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"I am wise, but quiddits will not answer death." STEEVENS.

104.

the sconce -] i. e. the head. STEEVENS. 108. Is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, Omitted in the quartos. STEEVENS. 119. -assurance in that.-] A quibble is intended. Deeds, which are usually written on parchment, are called the common assurances of the kingdom. MALONE.

140. by the card,-] The card is a sea-chart, still so termed by mariners: and the word is afterwards used by Osrick in the same sense. Hamlet's meaning will therefore be, we must speak directly forward, in a straight line, plainly to the point.

So, in Macbeth:

"And the very ports they blow, &c.

"On the shipman's card."

REMARKS.

STEEVENS.

142. the age is grown so picked,-] So smart, so sharp, says Hanmer, very properly; but there was, I think, about that time, a picked shoe, that is, a shoe with a long pointed toe, in fashion, to which the allusion seems likewise to be made. Every man now is smart; and every man now is a man of fashion.

JOHNSON. This fashion of wearing shoes with long pointed toes was carried to such excess in England, that it was restrained at last by proclamation so long ago as the fifth year of Edward IV. when it was ordered, "that the beaks or pykes of shoes and boots should

not

not pass two inches, upon pain of cursing by the clergy, and forfeiting twenty shillings, to be paid one noble to the king, another to the cordwainers of London, and the third to the chamber of London ;— and for other countries and towns the like order was taken. Before this time, and since the year 1382, the pykes of shoes and boots were of such length, that they were fain to be tied up to the knee with chains of silver, and gilt, or at least with silken laces."

STEEVENS.

150. that young Hamlet was born;- -] By this scene it appears that Hamlet was then thirty years old, and knew Yorick well, who had been dead twentytwo years. And yet in the beginning of the play he is spoken of as a very young man, one that designed to go back to school, i. e. to the university of Wittenberg. The poet in the fifth act had forgot what he wrote in the first. BLACKSTONE. -] Thus the folio.

196. -my lady's chamber,

The quartos read-my lady's table, meaning, I suppose, her dressing-table.

STEEVENS.

219. winter's flaw!] Winter's blast. JOHNSON. So, in Marius and Sylla, 1594:

66 -no doubt this stormy flaw,

"That Neptune sent to cast us on this shore.” The quartos read-to expel the water's flaw.

STEEVENS.

222. —maimed rites!—] Imperfect obsequies.

JOHNSON.

224. Foredo its own life.] To foredo, is to undo, to destroy. So, in Othello:

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"That either makes me or foredoes me quite." Again, in Acolastus, a comedy, 1529:

"-wolde to

God it might be leful for me to fordoo myself, or to

make an ende of me!"

STEEVENS.

230. Priest.] This Priest in the old quarto is called

Doctor.

STEEVENS.

230. Her obsequies have been as far enlarg'd

As we have warranty :-] Is there any allusion here to the coroner's warrant, directed to the minister and church-wardens of a parish, and permitting the body of a person, who comes to an untimely end, to -receive Christian burial? WHALLEY.

235. -allow'd her virgin crants,] Crants is the German word for garlands, and suppose it was retained by us from the Saxons. To carry garlands before the bier of a maiden, and to hang them over her grave, is still the practice in rural parishes.

Crants therefore was the original word, which the author, discovering it to be provincial, and perhaps not understood, changed to a term more intelligible, but less proper. Maiden rites give no certain or definite image. He might have put maiden wreaths, or maiden garlands, but he perhaps bestowed no thought upon it, and neither genius nor practice will always supply a hasty writer with the most proper diction. JOHNSON.

In Minshew's Dictionary, see Beades, where roosen krants means sertum rosarium; and such is the name of a character in this play. TOLLET.

238. Of bell and burial.] Burial, here, signifies interment in consecrated ground. WARBURTON.

242. To sing a Requiem,] A Requiem is a mass performed in Popish churches for the rest of the soul of a person deceased. The folio reads-sing sage requiem. STEEVENS.

there is none

288. Woo't drink up Esil! eat a crocodile?] This word has through all the editions been distinguished by Italick characters, as if it were the proper name of some river; and so, I dare say, all the editors have from time to time understood it to be. But then this must be some river in Denmark; and there so called; nor is there any near it in name, that I know of but Yssel, from which the province of Overyssel derives its title in the German Flanders. Besides, Hamlet is not proposing any impossibilities to Laertes, as the drinking up a river would be: but he rather seems to mean, Wilt thou resolve to do things the most shocking and distasteful to human nature; and, behold, I am as resolute. I am persuaded the poet wrote:

Wilt drink up Eisel? eat a crocodile?

i. e. Wilt thou swallow down large draughts of vinegar? The proposition, indeed,, is not very grand: but the doing it might be as distasteful and unsavoury as eating the flesh of a crocodile. And now there is neither an impossibility, nor an anticlimax: and the

lowness

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lowness of the idea is in some measure removed by THEOBALD.

the uncommon term.

Hanmer has,

Wilt drink up Nile? or cat a crocodile?

Hamlet certainly meant (for he says he will rant) to dare Laertes to attempt any thing, however difficult or unnatural; and might safely promise to follow the example his antagonist was to set, in draining the channel of a river, or trying his teeth on an animal, whose scales are supposed to be impenetrable. Had Shakspere meant to make Hamlet say-Wilt thou drink vinegar? he probably would not have used the term drink up; which means, totally to exhaust; neither is that challenge very magnificent, which only provokes an adversary to hazard a fit of the heart-burn or the cholic.

The commentator's Yssel would serve Hamlet's turn or mine. This river is twice mentioned by Stowe, P. 735. "It standeth a good distance from the river Issell, but hath a sconce on Issel of incredible strength."

Again, by Drayton, in the 24th Song of his Poly olbion:

"The one O'er Isell's banks the ancient Saxons taught;

"At Over Isell rest, the other did apply."

And, in K. Richard II. a thought in part the same, occurs, act ii, sc. 2.

-the task he undertakes

"Is numb'ring sands, and drinking oceans dry."

But

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