Chapter LIII: Act V

SC. 2. "Remember, son Slender, my _daughter_."

The word _daughter_, necessary both for sense and metre, was supplied by the 2nd folio.

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SC. 5. Among the characters given in the heading of this scene, we meet Mrs. Quickly and Pistol; the 4tos have "Mrs. Quickly, like the Queen of Fairies," and prefix _Quic._ to the following speeches, and it is not said that Anne was to assume that character. The folio heads the speeches with _Qui._ and _Qu._ We may therefore say that the poet was oblivious when, in iv. 4. 6, he said that Anne should "present the Fairy Queen;" for throughout she only appears as an ordinary fairy, as is plain by the mistake made by Caius and Slender. The poet seems to have confined the speaking to the elder persons.

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"You moonshine-revellers, and shades of night,
You orphan-heirs of fixed Destiny."

No one has been able to make any sense of 'orphan-heirs,' which may therefore be treated as a corruption. Warburton read '_ouphen_-heirs,' which Singer adopts; but there is no such word as _ouphen_. My own opinion is that the poet wrote _ouphes and_ heirs; and as in general the _d_ in _and_ is not pronounced, even before vowels, and the _ou_ might easily be mistaken for _or_, the printer made _orphan_. The line, we may see, thus forms a parallel to the preceding line. The poet seems to have used 'heirs' in the sense of children. In Fletcher's Mad Lover we have,

"Coarse and base appetites, earth's mere inheritors,
And _heirs_ of idleness and blood." (ii. 1.)

In favour of my reading, it may be observed that in iv. 4 and in the following speeches the Ouphes occur, as well as the Elves and Fairies, and nowhere else in Shakespeare.

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"Elves list your names. Silence, you airy toyès.
Cricket to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap;
What fires thou findest unraked and hearths unswept."

The rime shows that 'toyès' is a dissyllable. In 'unswept' the _t_ should not be sounded, and, I think, not be printed. _Unswep_ is merely the apocopated part, of which examples are so numerous in our language; it is like _kep_, _crep_, etc., which, though regarded now as vulgarisms, are grammatically correct. Collier's folio, followed by Mr. Collier and others, reads '_when_ thou_'st_ leap_'d_,' a mere result of ignorance of grammar.

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"And turn him to no pain."

From what precedes, we might conjecture _burn_.

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"To repay that money will be a biting affliction."

I have, after Theobald, added here from the 4tos the following lines, of which, however, he did not give the last:--

"_Mrs. Ford._ Nay, husband, let that go to make amends,
Forgive that sum and so we'll all be friends.

_Ford._ Well, here's my hand; all is forgiven at last.

_Fal._ It hath cost me well. I've been well pinch'd and wash'd."

The play is thus made to end more agreeably, and Falstaff can accept the invitation to supper with a better grace. These lines, it is true, rime, and so are not quite in harmony with the other speeches, whence it seems to follow that the omission was made by the poet. But his judgement in this case must have fallen asleep; for Ford had no right to be so hard on the poor knight, as he had given him the money, or rather we might say forced it on him. As to the rime, we have two other couplets toward the end of the play.

TWELFTH NIGHT.