SOME NEW EMENDATIONS IN SHAKESPEARE. 385 
In Richard II. there are two or three of the finest passages in 
the play in which I venture to suggest emendations. The first 
‘occurs in the splendid and patriotic speech which Shakespeare puts 
into the mouth of old John of Gaunt, when on his deathbed, he 
utters his last warning counsel to the weak young king, Richard 
II. (Act II. s. 1.) It is the oft-quoted speech beginning, ‘‘ Methinks 
I am a prophet, new inspired,” then follows his magnificent descrip- 
tion of England: 
** This sceptred Isle, 
This fortress built by nature for herself 
Against infection and the hand of war.” 
Staunton objects, rightly I think, to the word “ infection,” 
because, as a matter of fact, England in Shakespeare’s time was not 
preserved by her insular position from pestilential contagion. But 
apart altogether from this very matter of fact argument I cannot 
bring myself to believe that Shakespeare ever thought of regarding 
the “silver sea” in which England was set, the ‘“ triumphant sea” 
as 1t is called in the same speech, as a “ cordon sanitaire” to protect 
the country from the plague! This were on a par with using 
“Tmperious Czesar dead and turned to clay, to stop a hole to keep the 
wind away.” Farmer, feeling the necessity of an emendation here, 
proposed the word infestion—a word not found, so far as I know, 
anywhere else either in Shakespeare or any other English writer. 
*“Tnvasion” was, I believe, the word written by Shakespeare. 
“‘ Against invasion and the hand of war” brings the line into har- 
mony with the whole speech. 
In King Richard’s speech, in the same scene, he is made to say : 
‘* Now for our Irish wars ; 
We must supplant these rough rug-headed kernes, 
Which live like venom where no venom else 
Hath privilege to live.” 
* Living like venom” appears to me harsh and forced, if not 
obscure. I suspect Shakespeare wrote ‘“ vermin” not ‘‘ venom,” 
alluding to the legend, popular then as now, that St. Patrick had 
*‘ banished all the vermin” from the Island of Saints. It may be 
noted too that Richard proposes to deal with the “ Irish kernes” 
very much as the Saint had done with the Irish vermin, namely, 
“supplant them,” or, in other words, exterminate them—a mode of 
dealing with the Irish which has probably suggested itself to the 
