Shall we buy treason? and indent with feres," When they have lost and forfeited themselves? No, on the barren mountains let him starve; For I shall never hold that man my friend Whose tongue shall ask me for one penny cost To rausom home revolted Mortimer. Hot. Revolted Mortimer! He never did fall off, my sovereign liege, But by the chance of war ;-To prove that true Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds, Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took, He did confound the best part of an hour Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood; K. Hen. Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him, He never did encounter with Glendower; He durst as well have met the devil alone, Art thou not asham'd? But, sirrah, henceforth As will displease you.-My lord Northumberland, We license your departure with your son :— [Exeunt KING HENRY, BLUNT, and Train. Feres. The usual reading is fears. We have explained our reasons for the change in the Illustrations to this Act. -Illustration.6 Base and rotten policy. This is the reading of the folio -the quartos, bare. Bare policy, Monck Mason well observes, is no policy at all. N 2 "Zounds, I will speak of him; and let my soul Want mercy, if I do not join with him: In his behalf I'll empty all these veins, And shed my dear blood drop by drop i' the dust, But I will lift the down-trod Mortimer As high i' the air as this unthankful king, As this ingrate and canker'd Bolingbroke. North. Brother, the king hath made your nephew mad. [TO WORCESTER. Wor. Who struck this heat up, atter I was gone? Hot. He will, forsooth, have all my prisoners; And when I urg'd the ransom once again Of my wife's brother, then his cheek look'd pale; And on my face he turn'd an eye of death, By Richard that dead is, the next of blood? From whence he, intercepted, did return Wor. And for whose death, we in the world's wide mouth Live scandaliz'd, and foully spoken of. Hot. But, soft, I pray you; Did king Richard then Proclaim my brother Mortimer king, That wish'd him on the barren mountains starv'd. In his behalf. This is the reading of the folio;-the quartos, yea, on his part. b O, pardon, if. So the folio and some of the quartos;the first quarto, and that of 1604, 0, pardon me. 177 a Did 'gage them both in an unjust behalf,— To answer all the debt he owes unto yon, Wor. Hot. If he fall in, good night :-or sink or swim : Hot. All studies here I solemnly defy, But that I think his father loves him not, Wor. Farewell, kinsman! I will talk to you, When you are better temper'd to attend. North. Why, what a wasp-tongue and impatient fool Art thou, to break into this woman's mood; Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own! Hot. Why look you, I am whipp'd and scourg'd with rods, Nettled, and stung with pismires, when I hear Of this vile politician, Bolingbroke. In Richard's time,-What do you call the place ? A plague upon 't!-it is in Gloucestershire ;— 'Twas where the mad-cap duke his uncle kept; His uncle York;-where I first bow'd my knee Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke, When you and he came back from Ravenspurg. North. At Berkley castle. Hot. You say true: Why, what a candy deal of courtesy This fawning greyhound then did proffer me! me! Good uncle, tell your tale, for I have done. Wor. Nay, if you have not, to't again; We'll stay your leisure. a Wasp-tongue. Wasp stung, which finds a place in most editions, is the reading of the first quarto. Steevens says Shakspere knew the sting of a wasp was not situated in its mouth;Malone properly replies-"it means only having a tongue as peevish and mischievous as a wasp. ' Hot. soners. Deliver them up without their ransom straight, reasons, Which I shall send you written, be assur'd Hot. Of York, is 't not? Wor. True; who bears hard His brother's death at Bristol, the lord Scroop. As what I think might be, but what I know Upon my life it will do wond'rous well. North. Before the game's afoot thou still lett'st slip.b Hot. Why, it cannot choose but be a noble plot : And then the power of Scotland and of York, To join with Mortimer, ha? Wor. And so they shall. Hot. In faith, it is exceedingly well aim'd. Wor. And 't is no little reason bids us speed, To save our heads by raising of a head: For, bear ourselves as even as we can, The king will always think him in our debt; And think we think ourselves unsatisfied, Till he hath found a time to pay us home. And see already, how he doth begin To make us strangers to his looks of love. Hot. He does, he does; we 'll be reveng❜d on him. Wor. Cousin, farewell;-No further go in this, Than I by letters shall direct your course When time is ripe, which will be suddenly; a I'll steal to Glendower, and lord Mortimer; Where you and Douglas, and our powers at once, (As I will fashion it,) shall happily meet, To bear our fortunes in our own strong arms, Which now we hold at much uncertainty. North. Farewell, good brother: we shall thrive, I trust. Hot. Uncle, adieu :-O, let the hours be short, Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport! [Exeunt. a Suddenly. We make the sentence here end, as in the first folio. The modern editors read, "No further go in this Than I by letters shall direct your course. When time is ripe," &c. ILLUSTRATIONS OF ACT I. 1 SCENE II.-" Phœbus,-he, that wandering knight so fair." THE" wandering knight so fair" was the Knight of the Sun, who, when Don Quixote disputed with the Curate which was the better knight, Palmerin of England or Amadis de Gaul, was maintained by master Nicolas, the barber-surgeon, to be that knight to whom "none ever came up." The adventures of the Knight of the Sun were translated into English in 1585; and the renowned worthy is described in the romance not only as a prodigious "wanderer" but as "most excellently fair." Falstaff's allusion to the romance would be well understood by many of Shakspere's audience; nor would they object to the sun being represented as a wanderer, according to the longreceived theory which the discoveries of Copernik had scarcely then shaken. Douce thinks the allusion was to a spiritual romance, translated from the French, by the name of the Wandering Knight; and which may have suggested to Bunyan the idea of his Pilgrim's Progress. 2 SCENE II.-"The drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe." Steevens is of opinion that the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe is here used, metaphorically, for the croak of the frog in the marshes. Malone, by an apt quotation, has shewn that a bagpipe was peculiar to Lincolnshire. The following passage is from "A Nest of Ninnies. By Robert Armin." (1608):— "At a Christmas time, when great logs furnish the hall fire; when brawne is in season, and indeed all reveling is regarded; this gallant knight kept open house for all commers, were beefe, beere, and bread was no niggard. Amongst all the pleasures provided, a noyse of minstrells and a Lincolnshire bagpipe was prepared: the minstrells for the great chamber, the bagpipe for the hall; the minstrells to serve up the knight's meate, and the bagpipe for the common dauncing." 3 SCENE II." The melancholy of Moor-ditch." Moor-ditch, a part of the ditch surrounding the city of London, between Bishopsgate and Cripplegate, was not only stinking, poisonous, muddy, black, as described by Thomas Decker, in 1606, but it was bounded by an unwholesome and impassable morass; so that the citizens, who had many beautiful suburban fields, regarded this quarter as amongst the melancholy places in which pestilence continually lurked, and which they naturally shunned. 4 SCENE II." Sir John Sack-and-Sugar." The favourite potation of Falstaff-" a good sherris-sack"-which, with the genial knight, "ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish, and dull, and crudy vapours which en viron it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes,"-has had a somewhat different effect upon certain expounders of its virtues. The solemn disputations which the world has seen upon the nature of "sherris-sack"-whether it was sweet or drywhether it was Sherry or Malaga-whether the name sack was derived from sec, because it was dry, or from secco, because it was sold in a bagwhy Falstaff drank it with sugar, and why he eschewed lime in it-have wasted much learned ink; and, like many other controversies, the questions which have agitated the disputants seem to be left pretty much in their original obscurity. It may be sufficient to refer to Dr. Drake (Shakspere and his Times, vol. ii. p. 130) for the main argument, on one side, that "sherris-sack" was not our Sherry, but was a sweet wine; and to Archdeacon Nares (Glossary, art. Sack) on the other hand, that "sherris-sack was undoubtedly the same wine which we now call Sherry, a wine of the dry or rough kind. There appears only one thing quite certain in the controversy,-that the English in the time of Elizabeth were accustomed to put sugar in their wines; and this fact rests upon the authority of Paul Hentzner and Fynes Moryson. SCENE II. "But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill." We have given a view of Gadshill, which appears to have been a place notorious for robberies before the time of Shakspere ;-for Steevens discovered an entry of the date of 1558, in the books of the Stationers' Company, of a Ballad entitled "The Robbery at Gadshill." But Sir Henry Ellis, of the British Museum, (to whom the public is indebted for the discovery and publication of many curious historical documents, and to whom we are under many personal obligations for valuable suggestions as to the conduct of this edition of Shakspere), communicated to Mr. Boswell a narrative in the hand-writing of Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, dated 3d July, 1590, which shews that Gadshill was at that period the resort of a band of robbers of more than usual daring. The Chief Baron, it seems, indicted 'certain malefactors' upon suspicion of the robberies; and this document contains a narrative of his proceedings. The robbers were, it seems, like Falstaff's companions, mounted, and wore visors; and the unhappy travellers whom they plundered are, in the narrative, called “true men.' We cannot afford space for more than one paragraph from this paper, which is printed at length in Boswell's edition of Malone's Shakspere, vol. xvi., page 432 :-"In the course of that Michaelmas Term, I being at London, many robberies were done in the by-ways at Gadeshill on the west part of Rochester, and at Chatham Down on the east part of Rochester, by horse thieves, with such fat and lusty horses as were not like hackney horses nor far journeying horses; and one of them sometimes wearing a vizard grey beard, he was by common report in the country called Justice Grey Beard; and no man durst travel that way without great company." 7 SCENE III" Who then affrighted," &c. The author of "A Dialogue on Taste," 1762, speaking of this passage, says,-"Had not Shakspere been perverted by wrong taste and imitation, he could never have produced such lines as those. Nature could never have pointed out to him that a river was capable of cowardice, or that it was consistent with the character of a gentleman such as Percy, to say the thing that was not." We like, now and then, to shew our readers what was the standard of criticism, combining the qualities of pertness and dullness, in the early days of George III. Johnson alludes, we believe, to this criticism (which we have dragged from its obscurity) when be explains that "Severn is here not the flood, but the tutelary power of the flood." We presume, according to the author of the Dialogue on Taste, that Milton said the thing that was not, when he described Sabrina, another tutelary power of the Severn, rising "attended by water nymphs," and inging that exquisite lay "By the rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the osier dank, My sliding chariot stays." 6 SCENE III.-" Indent with feres." The old copies all read "Shall we buy treason? and indent with feares, When they have lost and forfeited themselves?" The modern copies invariably read "indent with fears." To "indent" is to agree-to sign an indenture to make a contract. When the king complains that Hotspur still doth deny his prisoners, unless Mortimer is ransom'd "at our own charge," he asks "shall we buy treason?"-shall we pay the ransom of Mortimer to Glendower, when they both are revolted-both allied in treason against me, by a family compact? But what are the fears with which the king refuses to indent, "When they have lost and forfeited themselves?' How can a contract be made with 'fears'? how can 'fears' forfeit themselves! The earlier commentators say that 'fears' may be used in the active sense for 'terrors;' or that 'fears' may be substituted for 'fearful people'-for 'dastards,' who have lost or forfeited themselves. Mr. Collier says that "indent with fears," means "subscribe an indenture as if under apprehension." Mr. Dyce has "not the smallest doubt that fears is equivalent to objects of fear." We have ventured, without any support from preceding editors, to substitute the word feres, in sound the same as the received reading. A fere, as is known to all students of our early poetry, is a companion. In "The Ancient Fragment of the Marriage of Sir Gawaine," (Percy's Reliques, vol. iii.) we have, "What when lords go with their feires, she said, If feres, then, were to be taken in the general sense of companions, brethren, associates,-and in this particular case applied to Glendower and Mortimer who have become fellows, colleagues, confederates, we should have a very fair reading -certainly a superior reading to fears. But in the passage before us, we are inclined to think, feres has a meaning beyond that merely of mates or companions, which is the familiar usage;-a meaning which was very likely to present itself to Shakspere, from his undoubted acquaintance with legal phrases and customs connected with tenures. The word fere, feere, pheer, or phear, as it is variously written, is derived from the Saxon fera, or gefera, a companion; but it is precisely from the same species of derivation that we obtain the word vassal. The feudal vassals have been supposed to have had their origin in the comites, (companions,) attending each of the German chiefs in war; and the word vassal itself, following its derivation from the German gesell, means a helper or subordinate associate. We believe, then, that the king, in the passage before us, alludes to Mortimer and Glendower as his revolted vassals-they are feres, with whom the king refuses to "indent," "When they have lost and forfeited themselves." But in this line and a half we have two other technical words, indent and forfeited. A deed is, in law, either an indenture or a deed poll. An indenture is a deed between two parties,-a deed poll is the declaration of one party. The king, then, refuses to put himself upon equal terms with Mortimer and Glendower-to indent with those who are his feres, his vassals. But these vassals are further not in a condition to make a contract with their lord, they have forfeited themselves-by their treason they have incurred the forfeiture of their fees, or fiefs. And this brings us to the connexion which appears to us to subsist between the words fee and fere. Lands held under the feudal obligation to a superior lord were held in fee. We have an example, in Skelton's Lament upon the Earl of Northumberland : : "More specially barons, and those knygtes bold, Here, the companions of the earl, the feres, were entertained in fee. We are not aware of any English example which would show that the holders in fee were called feres-but in Scotland, whilst an estate held by a vassal under a superior is a Feu, the possessor of such an estate is a Feuar. The different names which have originated in the feudal system, for the estate and the tenant, the one name arises out of the other, stand thus: |