Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners: / with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare; on a Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris dance.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT I.

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This is the name of the injured lady's father in the novel of Belleforest which Mr. Steevens supposes to have furnished the plot of the play; a circumstance that tends very much to prove the justness of that gentleman's opinion.

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See a future note on The taming of the shrew, Act IV. Scene 1.

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This mode of expression will admit of a little more illustration than it has already received. The practice to which it refers was calculated to advertise the public of any matters which concerned itself or the party whose bills were set up; and it is the more necessary to state this, because the passages which have been used in explanation might induce the reader to suppose that challenges and prize-fightings were the exclusive objects of these bills. This however was not the case. In Northbrooke's Treatise against dicing, dauncing, vaine plaies, &c., 1579, 4to, a work much resembling that extremely curious volume Stubbes's Anatomie of abuses, we are told that they used "to set up their billes upon postes certain dayes before, to admonish the people to make resort unto their theatres, that they may thereby be the better furnished, and the people prepared to fill their purses with their treasures." In the play of Histriomastix, a man is introduced setting up text billes for playes; and William Rankins, another puritanical writer against plays, which he calls the instruments of Satan, in his Mirrour of monsters, 1587, 4to, p. 6, says, that "players by sticking of their bils in London, defile the streetes with their infectious filthines." Mountebanks likewise set up their bills. "Upon this scaffold also might bee mounted a number of quacksalving emperickes, who arriving in some country towne, clap up their terrible billes in the market place, and filling the paper with such horrible names of diseases, as if every disease were a divell, and that they could conjure them out of any towne at their pleasure." Dekkar's Villanies discovered by lanthorne and candle-light, &c., 1616, 4to, sign. H. Again, in Tales and quick answeres, printed by Berthelette, b. l. n. d. 4to, a man having lost his purse in London "sette up bylles in divers places that if any man of the cyte had founde the purse and woulde brynge it agayn to him he shulde have welle for his laboure. A gentyllman of the Temple wrote under one of the byls howe the man shulde come to his chambers and told where." It appears from a very rare little piece entitled Questions of profitable and pleasant concernings talked of by two olde seniors, &c., 1594, 4to, that Saint Paul's was a place in which these bills or advertisements were posted up. Thomas Nashe in his Pierce Pennilesse his supplication to the divell, 1595, 4to, sign. E. speaks of the "maisterlessemen that set up theyr bills in Paules for services, and such as paste up their papers on every post, for arithmetique and writing schooles:" we may therefore suppose that several of the walks about Saint Paul's cathedral then resembled the present Royal Exchange with respect to the business that was there transacted; and it appears indeed, from many allusions in our old plays, to have been as well the resort of the idle, as the busy. The phrase of setting up bills continued long after the time of Shakspeare and is used in a translation of Suetonius published in 1677, 8vo, p. 227.

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In further exemplification of this sort of arrow, the following representations have been collected. A very sagacious modern editor of King James's Christ's kirk on the green has stated that the line "the bolt flew o'er the bire" is a metaphor of a thunderbolt flying over the cowhouse!

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There is a covert allusion in this speech that will not admit of a particular explanation. Debauchees imagine that wine recruits the loss of animal spirits. Love is used here in its very worst sense, and the whole is extremely gross and indelicate.

ACT II.

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From the unfortunate loss of these Merry tales, a doubt has arisen from whence they were translated, it being pretty clear that they were not originally written in English. Two authorities have been produced on this occasion, the Cent nouvelles nouvelles, and the Decameron of Boccaccio.

Mr. Steevens is an advocate for the first of these, and refers to an edition of them mentioned by Ames. This, it is to be presumed, is the Hundred merry tales noticed under the article for James Roberts. To this opinion an objection has been taken by Mr. Ritson, on the ground that many of the tales in the Cent nouvelles nouvelles are "very tragical, and none of them calculated to furnish a lady with good wit." Now it appears that out of these hundred stories only five are tragical, viz. novels 32, 47, 55, 56, and 98. In the old editions they are entitled Comptes plaisans et recreatiz pour deviser en toutes compaignies, and Moult plaisans á raconter par maniere de joyeuseté.

Mr. Reed has "but little doubt that Boccace's Decameron was the book here alluded to." If this gentleman's quotation from Guazzo's Civile conversation, 1586, be meant to establish the existence of the above work in an English dress it certainly falls short of the purpose; because it is no more than a translation of an author, who is speaking of the original Decameron. But there is a more forcible objection to Mr. Reed's opinion, which is, that the first complete English translation of Boccaccio's novels was not published till 1620, and after Shakspeare's death. The dedication states indeed, that many of the tales had long since been published; but this may allude to those which had appeared in Painter's Palace of pleasure, or in some other similar work not now remaining. There are likewise two or three of Boccaccio's novels in Tarlton's Newes out of purgatory, which might be alluded to in the above dedication, if the work which now remains under the date of 1630 was really printed in 1589, as may be suspected from a license granted to Thomas Gubbin. There seems to have been some prior attempt to publish the Decameron in English, but it was "recalled by my Lord of Canterbury's commands." See a note by Mr. Steevens prefixed to The two gentlemen of Verona. There is a remarkable fact however that deserves to be mentioned in this place, which is, that in the proem to Sacchetti's Novelle, written about the year 1360, it appears that Boccaccio's novels had been then translated into English, not a single vestige of which translation is elsewhere to be traced.

A third work that may appear to possess some right to assert its claim on the present occasion is the Cento novelle antiche, which might have been translated before or in Shakspeare's time, as it has been already shown in a note on the story of Twelfth night that he had probably seen the 13th novel in that collection. It may likewise be worth mentioning that Nashe in his Pappe with an hatchet, speaks of a book then coming out under the title of A hundred merrie tales, in which Martin Marprelate, i. e. John Penry, and his friends were to be satirized.

On the whole, the evidence seems to preponderate in favour of the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. As the greatest portion of this work consists of merry stories, there is no impropriety in calling it The hundred merry tales; the term hundred being part of the original title, and the epithet merry in all probability an addition for the purpose of designating the general quality of the stories. The Decameron of Boccaccio, which contains more tragical subjects than the other, is called in the English translation A hundred PLEASANT novels.

Whatever the hundred merry tales really were, we find them in existence so late as 1659, and the entire loss of them to the present age might have been occasioned by the devastation in the great fire of London.

It was the custom for those who were forsaken in love to wear willow garlands. This tree might have been chosen as the symbol of sadness from the verse in psalm 137, "We hanged our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof;" or else from a coincidence between the weeping willow and falling tears. Another reason has been assigned. The Agnus castus or vitex, was supposed by the ancients to promote chastity, "and the willow being of a much like nature," says an old writer, "it is yet a custom that he which is deprived of his love must wear a willow garland." Swan's Speculum mundi, chap. 6. sect. 4. edit. 1635. Bona, the sister of the king of France, on receiving news of Edward the Fourth's marriage with Elizabeth Grey, exclaims, "In hope he'll prove a widower shortly, I'll wear a willow garland for his sake." See Henry the Sixth, part iii. and Desdemona's willow song in Othello, Act IV. Two more ballads of a similar nature may be found in Playford's Select ayres, 1659, folio, pp. 19, 21.

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This reading of the older copy has been judiciously preferred to a jealous complexion. Yellow is an epithet often applied to jealousy by the old writers. In The merry wives of Windsor, Nym says he will possess Ford with yellowness. Shakspeare more usually terms it green-eyed.

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The print in Borde of the Englishman with a pair of shears, seems to have been borrowed from some Italian or other foreign picture in ridicule of our countrymen's folly. Coryat, in his Crudities, p. 260, has this remark; "we weare more phantasticall fashions than any nation under the sunne doth, the French onely excepted; which hath given occasion both to the Venetian and other Italians to brand the Englishman with a notable marke of levity, by painting him starke naked with a paire of shears in his hand, making his fashion of attire according to the vaine invention of his braine-sicke head, not to comelinesse and decorum." Purchas, in his Pilgrim, 1619, 8vo, speaks of "a naked man with sheeres in one hand and cloth in the other," as a general emblem of fashion. Many other allusions to such a figure might be cited, but it was not peculiar to the English. In La geographie Françoise, by P. Du Val d'Abbeville, 1663, 12mo, the author, speaking of the Frenchman's versatility in dress, adds, "dans la peinture des nations on met pres de luy le cizeau."

The inconstancy of our own countrymen in the article of dress is described in the following verses from John Halle's Courte of vertue, 1565, 12mo.

Randle Holme complained that in his time (1680) Englishmen were as changeable as the moon in their dress, "in which respect," says he, "we are termed the Frenchmen's apes, imitating them in all their fantastick devised fashions of garbs." Acad. of armory, book iii. ch. 5.

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It has been already shown that the stalking bull was equally common with the stalking horse. It was sometimes used for decoying partridges into a tunnelling net, or cage of net work, in the form of a tun, with doors. The process is described at large, with a print, in Willughby's Ornithology, 1678, folio, p. 34, where an account is also given of the stalking-horse, ox, stag, &c.

Howel in his Vocabulary, sect. xxxv. seems to have mistaken the tun or net into which the birds were driven, for the stalking bull itself. Sometimes, as in hunting the wolf, an artificial bush and a wooden screen were used to stalk with. See Clamorgan, Chasse du loup, 1595, 4to, p. 29.

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Mr. Theobald explains this "into a thousand pieces of the same bigness," as if Beatrice had torn the letter by rule and compass. Mr. Steevens more properly supposes halfpence to mean small pieces; but his note would have been less imperfect if he had added that the halfpence of Elizabeth were of silver, and about the size of a modern silver penny.

ACT III.

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Dr. Farmer has illustrated this term by citing a passage from Sidney's Arcadia; but he has omitted a previous description in which Cupid is metamorphosed into a strange old monster, sitting on a gallows with a crown of laurel in one hand, and a purse of money in the other, as if he would persuade folks by these allurements to hang themselves. It is certainly possible that this might have been Shakspeare's prototype; we should otherwise have supposed that he had called Cupid a hangman metaphorically, from the remedy sometimes adopted by desparing lovers.

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When Margaret adds that this tune "goes without a burden," she does not mean that it never had words to it, but only that it wanted a very common appendage to the ballads of that time. The name itself may be illustrated by the following extract from The glasse of man's follie, 1615, 4to. "There be wealthy houswives, and good house-keepers that use no starch, but faire water: their linnen is white, and they looke more Christian-like in small ruffes, then Light of love lookes in her great starched ruffs, looke she never so hie, with eye-lids awrye." This anonymous work is written much in the manner of Stubbes's Anatomie of abuses, and for the same purpose.

ACT IV.

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Though three explanations have been already offered, there is room for further conjecture. From the latter words of Beatrice it is clear that Benedick had stopped her from going. She may therefore intend to say that notwithstanding she is detained by force, she is in reality absent; her heart is no longer Benedick's.

ACT V.

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An allusion to these lines in the old calendars that describe the state of man:

In the Notbrowne mayde we have the expression lusty May. Capel's edit. p. 6. Roger Ascham, speaking of young men, says; "It availeth not to see them well taught in yong yeares, and after when they come to lust and youthfull dayes, to give them licence to live as they lust themselves." Scholemaster, 1571, fo. 13. See a former note in p. 45.

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Mr. Holt White's ingenious note may be supported by the following passage in Carew's Survey of Cornwall, 1602, 4to. p. 76: the author is speaking of wrestling. "This hath also his lawes, of taking hold onely above girdle, wearing a girdle to take hold by, playing three pulles, for tryall of the mastery, &c."

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In this comparison the prince is the staff, and the question is what sort of a one is here alluded to. Messrs. Steevens, Reed, and Malone, conceive it to be the staff used in the ancient trial by wager of battle; but this seems to have but small claim to be entitled reverend. On the contrary, as the combatants were of the meaner class of people, who were not allowed to make use of edged weapons, the higher ranks usually deciding the business by hired champions, it cannot well be maintained that much, if any, reverence belongs to such a staff. It is possible, therefore, that Shakspeare, whose allusions to archery are almost as frequent as they are to cuckoldom, might refer to the bowstaff, which was usually tipped with a piece of horn at each end, to make such a notch for the string as would not wear, and at the same time to strengthen the bow, and prevent the extremities from breaking. It is equally possible that the walking-sticks or staves used by elderly people might be intended, which were often headed or tipped with a cross piece of horn, or sometimes amber. They seem to have been imitated from the crutched sticks, or potences, as they were called, used by the friars, and by them borrowed from the celebrated tau of St. Anthony. Thus in The Canterbury tales, the Sompnour describes one of his friars as having "a scrippe and tipped staf," and he adds that

In these instances the epithet reverend is much more appropriate than in the others.

Mrs. Lenox, assuming, with the same inaccuracy as had been manifested in her critique on Measure for measure, that Shakspeare borrowed his plot from Ariosto, proceeds to censure him for "poverty of invention, want of judgment, and wild conceits," deducing all her reasoning from false premises. This is certainly but a bad method of illustrating Shakspeare.