384 SOME NEW EMENDATIONS IN SHAKESPEARE. 



These sweet thoughts being most busy when he was employed at 

 work. Some actor or copyist not understanding busie as referring 

 to these " thoughts," probably wrote " least " as a gloss in his copy, 

 and both words were by the printer incorporated in the text. 



It is not a very uncommon thing for a gloss or a stage direction 

 to find its way from the margin into the text. We have an illus- 

 tration of the latter, if I am not mistaken, in the commonly received 

 reading of a line in the opening scene of the second Act of Henry 

 V., Corporal Nym, loquitur. 



Nym. — " For my part I care not, I say little ; 



But when time serves there shall be smiles." 



The last word in the second line, "smiles," was, I take it, a stage 

 direction at the end of the line. Nym. merely says " there shall be 



," without saying what. It is his " humour " to " say little," 



but he " smiles " significantly, as though he could say a good deal if 

 he would. The line as usually given, " we shall have smiles," seems 

 weak and not in Nym's vein. 



By the way, I am not aware whether it has been suggested, that 

 Corporal Nyru, whose '• honesty " was of the Falstaff type, derived 

 his name from an old and now utterly obsolete English word 

 " Nimm," to take. The name being thus an index to the character, 

 as in the case of " Pistol," " Quickly " and " Doll Tearsheet " in the 

 same play. 



In first part Henry IV., in the last line (Act III., s. 11), in Prince 

 Harry's speech, " If not the end of life cancels all bands." I think 

 we should certainly read bonds for bands. Cancelling bands is hardly 

 intelligible, but cancelling bonds is technically correct. Shakespeare 

 uses the same phrase twice elsewhere. In Pilchard III., we have 

 *' cancel his bonds of life," and in Cymbeline, " cancel these cold 

 bonds." Oddly enough in the previous part of this very speech the 

 Prince distinctly speaks of other legal instruments : 



" Percy is but my factor. Good, my lord, 

 To engross up glorious deeds in my behalf." 



In this connection I need hardly mention that the frequent and 

 correct use by Shakespeare of technical legal phrases has been ad- 

 duced as an evidence that Shakespeare must have spent some years 

 as a clerk in a lawj'er's office. 



