The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [Vol. 2 of 9]

Hym. Then is there mirth in heaven,

When earthly things made even

104 Atone together.

105 Good Duke, receive thy daughter:

Hymen from heaven brought her,

Yea, brought her hither,

108 That thou mightst join her hand with his

109 Whose heart within his bosom is.

110 Ros. To you I give myself, for I am yours.

To you I give myself, for I am yours.

Duke S. If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.

113 Orl. If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.

114 Phe. If sight and shape be true,

115 Why then, my love adieu!

Ros. I’ll have no father, if you be not he:

I’ll have no husband, if you be not he:

Nor ne’er wed woman, if you be not she.

Hym. Peace, ho! I bar confusion:

120 ’Tis I must make conclusion

Of these most strange events:

Here’s eight that must take hands

To join in Hymen’s bands,

If truth holds true contents.

125 You and you no cross shall part:

You and you are heart in heart:

You to his love must accord,

Or have a woman to your lord:

You and you are sure together,

130 As the winter to foul weather.

Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing,

Feed yourselves with questioning;

That reason wonder may diminish,

134 How thus we met, and these things finish.

Song.

135 Wedding is great Juno’s crown:

O blessed bond of board and bed!

’Tis Hymen peoples every town;

High wedlock then be honoured:

Honour, high honour and renown,

140 To Hymen, god of every town!

Duke S. O my dear niece, welcome thou art to me!

142 Even daughter, welcome, in no less degree.

Phe. I will not eat my word, now thou art mine;

144 Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine.

Enter Jaques de Boys.

145 Jaq. de B. Let me have audience for a word or two:

I am the second son of old Sir Rowland,

That bring these tidings to this fair assembly.

Duke Frederick, hearing how that every day

Men of great worth resorted to this forest,

150 Address’d a mighty power; which were on foot,

In his own conduct, purposely to take

His brother here and put him to the sword:

And to the skirts of this wild wood he came;

Where meeting with an old religious man,

155 After some question with him, was converted

Both from his enterprise and from the world;

His crown bequeathing to his banish’d brother,

158 And all their lands restored to them again

That were with him exiled. This to be true,

I do engage my life.

Duke S.

160 Welcome, young man;

161 Thou offer’st fairly to thy brothers’ wedding:

To one his lands withheld; and to the other

A land itself at large, a potent dukedom.

First, in this forest let us do those ends

165 That here were well begun and well begot:

And after, every of this happy number,

That have endured shrewd days and nights with us,

Shall share the good of our returned fortune,

169 According to the measure of their states.

170 Meantime, forget this new-fallen dignity,

And fall into our rustic revelry.

Play, music! And you, brides and bridegrooms all,

With measure heap’d in joy, to the measures fall.

Jaq. Sir, by your patience. If I heard you rightly,

175 The Duke hath put on a religious life

And thrown into neglect the pompous court?

Jaq. de B. He hath.

Jaq. To him will I: out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learn’d.

180 [To Duke S.] You to your former honour I bequeath;

181 Your patience and your virtue well deserves it:

[To Orl.] You to a love, that your true faith doth merit:

[To Oli.] You to your land, and love, and great allies:

[To Sil.] You to a long and well-deserved bed:

185 [To Touch.] And you to wrangling; for thy loving voyage

Is but for two months victuall’d. So, to your pleasures:

I am for other than for dancing measures.

Duke S. Stay, Jaques, stay.

Jaq. To see no pastime I: what you would have

190 I’ll stay to know at your abandon’d cave. [Exit.

191 Duke S. Proceed, proceed: we will begin these rites,

192 As we do trust they’ll end, in true delights. [A dance.

000 EPILOGUE.

Ros. It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue: yet to good wine they 005 do use good bushes; and good plays prove the better by 006 the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, 007 that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me: my way is 010 to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as 012 much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women,—as I perceive by your 014 simpering, none of you hates them,—that between you and 015 the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make 020 curtsy, bid me farewell. [Exeunt.

NOTES.

AYLI TOC

Note I.

Le Beau is so called in F₁ on his first entrance, afterwards always ‘Le Beu.’

The banished Duke is called Duke Senior in the stage directions.

Rosalind is spelt indifferently thus and ‘Rosaline.’

Rowe, in his second edition, besides ‘Touchstone’ and ‘William,’ introduced among the Dramatis Personæ ‘A clown in love with Audrey.’ He was followed by Pope, Theobald, Hanmer, and Warburton. Johnson struck it out.

Note II.

i. 1. 46. The correction revenues for reverence has been made in MS. by some unknown hand in Capell’s copy of the third Folio. The writing somewhat resembles Warburton’s.

Note III.

i. 2. 79. There can be no doubt that the words ‘wise men’ here printed as two, in obedience to modern usage, were frequently in Shakespeare’s time written and pronounced as one word, with the accent on the first syllable, as ‘madman’ is still. See Sidney Walker’s Criticisms, Vol. ii. p. 139.

Note IV.

i. 2. 147, 149. It does not seem necessary to make any change in the text here. Perhaps Shakespeare wrote the prose parts of the play hastily, or it may be that Orlando, who is summoned by Celia, but whose thoughts are fixed upon Rosalind, is made to say ‘them,’ not ‘her,’ designedly.

Note V.

i. 2. 187. Before we were aware of Mason’s conjecture, it occurred to us that the sentence would run better thus: ‘An you mean to mock me after, you should not have mocked me before.’ ‘And,’ for ‘an,’ is a more probable reading than ‘if,’ as it may have been omitted by the printer, who mistook it for part of the stage direction—‘Orl. and’ for ‘Orland.’ We have since discovered that Theobald proposed ‘An.’

Note VI.

i. 3. 92. See a discussion as to the proper punctuation and meaning of the words ‘No, hath not?’ in Notes and Queries, 1st Ser. Vol. vii. p. 520, and in Mr Singer’s note on this passage. It may be doubted whether the passages quoted by Mr Grant White are apposite to this, where there is a double negative.

Note VII.

iii. 2. 317. In the fourth Folio, and in Rowe’s two editions, the word ‘kindled’ happens to be in two lines, and therefore divided by a hyphen. Pope, misled by this, printed it in his first edition as a compound, ‘kind-led,’ interpreting it probably with reference to the gregarious habits of the animal in question.

Note VIII.

iii. 3. 80–83. Johnson proposes to arrange these lines as follows:

Clo.... Come, sweet Audrey; we must be married, or we must live in bawdry.

Jaq. Go thou with me, and let me counsel thee. [They whisper.

Clo. Farewell, &c.

Note IX.

iii. 4. 38. As the word ‘puisny’ is here used not in the modern sense of ‘diminutive,’ but in the now obsolete sense of ‘inferior, unskilled,’ we think it better to retain the spelling of the Folios.

Note X.

iv. 2. 12. The words ‘Then sing him home, the rest shall beare this burthen’ are printed in the Folios as part of the song. Rowe and Pope made no change. Theobald first gave ‘the rest shall bear this burthen’ as a stage direction. Mr Knight, Mr Collier, Mr Grant White and Mr Dyce take the whole to be a stage direction, Mr Grant White reading ‘They sing him home,’ for ‘Then.......’ Mr Halliwell prints ‘Then sing him home, the rest shall bear—This burthen.’ Mr Knight gives in a note the music written for this song by Hilton, and published in 1652. In Hilton’s setting, the words ‘Then sing him home, &c.’ are left out, but that, as Mr Knight implies, is not conclusive as to the original song.

Capell’s arrangement is as follows:

1 v. What......deer?

2 v. His.........wear.

1 v. Then ......home.

BOTH.

Take ......born.

1 v. Thy ........wore it.

2 v. And ........bore it.

CHO.

The horn......scorn.

Note XI.

iv. 3. 164. Malone wrongly attributes the reading ‘Sir’ for ‘Sirra’ to the second Folio.

Note XII.

v. 3. 17. The Edinburgh MS. mentioned in our footnotes is one in the Advocates’ Library (fol. 18), and the song has been reprinted from it in Chappell’s Collection of National English Airs, ed. 1840, p. 130.