Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 149 pages of information about Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk.

Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 149 pages of information about Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk.

October 1, A. D. 1582.

LAUS DEO.

Footnotes: 

{8a} Quicken, bring to life.

{8b} Debtors were often let out of prison at the coronation of a new king; but creditors never paid by him.

{21a} The word here omitted is quite illegible.  It appears to have some reference to the language of the Highlanders.  That it was rough and outlandish is apparent from the reprimand of Sir Thomas.

{29a} By this deposition it would appear that Shakspeare had formed the idea, if not the outline, of several plays already, much as he altered them, no doubt, in after life.

{39a} The greater part of the value of the present work arises from the certain information it affords us on the price of small needles in the reign of Elizabeth.  Fine needles in her days were made only at Liege, and some few cities in the Netherlands, and may be reckoned among those things which were much dearer than they are now.

{39b} Mr. Tooke had not yet published his Pantheon.

{44a} This was really the case within our memory.

{45a} It was formerly thought, and perhaps is thought still, that the hand of a man recently hanged, being rubbed on the tumour of the king’s evil, was able to cure it.  The crown and the gallows divided the glory of the sovereign remedy.

{46a} And yet he never did sail any farther than into Bohemia.

{50a} Smock, formerly a part of the female dress, corresponding with shroud, or what we now call (or lately called) shirt of the man’s.  Fox, speaking of Latimer’s burning, says, “Being slipped into his shroud.”

{50b} Faith nailing the ears is a strong and sacred metaphor.  The rhyme is imperfect,—­Shakspeare was not always attentive to these minor beauties.

{53a} Shakspeare seems to have profited afterward by this metaphor, even more perhaps than by all the direct pieces of instruction in poetry given him so handsomely by the worthy knight.  And here it may be permitted the editor to profit also by the manuscript, correcting in Shakspeare what is absolute nonsense as now printed:-

Vaulting ambition that o’erleaps itself.”

It should be its SellSell is saddle in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian.

This emendation was shewn to the late Mr. Hazlitt, an acute man at least, who expressed his conviction that it was the right reading, and added somewhat more in approbation of it.

{55a} It has been suggested that this answer was borrowed from Virgil, and goes strongly against the genuineness of the manuscript.  The Editor’s memory was upon the stretch to recollect the words; the learned critic supplied them:-

“Solum AEneas vocat:  et vocet, oro.”

The Editor could only reply, indeed weakly, that calling and waiting are not exactly the same, unless when tradesmen rap and gentlemen are leaving town.

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Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.