August 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE 



227 



So wandering is Dame Quickly's mind, indeed, and so 

 cle;irly has Shakespeare ah-eady shown this, that I am not 

 sure we need even change a word. From her such a saying 

 as " his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a table of green 

 fields," would he iiitelligible, though not from any person of 

 coherent ideas; if this is not admitted, and we change " and " 

 to " on," it may be said the change is as great as from 

 " table " to " babbled " ; but the former mistake is one 

 which a compositor would be much more likely to make 

 than the other. No one would ever think of altering " a' 

 baVjbled of green fields " into " a table of green fields " if he 

 had read the woids aright ; whereas it would be a common- 

 place and fi\miliar sort of mistake to set up " and " for 

 "on." As regards reading the passage right, it should be 

 remembered that Shakespeare would have written the word 

 "table" with a capital " T," but " babbled" with a small 

 " b." (The double "b" does not count, I must admit, 

 for " babble " was written " bable " in Shakespaire's 

 time. 



On the whole, however, the strongest objection against 

 the poetical "babbling of green fields" is that it is far 

 too poeticivl for Mrs. Quickly, it was wholly beyond her 

 nature to have described Falstaff's wanderings so touch- 

 ingly.* 



And here I may notice what I take to be a wholly faulty 

 objection taken by many, and in particular by Charles 

 Reade (in " Hard Cash "), to the familiar simile in the best 

 known of Hamlet's soliloquies, where the Prince speaks of 

 taking up " arms against a sea of troubles." What arms 1 

 asks Eeade ; " I su])pose buoys and a cork jacket," or words 

 to that effect. It does not seem to be noticed when such 

 objections are made that it is Hamlet, not Shakespeare, who 

 is soliloquising. Hamlet may not be mad, though I myself 

 cannot see how the theory of his being wholly sane axn be 

 maintained by any one who notes that it was immediately 

 after he had seen the Ghost, and long before he could have 

 formed any deliberate plan of simulating madness, that his 

 wild and whirling words are first heard ; but he is assuredly 

 much perturbed in spirit. Apart from this, though we call 

 the passage a soliloquy, and though it is always delivered as 

 such, Ophelia is present all the time. If Hamlet's madness 

 is wholly assumed, yet the assumption would not be thrown 

 oflfhere; and as a matter of fact UpheUa throughout the 

 scene deems Hamlet mad, saying the monient he leaves, 

 " O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ! " Now, for 

 Shakespeare, composing a sonnet, to speak of " taking arms 

 against a sea of troubles " would doubtless be false poetry; 

 but for the much-perturbed Hamlet, in the presence of one 

 whom he would have regard him mad, to speak in that way 

 would be altogether a true dramatic rendering of the posi- 

 tion. The words would not even be utterly " wild and 

 whirling " ; they would only wander enough from exactness 

 to correspond with Hamlet's state of mind, actual as well 

 as in part assumed. 



There is a passage in the .same play which has exercised 



* It is absolutely certain that the passage should not be left and 

 understood precisely as it stands in the folio. Remembering that 

 Shakespeare repeatedly uses " table " or " tablet," or any small 

 surface on which marks or colouring may be put, while in liis time 

 a patch of colour was called a field, may we not understand the 

 words, "his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a table of greene 

 fields ' to mean simply, " his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a mere 

 tablet of green spots " ? In other words, having given her unpoetical 

 account of the shape of Falstaff's nose, Mrs. Quickly adds an 

 equally ridiculous description of its colour. Shakespeare represents 

 Falstaff as dying of a sweat — that is, of the sweating sickness -and 

 In that disease no such changes of colour took place. Bacon 

 expressly says there were neither purple nor livid spots. But this 

 was probably not known to Shakespeare, as the sweating sickness 

 died out finally in 1551. 



commentators, and led to the invention of multitudinous 

 new readings, though it needs in reality no change whatever, 

 and if a little confused or rather, I should say, complicated, 

 can yet te quite readily and reasonably interpreted. Osric 

 has just, in elaborate phrase, praised Laertes— so elaborately 

 that Horatio presently asks whether they might not as well 

 speak in " another tongue." But before saying this Hamlet 

 mimics the idiotic jjhrases of Osric, in the remarkable 

 answer beginning, " Sir, his definement suflers no perdition 

 in you : though, I know, to divide him inveutorially would 

 dizzy the arithmetic of memory ; and yet but yaw neither, 

 in respect of his quick sail." (This exquisite fooling is not 

 in the foho, the Hamlet in which was edited from a play- 

 house transcript.) Does not some dullard, whose arithmetic 

 of reason must liave been grievously dizzied, propose the 

 substitution of " raw " for " yaw " 1 — turning complication 

 into sheer nonsense. Repeatedly one sees this passage 

 quoted as manifestly corrupt, and sometimes as hopeles.sly 

 corrupt. Many alterations have been suggested, though I 

 think nothing quite so idiotic as " raw " for " yaw " has ever 

 been proposed. In reality no change is necessarv. Osric 

 has been mixing up his ideas and his metaphors in the most 

 preposterous fashion ; Hamlet, therefore, does the like. 

 Definement, perdition, inventory, dizzying, arithmetic, and 

 memory — surely after mixing these in the compass of three 

 lines he may be expected to start yet another idea in the 

 rest of the sentence. The " quick sail " shows that he has 

 done so ; and the sea term " yawing " belongs to this new 

 idea. It may not be so familiar in our mouths to-day as it 

 was in men's mouths in Shakespeare's time, when all men 

 talked of the doings of the sea-dogs who made Eliz;ibeth's 

 days famous for all time. Many an English buccaneer had 

 seen the big Spaniard that sailed in pursuit "yaw "as he 

 punished her about the bows with ball and bullet — not 

 wholly giving up the chase, but leaving her course as his 

 blows fell on her cumbrous prow and forecastle. (For only 

 a steady crew can steer a shij) truly under such conditions.) 

 Such a man, describing the chase afterward — very likely 

 Shakespeare had heard many a yarn of the kind — would tell 

 how the pursuing ship crowded all sail, and came on 

 in swift pursuit, "yet but yaw as ne pounded her bows, 

 and so fell astern in respect of our quick sail." That 

 is just what Hamlet, mixing his metiiphors, means. " Sir," 

 he says, " he suflers no loss as you define him ; though I 

 know to set out all his qualities as in an inventory would 

 grievously tax the memory, and even then fall behind, so far 

 ahead of all praise do his abilities take him." 



The curious passage about knighthood in the " Merry 

 Wives of Windsor " is another of those which seems to me 

 to have been needlessly dealt with as difiicult. Mi-s. Ford 

 has said she "could be knighted " (playing on the words) ; 

 Mrs. Page pretends to understand her to mean that she 

 might hei'self be made a knight, and answers, " What 1 thou 

 liest " (mid-county English for " you lie under a mistake "). 

 " Sir Alice Ford ! these knights will hack ; and so thou 

 shouldst not alter the article of thy gentry." A commen- 

 tator says the word " hack " refers to hacking ofi' a knight's 

 spurs in token of disknighting. This is nonsense ; Shake- 

 speare had no such meaning. ]\Irs. Page would hardly 

 have suggested that a woman knight would be received by 

 other knights with contumely, and rejected from their order. 

 The word " hack " is used in its other sense, quite familiar in 

 Shakespeare's time, the sense of growing common. She 

 says, in fact, these knights will soon be so common that a 

 simple gentleman will have better standing ; so keep you to 

 your gentry, not going in for knighthood. (Shakesjieare 

 uses the word " hackney " in " Love's Labour's Lost," and 

 " hackneyed " in the first part of " King Henry IV.") 



A passage which has given rise to much dispute is that 



