Chapter LXV: Act II: SCENE 1. Page 401

BAN. This diamond he greets your wife withal,
By the name of most kind hostess; _and shut up
In measureless content_.

As the last sentence stands, it is at once ungrammatical and obscure; and neither Mr. Steevens's construction of _shut up_ in the sense of _to conclude_, as referring to the speaker, nor Hanmer's reading _and is shut up_, as connected with Duncan, will render it intelligible. It should seem as if Banquo meant to say that the king was immured in happiness; but then it is obvious that some preceding words have been lost.

SCENE 3. Page 428.

Enter MACDUFF.

_Duff_ in the Erse language signifies a captain; _Macduff_, the son of a captain.

SCENE 3. Page 433.

MACD. Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit.

This simile has been elsewhere used by Shakspeare. Thus in _Cymbeline_, he calls sleep _the ape of death_. In _A midsummer night's dream_, he has _death counterfeiting sleep_. It might indeed from its extreme obviousness have occurred to writers of weaker imagination than our poet; yet as he is known to have borrowed so much, it is not impossible that he might in this instance have been indebted to Marlow's translation of a line in Ovid's _Elegies_, book ii. el. 9:

"Foole what is sleepe, but image of cold death?"

or to another version of the same line in Cardanus's _Comfort_:

"Is not our sleepe (O foole) of death an image playne?"

Whoever will take the trouble of reading over the whole of Cardanus's second book as translated by Bedingfield, and printed by T. Marshe, 1576, 4to, will soon be convinced that it had been perused by Shakspeare.

SCENE 3. Page 438.

MACB. ... _their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd_ with gore.

Mr. Steevens's explanation must be objected to. Finding that the _lower end_ of a cannon is called its _breech_, he concludes that the _hilt_ or _handle_ of a dagger must be here intended by the like appellation. But is not this literally to mistake the _top_ for the _bottom_? It is conceived that the present expression, though in itself something _unmannerly_, simply means _covered as with breeches_. The idea, uncouth and perhaps inaccurate as it is, might have been suggested from the resemblance of daggers to the legs and thighs of a man. The sentiments of Dr. Farmer on this, as on all occasions, are ingenious, and deserving of the highest respect; but it is hardly possible that Shakspeare could have been deceived in the way he states. To give colour to his opinion, he is obliged in his quotation from Erondell's _French garden_ to print the word _master's_ as a genitive case singular, in order to apply the pronoun _their_ to _daggers_; but without the aid of the French text, the word _their_ is _in the original_ equally applicable to _masters_. Indeed the subsequent mention of stockings, hose and garters, would have satisfied a person of much less penetration than Shakspeare, that _breeches_ were there intended as an article of dress.

The above conjecture that the term _breech'd_ might signify _cover'd_, suggests the mention of a circumstance from which it may on the whole be thought to derive support.

It is well known that some ridicule has been cast on one of our translations of the Bible from the Genevan French edition, on account of the following words, "And they sewed fig-tree leaves together and made themselves _breeches_," Gen. iii. 7; whence it has been called the _Breeches Bible_, and sometimes sold for a high price. It is generally conceived that this peculiarity belongs exclusively to the above Bible, but it is a mistake. The Saxon version by Ælfric has ⁊ ꞅɩƿoꝺon ꝼɩcleaꝼ ⁊ ƿoꞃhꞇon hɩm ƿæꝺbꞃec, _and sewed fig-leaves and worked them_ WEED-BREECH_, or cloaths for the breech_. Wicliffe also translates "and maden hem _breechis_;" and it is singular that Littelton in his excellent dictionary explains _perizomata_, the word used in the Vulgate, by _breeches_. In the manuscript French translation of Petrus Comestor's commentary on the Bible, made by Guiars des Moulins in the thirteenth century, we have "couvertures tout autressint comme unnes petites _braies_."