I. iv. 107. dolphin or dogfish. Dogfish, a small shark, was commonly used as an opprobrious epithet. Dolphin is the invariable form of the French title Dauphin in the early editions of the play. Modern editors substitute the present spelling in all cases except this, where the pun requires retention of the older form. It should be remarked that the Dauphin of the play was from the legitimist French point of view King of France (Charles VII) through the entire course of the action, since the death of his father, Charles VI, occurred only two months after that of Henry V. The English, however, ignored Charles VII's pretensions to the throne and continued to employ his old title.

I. v. 6. Blood will I draw on thee, thou art a witch. Johnson asserted the existence of a superstition that 'he that could draw the witch's blood was free from her power'; but no confirmation of this has apparently been found in Elizabethan literature.

I. v. 14 S. d. Joan here goes from the lower to the upper stage of the Elizabethan theatre, lines 1518 being spoken from the upper or balcony stage.

I. v. 21. like Hannibal. The allusion is perhaps to the stratagem recorded by Livy (bk. xxii. c. 16, 17); Hannibal extricated his forces from an unfavorable position by driving against Fabius's army during the night two thousand oxen with blazing fagots tied to their horns.

I. v. 28. tear the lions out of England's coat. The armorial dress of the kings of England was embroidered with three lions (or leopards).

I. vi. 4. Astræa's daughter. That is, daughter of Justice, in allusion to the myth that Astræa forsook the world when it became corrupt, and carried her divine scales to the constellation of Libra. Spenser develops the legend elaborately at the opening of the fifth book of the Fairy Queen; and Peele's Descensus Astrææ turns it into a pageant in honor

of the installation of a new lord mayor of London in 1591.

I. vi. 6. Adonis' gardens. What these were in classic literature has been acrimoniously disputed, but a beautiful and extended description, which perhaps inspired the present line, is given by Spenser, Fairy Queen, bk. iii. canto vi.

I. vi. 22. Rhodope's of Memphis. One of the most beautiful pyramids was said to have been built by Rhodope, a Greek courtesan who married the king of Memphis. The reading in the text is a conjecture of Capell for 'Rhodophes or Memphis' of the Folios.

I. vi. 25. the rich-jewell'd coffer of Darius. Alexander the Great is said to have kept Homer's poems under his pillow at night and during the day to have carried them 'in the rich iewel cofer of Darius, lately before vanquished by him in battaile.' (Puttenham, Art of English Poesie, 1589.)

II. i. 7 S. d. dead march. The dead march is in honor of Salisbury, whose body is carried with the army. Cf. line 4 of the next scene. (Hart.)

II. i. 8. redoubted Burgundy. Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had been alienated from the Dauphin by the treacherous murder of his father in 1419. He was the ally of the English from the time of the treaty of Troyes (1420) till 1435. He was the second cousin of Charles VII and father of the famous Charles the Bold.

II. i. 38 S. d. The French leap o'er the walls in their shirts. This entire episode, which the dramatist has transferred to Orleans, is based upon an incident that really occurred in May, 1428 (a year before the relief of Orleans), at Le Mans in the adjacent province of Maine. Holinshed, following earlier chroniclers, records that the Frenchmen, surprised by ar early morning counter-attack, 'got vp in their shirts, and lept ouer the walles.'

II. iii. 6. As Scythian Tomyris by Cyrus' death. The story of Herodotus is that Tomyris, Queen of the Massagetæ, led her troops to battle after her husband's death, slew Cyrus the Great (B. C. 529), and in scorn of his bloodthirstiness dropped his severed head into a wine skin filled with blood. Compare the countess's address to Talbot in line 34. II. iii. 22. this is a child, a silly dwarf. The countess exaggerates greatly. Talbot was eighty years of age when he fell in battle, and the examination of his bones, when they were exhumed in 1874, showed that he could not have been undersized. "The bones generally were remarkably well developed, and had evidently belonged to a muscular man.'

II. iv. 6. Or else was wrangling Somerset in th' error? Capell changed error to 'right' and Rolfe, retaining the old text, wished to interpret else as 'in other words.' Neither, probably, is justified. Richard's apparent alternatives amount to the same thing. From craft or from impetuosity he leaves the hearers to whom he appeals but one answer. It is 'heads, I win; tails, Somerset loses.'

II. iv. 7. Faith, I have been a truant in the law. Shakespeare brilliantly imagines the quarrel of the roses to have started among a group of young aristocrats, studying law in the Temple.

II. iv. 81. the yeoman. Somerset's slur is explained in his next speech. The execution of Plantagenet's father for treason (as recorded in the play of Henry V) deprived his heir of all titles of nobility. Lionel of Clarence, third son of Edward III, was not the grandfather, as Warwick states in line 83, but the great-great-grandfather of Plantagenet. See the genealogical table on next page.

II. iv. 96. attached, not attainted. Literally, arrested, but not formally condemned, as by bill of attainder, to the legal consequences of treason. It is evident that the speaker is splitting hairs, but it

does appear that Richard was permitted to succeed to his inheritances without the formal restoration to his blood which the play represents (III. i. 148 ff.). See D. N. B.

II. v. 6. Nestor-like aged, in an age of care. That is, trebly aged by care. "The care that has afflicted my life has made me as old as Nestor' (who lived through three mortal lifetimes).

The poet adopts

II. v. 7. Edmund Mortimer. without essential alteration the statement of the chroniclers. Holinshed says: 'Edmund Mortimer, the last earle of March of that name (which long time had beene restreined from his libertie . . .) deceassed without issue; whose inheritance descended to the lord Richard Plantagenet.' Modern commentators point out that the chronicles, and with them Shakespeare, are wrong, since this Mortimer died in freedom in 1424. Apparently, they confused Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, with his cousin, Sir John Mortimer, who after long captivity was executed in the same year (1424). It is evident, moreover, from the use of the word 'mother' rather than 'grandmother' in line 74, that Shakespeare further confuses Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, with an older Edmund Mortimer, his uncle, just as he does in the first part of Henry IV. (See note on I. iii. 145, 146 of that play in the present edition.)

II. v. 96. the rest I wish thee gather. Probably gather is used in the well-authenticated Shakespearean sense of 'infer,' and Mortimer desires cautiously to remind his nephew of the full significance of his heirship; namely, the claim to the crown that it carries with it.

II. v. 129. 'Or make my injuries an instrument for attaining my ambition.' The Folios read 'will' instead of ill, the latter being one of Theobald's convincing emendations.