of any necessary connexion between the 

 feet and the shoes. 



Therein lies the difference between Shakspeare 

 and "our old poets;" a difference that ought to 

 be sufficient, of itself, to put down the common 

 cry, — that Shakspeare borrowed his allusions from 

 them. If so, how is it that his expositors, with 

 these old poets before their eyes all this time, 

 together with their own scholarship to boot, have 

 so widely mistaken the true point of his allusion ? 

 It is precisely because they have confined their 

 researches to these old poets, and have not followed 

 Shakspeare to the fountain head. 



There is a passage in Quintillan which, very 

 probably, has been the common source of both 

 Shakspeare's version, and that of the old poets ; 

 with this difference, that he understood the original 

 and they did not. 



Quintillan is cautioning against the introduction 

 of solemn bombast in trifling affairs : 



" To get up," says he, « this sort of pompous tragedy 

 about mean matters, is as though you would dress up 

 -children with the mask and buskins of Hercules." 



[" Nam in parvis quidem litibus has tragcedias movere 

 tale est quale si personam Herculis et cothurtios aptare 

 infantibus velis."] 



Here the addition of the mash proves that the 

 allusion Is purely theatrical. The mask and bus- 

 kins are put for the stage trappings, or properties, 

 •of the part of Hercules : of these, one of the items 

 •was the lion's skin; and hence the extreme aptitude 

 of the allusion, as applied by the Bastard, in King 

 John, to Austria, who was assuming the importance 

 of Cceur de Lion ! 



It is interesting to observe how nearly Theo- 

 bald's plain, homely sense, led him to the necessity 



of the context. The real points of the allusion caa 

 scarcely be expressed in better words than hia 

 own: 



" Faulconbridge, in his resentment, would say this to 

 Austria, ' That lion's skin which my great father, King 

 Richard, once wore, looks as uncouthly on thy back, as. 

 that other noble hide, which was borne by Hercules, 

 would look on the back of an ass !' A double allusion 

 was intended : first, to the fable jf the ass in the lion's 

 skin ; then Richard I. is finely set in competition with 

 Alcides, as Austria is satirically coupled with the ass." 



One step farther, and Theobald would have dis- 

 covered the true solution : he only required to 

 know that the shoes, by a figure of rhetoric called 

 synecdoche, may stand for the whole character and 

 attributes of Hercules, to have saved himself the 

 trouble of conjecturing an ingenious, though infi- 

 nitely worse word, as a substitute. 



As for subsequent annotators, it must be from 

 the mental preoccupation of this unlucky "ex 

 pede Herculem," that they have so often put their 

 foot in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe 

 into a sort of antithesis to Cinderella's ; and, Ilka 

 Procrustes, they are resolved to stretch everything 

 to fit. A. E. B. 



Leeds. 



GOTHES AUTHOB-EEMUNERATION. 



The Note in your valuable Journal (Vol. vli., 

 p. 591.) requires, I think, so far as it relates to 

 Gi3the, several corrections which I am in the position 

 of making. The amount which that great man is 

 said to have received for his "works (aggregate)" 

 is " 30,000 crowns." The person who originally 

 printed this statement must have been completely 

 ignorant of Gothe's affairs, and even biography. 

 Gcithe had (unlike Byron) several publishers 

 in his younger years. Subsequently he became 

 closer connected with M. J. G. Cotta of Stuttgardt, 

 who, in succession, published almost all Gothe's 

 works. Amongst them were several editions of 

 his complete works : for instance, that published 

 conjointly at Vienna and Stuttgardt. Then 

 came, in 1829, what was called the edition of the 

 last hand (Ausgale letzter Hand), as Gothe was 

 then more than eighty years of age. During all 

 the time these two editions were published, other 

 detached new works of Gothe were also printed ; 

 as well as new editions of former books, &c. Who 

 can now say that it was 20,000 crowns (thalers .?) 

 which the great poet received for each various 

 performance ? — No one. And this for many rea- 

 sons. Gothe always remained with M. Cotta on 

 terms of polite acquaintanceship, no more : there 

 was no " My dear Murray " in their strictly busi- 

 ness-like connexion. Gothe also never wrote on 

 such things, even in his biography or diary. But 

 some talk was going around in Germany, that for 

 one of the editions of his complete works (there 



