101 scrimers, fencers; French escrimeurs. 107 What] Q; Why F. 118 plurisy, excess. 139 unbated, not blunted, lacking the button. a pass of practice, a tricky thrust. 142 a mountebank. Mountebanks were Italian vendors of drugs and quack medicines, who attracted purchasers by improvised dramatic performances on the streets. The best account of their procedure is given in Ben Jonson's play, Volpone or The Fox, Act II. sc. i. 143 that, but dip] Q; I but dipt F. 144 cataplasm, plaster. 146 Under the moon. It was an old belief that medicinal herbs, to have their full effect, should be gathered by the light of the moon. See Merchant of Venice V. i. 12-14. 156 cunnings] Q; comings F. 159 that end] Q; the end F. 162 stuck, thrust. 163 there. After this word Q adds 'But stay, what noise?' omitting the 'How now, sweet queen' of F. 165 they] Q; they'll F. 175 her] Q; the F. 179 incapable, insensible. 182 their] Q; her F. 89 Feeds on his] Johnson; Keeps on his F; Feeds 192 douts, extinguishes, from 'do out.' So F1; Q and on this Q. 99 list, edge. 110 counter, a hunting expression, applied to dogs which follow the trail backwards, i. e., in a direction opposite to that the game has taken. 134 both the worlds, this world and the next. 136 throughly, thoroughly. 137 My will, as regards my will. 146 pelican] Q; Politician F. 150 sensible, sensitive. Q reads 'sensibly.' 176 pansies. The word is connected with the French pensées, thoughts. 217 call't] Q; call F. vi. 24 thine] Q; your F. vii. 10 unsinew'd, feeble. 14 conjunctive, closely joined. 18 the general gender, the common people. 20 the spring that turneth wood to stone. Such petrifying springs exist in Warwickshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire. 21 gyves, fetters. 22 Too slightly timber'd, having shafts too light. 27 Whose worth] Q; Who was F. 51 and] Q; or F. the later folios read 'drowns.' i. 4 crowner, coroner. ACT V 32 even Christian, fellow-Christian. 55 argal, the clown's perversion of ergo, therefore. 68 Yaughan, probably an attempt to represent the German Johann or Dutch Jan, the name of an imaginary innkeeper. 69 In youth when I did love, etc. The three stanzas sung by the clown are an inaccurate version of a lyric ascribed to Lord Vaux and first printed in Tottel's Miscellany (1557). 87 o'er-offices, exercises the prerogatives of his office over. Q reads 'o'er-reaches.' 97 mazzard, head; a slang word. 100 loggats, a game played with sticks of wood (loggats), which were tossed somewhat like quoits. 148, 149 speak by the card, speak with the greatest precision; a metaphor from the mariner's 'card' or compass with its thirty-two points. 151 picked, fastidious. 153 the courtier] Q; our courtier F. kibe, chilblain, appearing on the heel. 61 So. Before this word Q inserts the words, 'Ay, 169 there; there] Q; there F. 64 188 your water. 'Your' has no particular force here except to suggest the hearer's interest. 189 whoreson, an unrefined adjective generally used with a slightly affectionate sense. 203 Yorick, probably intended to represent the Danish form of the name George. It has been suggested that the reference to Yorick may be a compliment to the memory of the great English comedian, Tarleton, who died in 1588. 206 in my imagination it is] Q; my imagination is F. 211 Not one] Q; No one F. 212 grinning] Q; jeering F. 236 Imperial] F; Imperious Q. 239 flaw, gust of wind. 244 it, its. See note on I. ii. 216. of] om. F. 245 couch, lie hidden. 255 crants, the same word as the German Kranz, wreath. F substitutes 'rites,' probably because the rare 'crants' of Q was not understood. 260 a requiem] Q; sage Requiem F. 271 ingenious sense, delicate feeling. 284 For] Q; Sir F. spleenative, full of spleen, given to passion. 285 Away] F; Hold off Q. 288 Hor. F assigns this speech to Gen (tleman). 297 'Swounds] Q; Come F (to avoid profanity). 298 woo't fast] om. F. 299 eisel, vinegar. 310 golden couplets, the dove's two young ones, covered with yellow down. For the meaning of 'disclosed' see note on III. i. 174. 53 changeling, properly a child substituted by fairies for another; here used figuratively for the substituted letter. 57 Why... employment] om. Q. 65 my hopes, my hopes of being king of Denmark. 66 angle, fishing-hook. my proper life, my very life. 68-80 To quit . . . comes here] om. Q. 68 quit, requite. 69 canker, disease. 78 court] Rowe; count F. 89 chough, jack-daw, chatterer. 91 lordship] Q; friendship F. 120 yaw, move unsteadily. Hamlet is purposely speaking pompous nonsense to confuse Osric. 122 article, importance. 125 umbrage, shadow. 149 meed, worth. 162, 163 edified by the margent, alluding to the practice of printing explanatory notes in the margins of Elizabethan books. Hamlet must as it were seek the marginal explanations before he can comprehend Osric's elaborate language. 192 turn] Q; tongue F (misprint?). 196 has] Q; had F. 197 drossy, trivial. 199 yesty collection, frothy inference, superficial knowledge. See IV. v. 9 and note. 200 fond and winnowed] F; prophane and trennowed Q. Probably both readings are corrupt. 'Profound and winnowed,' i.e., deep and well-sifted, has been suggested. 226 gain-giving, misgiving. 251 Sir, in this audience] om. Q. ... 283 an union, a fine pearl. In addition to the passages already quoted by commentators to illustrate the meaning of the word, I have found the following in Arthur Golding's translation of Julius Solinus Polyhistor (1587), Ch. lxv, F f 11: 'While the pearl is in the water it is soft, and as soon as it is taken out of the shell it becometh hard. There are never found above one in a shell, and therefore the Latins call them Unions. They say they be never found above half an inch big.' 286 kettle, kettle-drum. 291 Come, my lord] Q; Come on, sir F. 295 set it] Q; set F. 310 a wanton, a spoiled child. 317 springe, bird-snare. Woodcocks are said to have been used as decoys to attract other birds to the snare. They were proverbial for their stupidity and were often caught themselves. 346 sergeant, a sheriff's officer, whose business was to make arrests. 350 cause aright] Q; causes right F. 359 S. D. shot within. F gives 'shout' for 'shot,' but the reference to the 'warlike volley' in 363 establishes the text. 364 o'ercrows, a metaphor from cock-fighting. 369 solicited, prompted. The object is not quite certain. Perhaps the sentence is left unfinished. 375 This] Q; His F. quarry, properly the pile of slain deer after a hunt. havoc, indiscriminate slaughter. 386 jump, precisely. See Ì. i. 65. OTHELLO CINTHIO'S HECATOMMITHI AND OTHER work that only the heroine is given a specific name: POSSIBLE SOURCES-It has been pointed out Disdemona. The other figures are distinguished that in 1508 a distinguished warrior of Venice, Chris- merely by their titles, sometimes quite confusedly topher Moro, Lord Lieutenant of Cyprus, was de- applied: the Moor or the Captain (Othello), the tained in the island by a false scare of Turkish in- Captain (Cassio), the Ancient (Iago), the Ancient's vasion, and that when he returned to undertake the wife (Emilia). The Shakespearean names are taken government of Candia, he came mourning "for the partly from the characters in earlier plays of the death of his wife on her way from Cyprus." Moro poet (e. g., Montano, Gratiano, Bianca), partly as was not a Moor, the name being that of a great the poet chanced to meet them in his general reading. Venetian family, nor was his marriage tragedy of his In Bianca Shakespeare combines two of Cinthio's own making; but it has been conjectured that the minor figures, a casually mentioned courtesan and story of the Moor of Venice may have originated in the Captain's (Cassio's) wife. Of Montano, Roa misunderstanding of his name, and that the straw- derigo, Gratiano, and Lodovico no trace exists in berries embroidered on Desdemona's handkerchief Cinthio, and Brabantio is suggested only in the bare may represent the mulberry ("moro" in Italian), statement that Disdemona's parents had disapproved which canting heraldry assigned the Moro family as her marriage with the Moor. a badge. Another critic has called attention to the fact that in 1562, a few months before Shakespeare's birth, a famous Italian soldier of fortune, Sampiero, strangled with her handkerchief his beautiful and innocent wife in a scene of magnificent but deluded jealousy, prompted by the artful defamations of the lady which his political enemies had circulated. Shakespeare's transfiguration of an unusually clumsy tale into a supreme tragedy is achieved by alterations of three kinds: (a) By endowing the various characters with human interest. In this respect it can hardly be said that Cinthio offered any hint whatever. (b) By giving coherence to the story. The dismissal of Cassio and Desdemona's intercession for From either of these sources Shakespeare may pos- him; the stealing of Desdemona's handkerchief, sibly have derived a hint or two for his play. Other- which Iago drops in Cassio's room; the scene in wise the plot of Othello seems indebted only to the which Othello witnesses and misinterprets the conpoet's imagination and to the twenty-seventh story versation between Iago and Cassio (IV. i. 75, etc.); in Geraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi (The Hundred and Iago's wounding of Cassio in the leg are all Tales), 1566, with which Shakespeare must appar- found with differences of detail in Cinthio; but they ently have become familiar either in Italian or in are there haphazard occurrences bound together by French, no English version of the time being known. no logical purpose. Cassio, for example, is dismissed, Cinthio's ill-constructed narrative is called "The quite without the responsibility of lago, because he Moor of Venice" and is thus (inaccurately) sum- chances to wound a private soldier, and Iago has marized in the prefatory argument: "A Moorish nothing whatever to do with the fact that Desdemona captain takes to wife a Venetian dame, and his an- undertakes to secure his reinstatement. cient accuses her of adultery to her husband; it is (c) By giving finality and tragic force to the close. planned that the ancient is to kill him whom he be- Even the development of the transcendent characters lieves to be the adulterer; the captain kills the of Othello and Iago out of their insipid prototypes woman, is accused by the ancient; the Moor does not does not testify to a higher degree of imaginative confess, but after the infliction of extreme torture, power than does the creation of the terror and beauty is banished; and the wicked ancient, thinking to in- of the last act of Othello out of the base material jure others, provided for himself a miserable death." provided by the Italian story. This is the way in It is characteristic of the vagueness of Cinthio's which the death of Desdemona is managed in Cinthio, "Then they consulted of one means and another-in revenge then discloses the circumstances of the poison and daggers-to kill poor Disdemona, but murder to the Captain (Cassio), who, eager to secould resolve on nothing. At length the Ancient cure vengeance for his lost leg, accuses the Moor said, ‘A plan comes to my mind, which will give you before the Venetian Signory. The Moor refuses to satisfaction and raise cause for no suspicion. It is confess, and after several days' confinement is let this: the house in which you live is very old, and off with a decree of banishment. The only suggesthe ceiling of your chamber has many cracks; Ition of justice or reason is contained in the bare propose we take a stocking filled with sand, and beat statement that the Moor was "eventually slain by the Disdemona with it till she dies; thus will her body kins folk of Disdemona, as he merited," and that later bear no signs of violence. When she is dead we the Ancient died an unpleasant death in consequence can pull down a portion of the ceiling, and thus of torture inflicted while he was being tried for a make it seem as if a rafter falling on her head had subsequent crime. Such is the almost incredibly fukilled the lady. Suspicion cannot rest on you, since tile conclusion which seems to have supplied Shakeall men will impute her death to accident.' This speare with his only external suggestion for the most cruel counsel pleased the Moor, and he only waited heart-rending of all his catastrophes. for a fitting time to execute the plot. One night, when he and Disdemona had retired to bed, the Ancient, whom the Moor had concealed in a closet which opened into the chamber, raised a noise in the closet, according to a concerted plan; whereat the Moor said to his wife, 'Did you not hear that noise?' 'Indeed I heard it,' she replied. 66 "Rise,' said the Moor, 'and see what 'tis.' A POSSIBLE DRAMATIC INFLUENCEOthello is one of the very few among Shakespeare's more conspicuous plays of which there is no reason to believe that the theme had been employed in any earlier English drama. But though no previous treatment of "the gentle lady married to the Moor" had presumably appeared on the stage, a circumstance of London theatrical history may possibly explain what turned Shakespeare's thoughts to the Mediterranean setting of this play. On May 19, 1601, Shakespeare's most energetic competitor in There "The unhappy Disdemona rose from bed, and the instant she approached the closet, out rushed the Ancient, and being strong and of stout nerve, he beat her cruelly with the bag of sand across her back; theatrical management, Philip Henslowe, was expendupon which Disdemona fell to the ground, scarce ing money on a revival of Marlowe's Jew of Malta, able to draw her breath; but with the little voice she one of the greatest stage successes of the era. had left, she called upon the Moor for aid. But the existed at this time a marked tendency for the rival Moor, leaping from bed, exclaimed, "Thou wickedest companies of Shakespeare and Henslowe to attempt of women, thus has thy falseness found its just re- to cap each other's offerings to the public. A halfward.'... The wretched lady, hearing these words, dozen years earlier, Shakespeare pretty certainly and feeling that she was near her end (for the wrote his Merchant of Venice as a match for the Ancient had given her another blow), appealed to story of the Christian-hating Jew and his daughter the justice of Heaven, since justice here had failed in this same play of Marlowe; and now it may have her, in proof of her fidelity and truth; and as she been the desire to find a subject parallel with Marwas thus calling Heaven to witness, the wicked En- lowe's secondary theme of the sixteenth-century wars sign inflicted a third blow, under which she sank of Christians and Turks over the Mediterranean lifeless on the floor. Then the Ancient and the Moor, laying Disdemona on the bed and wounding her head, pulled down part of the ceiling of the chamber as they had arranged; whereupon the Moor began to call aloud for help, exclaiming that the house was falling. Hearing this uproar, the neighbors all came running up, and there found Disdemona lying dead beneath a rafter,-a sight which, from the good life of that poor lady, did fill all hearts with sorrow." isles that first led the poet to delve in Cinthio. Only in the first act do we find any approximation to Marlowe's subject. After Iago's plot is launched, the internal psychological tension becomes so allabsorbing as to exclude other interest and require the unceremonious "banging" of the Turkish fleet at the beginning of Act II. DATE-The suggested connection between Othello and the revival of The Jew of Malta in 1601 would The two murderers escape detection and live un- indicate the middle of that year as the time when molested till the dastardly Moor, coming to loathe the first notion of the play was conceived. The same his confederate and yet fearing to attempt violence earlier limit of composition is established by the against him, deprives him of his post. The Ancient fact that Othello's fine lines on the Pontic Sea (III. iii. 453, etc.) follow a passage in Philemon Holland's "But let me not forget one chiefest part translation of Pliny, first printed in 1601. On the Wherein, beyond the rest, he mov'd the heart, evidence of a dubious record published by J. P. The grieved Moor, made jealous by a slave, Who sent his wife to fill a timeless grave, Collier in 1836 Othello is said to have been presented Then slew himself upon the bloody bed. Aug. 6, 1602, before Queen Elizabeth. In any case, All these and many more with him are dead." the position of the play, after Hamlet and before Othello was one of the most popular of ShakeLear, is sufficiently proved by another document now speare's plays during the Restoration age, and its accepted as trustworthy, which records the perform-revival in 1660, very soon after the return of Charles ance of "The Moor of Venice" at the palace of Whitehall, Nov. 1, 1604. TEXT-The first edition of Othello was published in 1622 in separate quarto form by Thomas Walkley. The next year the play appeared again in the 1623 Shakespeare Folio. By some stratagem Walkley seems to have anticipated the publishers of the Folio, and the copyright of the play remained in his possession till 1628 when he transferred it to Richard Hawkins, who in 1630 published a second quarto. A third followed in 1655, and between 1681 and 1695 three others, so-called "players' quartos," were evoked by the current theatrical performances of the play. The second quarto is occasionally interesting for the reason that it represents a kind of blend between the texts of the first quarto and the Folio, but it has very little independent authority. The text of the first quarto is certainly based on an older and less perfect manuscript than the Folio. It lacks considerably more than a hundred and fifty lines found in the latter, while containing less than a dozen peculiar to itself. The presence in the quarto alone of a number of light oaths indicates that the manuscript it represents was prepared before the act against profanity on the stage (1606), and thus substantiates the accepted date of the play. There is no question that the Folio version is the better, and that edition is made the basis of the present text, all significant deviations from it being recorded in the notes. Consultation of these notes will show that, in addition to the few new lines contributed by the quarto and the comparatively trivial matter of the oaths, Walkley's version makes it possible in about ten or a dozen places to correct an important error in the Folio. II, signalized an enormous advance in theatrical art, for on this occasion Desdemona was played by the first woman who is known to have acted on the English public stage. An introductory prologue justifies the innovation and illustrates some of the inconveniences of having female parts performed by men: "For to speak truth, men act, that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen; With bone so large and nerve so incompliant, When you call Desdemona, enter Giant." Samuel Pepys witnessed the production on Oct. 11, 1660, and approved. "To the cockpit," he writes, "to see "The Moor of Venice,' which was well done. Burt acted the Moor; by the same token, a very pretty lady that sat by me called out to see Desdemona smothered." Burt's Othello was supported by the Iago of Clun and the Cassio of Shakespeare's great-nephew Hart. James Quin, the great Falstaff of the next century, added a somewhat comic touch to his Othello by setting off the traditional jetblackness of the Moor's skin by "a large powdered major wig" and white gloves. The public seems to have had more fondness for Quin's Othello, bizarre as it sounds, than for that of his contemporary, Garrick, whose comparative failure in the play may In 1785 Mrs. Siddons acted Desdemona at Druryhave been due in part to his diminutive stature. Lane to the Othello of her brother John Kemble, the latter appearing "in a British general officer's uniform." The Othello of Edmund Kean has been called that great actor's unapproachable masterpiece, and was there is definite record. It was while giving a fareperhaps the finest interpretation of the rôle, of which well performance of Othello to the Iago of his son STAGE HISTORY-All that is known of the first Charles, March 25, 1833, that Kean was smitten performance of Othello has been indicated in the with death, falling unconscious just after he had findiscussion of the play's date. The part of the Moorished the great speech of the third act, "Farewell, was created by the finest tragic actor of Shakepeare's company, Richard Burbage, whose interpretation of the character was so notable as to be particularly commemorated in some verses written after the player's death in 1619: Othello's occupation's gone!" As a young man, the American, Edwin Forrest, played Iago to Kean's Othello at Albany, N. Y. (1826), winning the warm praise of the veteran by a new interpretation. In 1836 and again in 1845 Forrest's Othello was tri |