Chapter CXVII: Act IV: SCENE 2. Page 154

GUI. But his neat _cookery_.

This speech has exercised the talents of a certain ingenious female _illustrator_ of Shakspeare, who has endeavoured to ridicule the character of Imogen, and indeed the whole of the play. She degrades our heroine into a mere kitchen wench, and adverts to what she calls her _œconomical education_. Now what is this but to expose her own ignorance of ancient manners? If she had missed the advantage of qualifying herself as a commentator on Shakspeare's plots by a perusal of our old romances, she ought at least to have remembered, what every well informed woman of the present age is acquainted with, the education of the princesses in Homer's _Odyssey_. It is idle to attempt to judge of ancient simplicity by a mere knowledge of modern manners; and such fastidious critics had better close the book of Shakspeare for ever. In another part of her critique on this play, she condemns the giving of the drug to Imogen which Pisanio had received from the queen, from an idea that he was sufficiently warned of its soporific quality; and she positively states that the physician had, by a whisper, informed Pisanio of its property; not one word of which is to be found in Shakspeare. So much for the criticism and accuracy of a work to which Dr. Johnson condescended to write a dedication. He has likewise too often confided in its opinions in the course of several of his remarks on Shakspeare's plays.

SCENE 2. Page 156.

CLO. Know'st me not by my clothes?

GUI. _No_, nor thy tailor, rascal.

Mr. Steevens's correct ear has on this, perhaps single, occasion been deceived. He objects to the negation _no_, as "at once superfluous and injurious to the metre;" yet it is impossible to read the line harmoniously without it. Nor does it constitute the superfluity of the metre, which has, exclusively, two redundant syllables. If any alteration were allowable, it might be the following:--

"Know'st not my clothes? No, nor thy tailor, rascal."

SCENE 2. Page 164.

BEL. O thou goddess,
Thou divine nature, _how_ thyself thou blazon'st----

This judicious emendation from _thou_ thyself, &c., claimed by one learned gentleman and adopted by another, is the original property of Sir Thomas Hanmer.

SCENE 2. Page 168.

GUI. With _female_ fairies will his tomb be haunted.

i. e. harmless and protecting spirits, not fairies of a mischievous nature.

SCENE 2. Page 169.

GUI. And worms will not come to _thee_.

Mr. Steevens imputes _great violence_ to this change of person, and would read "come to _him_;" but there is no impropriety in Guiderius's sudden address to the _body itself_. It might indeed be ascribed to our author's careless manner, of which an instance like the present occurs at the beginning of the next act, where Posthumus says,

"... _you_ married ones,
If each of _you_ would take this course, how many
Must murder wives much better than _themselves_."

SCENE 2. Page 169.

ARV. ... the ruddock would,
With charitable bill,--bring thee all this;
Yea and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none
To _winter-ground_ thy corse.

The question made by Dr. Percy, whether the notion of the redbreast covering dead bodies be older than the celebrated ballad of the babes of the wood, has been satisfactorily answered in the affirmative by Mr. Reed's note. In Dekker's _Villanies discovered by lanthorn and candle light_, 1616, 4to, it is said, "They that cheere up a prisoner but with their sight, are Robin red breasts that bring strawes in their bils to cover a dead man in extremitie." See chap. xv.

With respect to _winter-ground_; until some other example of the use of this word be produced, there will be no impropriety in offering a substitute in _winter-green_, that is, "to preserve thy tomb green with moss in the winter season, when there will be no flowers wherewith to deck it." Such a verb might have been suggested to Shakspeare, who often coins in this way, by the plant _winter-green_, the _pyrola_.

_Ruddock_ was the Saxon name ꞃuꝺꝺuc, for the redbreast, and long continued to be so. In Bullokar's _Æsop_, 1585, 12mo, there is a fable "Of a fowlor and the bird cale'd Robin-red-brest," which concludes in these words: "Then the fowlor, hop of-taking many being lost, when it waz now tym too-rest, drawing the netz, he cauht only on _Robin-ruddok_, which being unhappy [unlucky] had abydd stil in the shrap."

SCENE 2. Page 175.

IMO. 'Od's pittikins!

Mr. Steevens's derivation from God's _my_ pity, is not quite correct. It is rather from _God's pity_, diminutively used by the addition of _kin_. In this manner we have _'od's bodikins_.

ON THE STORY OF THIS PLAY.

For the plot of Cymbeline, Shakspeare has been almost exclusively indebted to Boccaccio's novel of Bernabo Lomellin, Day 2, novel 9, as Mr. Malone has proved beyond the possibility of doubt. Unless we suppose, what is not probable, that Shakspeare was acquainted with the Italian language, or that he had heard the above novel read by some person in English, a difficulty arises in accounting for the manner in which he got access to it. The earliest English translation of the _whole of the Decameron_ was first printed in 1620, by Isaac Jaggard, in folio, and in two parts, the first of which was republished under the title of _The modell of wit, mirth, eloquence, and conversation, framed in ten days of an hundred curious pieces, by seven honourable ladies, and three noble gentlemen, preserved to posterity by the renowned John Boccacio, the first refiner of Italian prose, and now translated into English_, 1625, in folio. See more on this subject in a preceding note, p. 102. Had Shakspeare been intimately acquainted with Boccaccio's _Decameron_, one should have expected that he would have made considerable use of that work; but this is the only play in which the most material part of the plot has been extracted from it. There are indeed one or two instances in which a very slight use has been made of it, but then evidently through the medium of an English translation. Is it not possible that our author might have known French enough to have occasionally read the Decameron in that language?

TITUS ANDRONICUS.