Scana Tertia.

Enter Clowne, Audrey, & Iaques:

Clo. Come apace good Audrey, I wil fetch vp your Goates, Audrey and how Audrey am I the man yet? Doth my fimple feature content you?

:

Aud. Your features, Lord warrant vs: what features?

Scene IX. Pope +

2. Audrey] Audrie F.

3. how] now FF, Rowe+.

3. the man] ABBOTT, § 92: The used to denote notoriety.

I

5

5. features] STEEVENS: Feat and feature, perhaps, had anciently the same meaning. The Clown asks if the features of his face content her; she takes the word in another sense, i. e. feats, deeds, and in her reply seems to mean what feats, i. e. what have we done yet? Or the jest may turn on the Clown's pronunciation. In some parts, 'features' might be pronounced faitors, which signify rascals, low wretches. Pistol uses the word in 2 Hen. IV: II, iv, 173, and Spenser very frequently_ MALONE: In Daniel's Cleopatra, 1594: 'I see then artless feature can content, And that true beauty needs no ornament' [III, ii, line 729, ed. Grosart]. Again, in The Spanish Tragedy: My feature is not to content her sight; My words are rude, and work her no delight' [II, i, p. 37, ed. Hazlitt]. Feature' appears to have formerly signified the whole countenance. So, in 1 Hen. VI: V, v, 68: 'Her peerless feature, joined to her birth, Approves her fit for none but for a king.' WHITER (p. 51): Feature' appears to have three senses. First, The cast and make of the face. Secondly, Beauty in general. Thirdly, The whole turn of the body. CALDECOTT: 'Feature' strictly is form or figure. NARES: This passage may as well be explained by supposing that the word 'feature' is too learned for the comprehension of the simple Audrey. Feature' is sometimes used for form or person in general: 'She also dofft her heavy haberieon, Which the fair feature of her limbs did hide.'-Spenser, Faerie Queene, III, ix. As a magical appearance: Stay, all our charms do nothing win Upon the night; our labour dies! Our magick feature will not rise.'-Jonson, Masque of Queens. On the preceding charm Jonson's own note says: Here they speake as if they were creating some new feature, which the devil persuades them to be able to do often, by the pronouncing of words, and pouring out of liquors on the earth.' DYCE: 'Feature' is form, person in general. WALKER (Crit. ii, 305): 'Feature,' in its earliest form, the Latin factura, signifies, in our old writers, the make of a person, his tout-ensemble. Jonson, Poetaster, II, i, Gifford, vol. ii, p. 416: 'her fair features'; surely an error; in the very same scene, p. 418, l. 4, we have, ‘No doubt of that, sweet feature'; as Browne, B. P. i, Song iv, Clarke, p. 112: 'from the ruins of this mangled creature Arose so fair and so divine a feature, That envy from her heart would dote upon her,' &c.; and, I think, Milton, P L. x: So scented the grim feature'; abstractum pro concreto, ut persæpe in poëtt. vett. Anglicis. Uncertain Poets, Chalmers, vol. ii, p. 439, col. 2, Praise of M. [Mistresse] M.: 'I woxe asto

[Your features... what features?]

nied (?) to read the feator [feature] of her shape, And wondred that a mortall hart such heavenly beames could scape.' Browne, B. P. B. i, Song ii, Clarke, p. 67 (of a fountain): Not changing any other work of nature, But doth endow the drinker with a feature More lovely,' &c. Spenser, F. Q. B. iv, C. ii, St. xliv: 'And to her service bind each living creature, Through secret understanding of their feature'; i. e. their construction, their make. C. ii, of Mutabilitie, St. iv: 'And thither also came all other creatures, Whatever life or motion do retaine, According to their sundry kinds of features.' Carew, Epitaph on the Lady S., Clarke, lviii, init. p. 76: The harmony of colours, features, grace, Resulting airs (the magic of a face) Of musical sweet tones, all which combined, To crown one sovereign beauty, lies confined To this dark vault.' Drunken Barnaby: Where I sought for George à Green a; But cou'd find not such a creature, Yet on a sign I saw his feature,' &c. [p. 19, ed. 1805]. Dubartas, i, vi, ed. 1641, p. 54, col. 2: Can you conceal the feet's rare-skilful feature, The goodly bases of this glorious creature?' WRIGHT: There is possibly some joke intended here, the key to which is lost. Feature' in Shakespeare's time signified shape and form generally, and was not confined to the face only. [In the Transactions, 1877-9, Part I, p. 100, of The New Shakspere Soc., W. WILKINS 'made Touchstone use "feature" in its etymological sense of "making," that is, the Early English making or writing of verses, as we use "composition," &c. now. Ben Jonson,' continues FURNIVALL, 'seems to use the word in the same sense when he says of his creature or creation, the play of Volpone, that two months before it was no feature: "think they can flout them, With saying he was a year about them. To this there needs no lie, but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature." -Prologue to Volpone, 1607. MR. W A. HARRISON finds the same sense in Bp. Latimer and Pliny: "Some of them ingendred one, some other such features, and euery one in that he was deliuered of was excellent, politike, wise."-Fruitfull Sermons, &c. by Master Hugh Latimer, &c. 1596, Sig. B 4, p. 12. Feture means here "a thing made," "a production." Pliny (Præf. Lib. I) uses fetura figuratively of a literary production, and calls his work on Natural History proxima fetura: “Libros Naturalis Historiæ. . . . natos apud me proxima fetura." Nares's citations are also repeated in a foot-note.] BRINSLEY NICHOLSON (Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, Reprint, 1886, p. 548): 'Feature.' An example of its being used for the make of a man, and not merely of the features of his countenance, to which it is now appropriated; but till I can find-and as yet I have found none, though I have looked out for it-an example of feature used for things inanimate, I cannot accept the interpretation of song or sonnet in [the present passage.] Did it refer to verse we should expect features..... All Touchstone's reference to verse-making in this passage may readily have arisen from his reference to his new situation as like that of the honest poet Ovid among the Goths. Had he been poetical and given her verses, he could not have explained to Audrey that he, being a poet, only feigned to love her. [We know, from Steevens's note, that the jest was lost over a hundred years ago, and it seems vain to hope to find it now. We may have our own little explanations and theories, but it is doubtful that any can be now proposed which will be generally accepted. The latest that has been offered, that of Wilkins and of The New Shakspere Soc., is to me far from satisfactory, and indeed is scarcely a clue to the joke at all, which does not lie in what Touchstone says, but in Audrey's interpretation. It makes but little difference to us what Touchstone's 'feature' is; it may be anything in the world, from a sonnet to the cut of his beard, it may be 'feature' in the sense of composition, or it

Clo. I am heere with thee, and thy Goats, as the most capricious Poet honeft Ouid was among the Gothes.

may be, which I think extremely probable, that the sentence is merely a repetition by Touchstone, in different words, of his previous question, am I the man yet?' But what is important, and must be known before our lungs can crow like chanticleer, is the meaning that Audrey attaches to it which necessitated a 'Lord warrant us' when she alluded to it. Here lay the jest, and I think it still lies there, not in Touchstone's meaning, but hidden in his pronunciation of 'feature,' as Steevens suggested. We need have little doubt that the ea in 'feature' was pronounced to rhyme with the a in our pronunciation of nature. Ellis (Early Eng. Pronun. p. 992) gives 'feature' in palæotype as 'fee·tyyr,' wherein 'ee' has the sound of a in Mary, and 'yy' the sound of the German softened ü. By the analogy of 'Lectors,' however, which we had in the last scene, and of many similar words, I think we have a right to suppose that Touchstone varied this pronunciation and may have said 'fee-tor.' If so, Audrey may readily have accepted it as meaning faitor, which is exactly what Steevens suggested. Faitor means a cheat, a vagabond, a villain. Pistol in 2 Hen. IV: II, iv, 173, says 'Down, down, dogs! down, faitors!' and in Spenser we have 'The false faitor Scudamore.' If this be the jest, it is not, it must be confessed, side-splitting, but it is quite enough to disconcert Touchstone, who was fishing for a compliment, whether we take 'feature' to mean his manly proportions (as I think he means it) or his verses, as Wilkins supposes. In support of the latter interpretation it is a little unfortunate that no other exactly parallel instance of the use of 'feature' in the sense of factura has been cited. In the quotation from Jonson's Volpone the allusion is more physiological than psychological, and, it seems to me, clearly refers to the shape or outline of his play. If, however, Jonson, with his unquestionable scholarship, here uses 'feature' in its classical sense, it should be classed, I think, with the feture of Pliny (cited above by Harrison), which comes from quite a different root, and has quite a different meaning, from factura. There may well have been some peculiarity, not confined to Touchstone, in the pronunciation of 'feature.' In Willobie's Avisa, 1594, on pp. 19, 46, 99 (ed. Grosart), it is spelled fewture, and in no other way, as far as I noticed. This may have been a peculiarity of a Northern dialect, of which there are other indications in the poem, or it may have arisen from some peculiarity in the handwriting of Hadrian Dorrell,' but at any rate I think it helps to justify us in looking to Touchstone's pronunciation as the source wherein Audrey's jest lies perdu.-ED.]

5. FARMER: I doubt not this should be 'Your feature! Lord warrant us! what's feature?"

7. capricious]. CALDECOTT: Caper, capri, caperitious, capricious, fantastical, capering, goatish; and by a similar process are we to smooth 'Goths' into 'goats.' DYCE quotes LETTSOM: No doubt there is an allusion to caper here: but there seems to be also one to capere; at least the word capricious may be used in the sense of 'taking.' Compare [Brewer's?-Dyce] Lingua, II, ii: 'Carry the conceit I told you this morning to the party you wot of. In my imagination 'tis capricious; 'twill take, I warrant thee.'-[p. 368, ed. Hazlitt].

7. Gothes] CALDECOTT: In our early printing Goths and Gothic were spelt Gotes and Gottishe. Wylliam Thomas's Historye of Italye, 1561, fol. 86: 'against the gotes'; and fol. 201: 'Attila, kyng of the Goti. So in Chapman's Homer, passim.

Iaq. O knowledge ill inhabited, worse then Ioue in a thatch'd house.

8, 29, 42. Aside. Johns. et seq.

8

WHITE (Introd. to Much Ado, p. 226, ed. i): This joke of Touchstone's is quite decisive upon the point that the combination oth was sometimes, at least, pronounced ote. If the pronunciation of 'Goths' was not gotes, he might as well have said 'among the Vandals.' [See also vol. xii, p. 431 of Grant White's first edition, where, in one of the earliest attempts to fix the pronunciation of Elizabethan English, White argues rather more strongly perhaps than he would have maintained in his maturer years that 'd, th, and t were indiscriminately used to express a hardened and perhaps not uniform modification of the Anglosaxon .' Ellis (Early Eng. Pronunciation, p. 971) reviews at length White's conclusions and dissents from them: 'there does not appear,' he says, p. 972,' to be any reason for concluding that the genuine English th ever had the sound of t, although some final t's have fallen into th.' This seems to be stated a little too broadly, especially with Touchstone's joke before us, which Ellis elsewhere recog nises, but refers to the category of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words in which at that time there was probably great uncertainty of pronunciation. Again, there is a little strain in thus classing with Latin, Greek, or Hebrew a word as thoroughly Anglosaxon as 'goat.'

We all know that poor Ovid for an unknown misdeed was banished to the bleak shores of the Euxine among the Geta, who are the Goths.-ED.]

8. inhabited] STEEVENS: That is, ill-lodged., An unusual sense of the word. A. similar phrase occurs in Reynolds' God's Revenge against Murder, book v, hist. 21: ♦ Pieria's heart is not so ill-lodged,.... but-that she is very sensible of her disgrace.' Again, in The Golden Legend, ed. Wynkyn de Worde, fol. 196: ‘I am ryghtwysnes that am enhabyted here, and this hous is myne.' ['But,' adds WRIGHT, 'there is no evidence that in Shakespeare's time "inhabit" was equivalent to "lodge" in the active sense. Ill-lodged must be the meaning, although it is not easy to say why.'] ABBOTT thus explains this curious word, § 294: Hence [i. e. from the license in the formation of verbs] arose a curious use of passive verbs, mostly found in the participle. Thus 'famous'd for fights' (Sonn. 25) means 'made famous'; but in 'Who.... would not be so lover'd ?—L. C. 'lover'd' means 'gifted with a lover.' And this is the general rule: A participle formed from an adjective means 'made (the adjective),' and derived from a noun means 'endowed with (the noun).' [Hereupon a page and a half of examples follow, which see; among them, the present phrase is interpreted 'made to inhabit.' See also 'guiled shore,' Mer. of Ven. III, ii, 103.]

9. thatch'd house] UPTON: That of Baucis and Philemon; 'Stipulis et canna tecta palustri.'-Ovid, Met. viii, 630. ['The roofe therof was thatched all with straw and fennish reede.'-Golding's trans. 1567, p. 106]. KNIGHT: The same allusion is in Much Ado, II, i, 99: 'Don Pedro. My visor is Philemon's roof; within the house is Jove. Hero. Why, then, your visor should be thatched.'

9. CAPELL: Does not this reflection of Jaques upon Touchstone's speech imply a sort of consciousness in the Poet, that he had made his clown a little too learned? for, besides that he has made him acquainted with Ovid's situation in Pontus, and his complaints upon that subject in his Poems de Tristibus, he has put into his mouth a conundrum that certainly proves him a latinist; Capricious'. . . . as if it had sprung directly from caper, without the medium either of the French caprice or the Italian

Clo. When a mans verses cannot be vnderstood, nor a mans good wit feconded with the forward childe, vnderstanding: it strikes a man more dead then a great reckoning in a little roome: truly, I would the Gods hadde made thee poeticall.

Aud. I do not know what Poetical is: is it honeft in deed and word: is it a true thing?

Clo. No trulie: for the trueft poetrie is the most faining, and Louers are giuen to Poetrie: and what they sweare in Poetrie, may be faid as Louers, they do feigne. Aud. Do you wish then that the Gods had made me Poeticall?

Clow. I do truly for thou swear'st to me thou art honeft: Now if thou wert a Poet, I might. haue fome hope thou didst feigne.

Aud. Would you not haue me honest?

Clo. No truly, vnlesse thou wert hard fauour'd : for 12, 13. reckoning] reeking Han.

19. may] it may Mason, Coll. (MS) ii, iii.

capriccio: The Poet has indeed qualify'd his learning a little, by giving him 'Goths' for Getes.

13. roome] WARBURTON: Nothing was ever wrote in higher humour than this simile. It implies that the entertainment was mean, and the bill extravagant. MOBERLY: To have one's poetry not understood is worse than the bill of a first-class hotel in a pot-house. REV. JOHN HUNTER: An extensive reckoning to be written out in very small space. [Can this last interpretation possibly be right? To me Moberly's paraphrase is admirable, and the only one.-ED.]

14. poeticall] GILES (p. 193): Touchstone is the Hamlet of motley. He is bitter, but there is often to me something like sadness in his jests. He mocks, but in his mockery we seem to hear echoes from a solitary heart. He is reflective; and melancholy, wisdom, and matter aforethought are in his quaintness. He is a thinker out of place, a philosopher in mistaken vesture, a gentleman without benefice, a genius by nature, an outcast by destiny.

15. honest] That is, chaste. So in I, ii, 38, and 'dishonest,' V, iii, 5.

17, 18. the truest... faining] Capel Lofft (p. 285): This was Waller's courtly apology to Charles II for having praised Cromwell.

19. feigne] JOHNSON: This sentence seems perplexed and inconsequent; perhaps it were better read thus: What they swear as lovers, they may be said to feign as poets. MASON: I would read: it may be said as lovers they do feign. WRIGHT: The construction is confused. Shakespeare may have intended to continue the sentence may be said to be feigned.' [Mason's emendation is so trifling, and yet effective withal, that, if change be necessary, it may well be adopted. But I think change is unnecessary; confused as the construction is, the sense is quite intelligible. -ED.]