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Yet none of you would once plead for his life.
O God! I fear, thy justice will take hold
On me, and you, and mine, and yours, for this.-
Come, Hastings, help me to my closet.
Poor Clarence!

O,

[Exeunt King, Queen, HAST. RIV. DOR. and GREY. Glo. This is the fruit of rashness!-Mark'd you not, How that the guilty kindred of the queen

Look'd pale, when they did hear of Clarence' death? O! they did urge it still unto the king:

God will revenge it. Come, lords; will you go,

To comfort Edward with our company?
Buck. We wait upon your grace.

SCENE II.

The same.

[Exeunt.

Enter the Duchess of York,5 with a Son and Daughter of Clarence.

Son. Good grandam, tell us, is our father dead?
Duch. No, boy.

Daugh. Why do you weep so oft? and beat your breast; And cry-O Clarence, my unhappy son!

Son. Why do you look on us, and shake your head, And call us-orphans, wretches, cast-aways,

If that our noble father be alive?

6

Duch. My pretty cousins, you mistake me both; I do lament the sickness of the king,

As loth to lose him, not your father's death;

4 Come, Hastings, help me to my closet] Hastings was Lord Chamberlain to King Edward IV. Malone.

5 Enter the Duchess of York,] Cecily, daughter of Ralph Neville first Earl of Westmoreland, and widow of Richard Duke of York, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield in 1460. She survived her husband thirty-five years, living till the year 1495.

Malone.

6 my pretty cousins,] The Duchess is here addressing her grand-children, but cousin was the term used in Shakspeare's time, by uncles to nephews and nieces, grandfathers to grandchildren, &c. It seems to have been used instead of our kinsman, and kinswoman, and to have supplied the place of both.

See note on Othello, Act I, sc. i. Steevens.

Malone

It were lost sorrow, to wail one that's lost.

Son. Then, grandam, you conclude that he is dead. The king my uncle is to blame for this:

God will revenge it; whom I will impórtune

With earnest prayers, all to that effect.

Daugh. And so will I.

Duch. Peace, children, peace! the king doth love you well:

Incapable and shallow innocents,7

You cannot guess who caus'd your father's death.
Son. Grandam, we can: for my good uncle Gloster
Told me, the king, provok'd to 't by the queen,
Devis'd impeachments to imprison him:
And when my uncle told me so, he wept,
And pitied me, and kindly kiss'd my cheek;
Bade me rely on him, as on my father,
And he would love me dearly as his child.

Duch. Ah, that deceit should steal such gentle shapes,
And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice!
He is my son, ay, and therein my shame,
Yet from my dugs he drew not this deceit.

8

Son. Think you, my uncle did dissemble, grandam? Duch. Ay, boy.

Son. I cannot think it. Hark! what noise is this? Enter Queen ELIZABETH, distractedly; RIVERS, and DORSET, following her.

Q. Eliz. Ah! who shall hinder me to wail and weep? To chide my fortune, and torment myself? I'll join with black despair against my soul,

And to myself become an enemy.

Duch. What means this scene of rude impatience? Q. Eliz. To make an act of tragick violence:— Edward, my lord, thy son, our king, is dead.—

7 Incapable and shallow innocents,] Incapable is unintelligent. So, in Hamlet:

8

"As one incapable of her own distress." Steevens.

my

Malone.

uncle did dissemble,] Shakspeare uses dissemble in the sense of acting fraudulently, feigning what we do not feel or think; though strictly it means to conceal our real thoughts or affections. So also Milton in the passage quoted in p. 61, n. 6.

Malone.

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Why grow the branches, when the root is gone?
Why wither not the leaves, that want their sap?-
If you will live, lament; if die, be brief;

That our swift-winged souls may catch the king's;
Or, like obedient subjects, follow him

To his new kingdom of perpetual rest.9

Duch. Ah, so much interest have I in thy sorrow,
As I had title in thy noble husband!

I have bewept a worthy husband's death,
And liv'd by looking on his images: 1

But now, two mirrors of his princely semblance
Are crack'd in pieces by malignant death;2
And I for comfort have but one false glass
That grieves me when I see my shame in him.
Thou art a widow; yet thou art a mother,

And hast the comfort of thy children left thee;
But death hath snatch'd my husband from my arms,
And pluck'd two crutches from my feeble hands,
Clarence, and Edward. O, what cause have I,
(Thine being but a moiety of my grief)

To over-go thy plaints, and drown thy cries?

Son. Ah, aunt! you wept not for our father's death;

How can we aid you with our kindred tears?

Daugh. Our fatherless distress was left unmoan'd,

Your widow-dolour likewise be unwept!

Q. Eliz. Give me no help in lamentation,

I am not barren to bring forth laments:

All springs reduce their currents to mine eyes,

9 of perpetual rest.] So the quarto. The folio reads-of ne'er changing night. Malone.

11

his images:] The children by whom he was represented. Johnson. So, in The Rape of Lucrece, Lucretius says to his daughter: "O, from thy cheeks my image thou hast torn." Malone.

2 But now, two mirrors of his princely semblance Are crack'd in pieces by malignant death;] So, in our author's Rape of Lucrece:

"Poor broken glass, I often did behold

"In thy sweet semblance my old age new born;
"But now, that fair fresh mirror, dim and old,
"Shows me a bare-bon'd death by time out-worn.”

Again, in his 3d Sonnet:

"Thou art thy mother's glass," &c. Malone.

That I, being govern'd by the watry moon, 3
May send forth plenteous tears to drown the world!
Ah, for my husband, for my dear lord Edward!

Chil. Ah, for our father, for our dear lord Clarence!
Duch. Alas, for both, both mine, Edward and Clarence!
Q. Eliz. What stay had I, but Edward? and he's gone.
Chil. What stay had we, but Clarence? and he 's gone.
Duch. What stays had I, but they? and they are gone.
Q. Eliz. Was never widow, had so dear a loss.
Chil. Were never orphans, had so dear a loss.
Duch. Was never mother, had so dear a loss.
Alas! I am the mother of these griefs;
Their woes are parcell'd, mine are general.
She for an Edward weeps, and so do I;

I for a Clarence weep, so doth not she:
These babes for Clarence weep, and so do I:4
I for an Edward weep, so do not they :5.

3-being govern'd by the watry moon,] That I may live hereafter under the influence of the moon, which governs the tides, and by the help of that influence drown the world. The introduction of the moon is not very natural. Johnson.

The same thought has already occurred in K. Henry IV, P. 1: - being governed, as the sea is, by the moon.” Steevens.

4

and so do I:] So the quarto. The variation of the folio is remarkable: It reads-so do not they. Malone.

5 I for an Edward weep, so do not they:] The text is here made out partly from the folio and partly from the quarto. In the quarto this and the preceding fine stand thus:

"These babes for Clarence weep, and so do I;

"I for an Edward weep, and so do they."

The end of the second line is evidently corrupted. In the MS. from which the folio was printed, or in a corrected quarto copy, the two lines undoubtedly were right:

"These babes for Clarence weep, [and so do I;

"I for an Edward weep,] so do NOT they."

But the compositor's eye passing over two half lines, the passage was printed thus in the folio, in one line:

"These babes for Clarence weep, so do not they."

I have stated this matter thus particularly, because it confirms an observation that I have more than once had occasion to make in revising these plays; that there is reason to suspect that many of the difficulties in our author's works have arisen from the omission of either single words, single lines, or the latter half of one line with the half of the next: a solution which readers are very slow to admit, and generally consider as chimerical. One week's acquaintance with the business of the press (without those proofs

Alas! you three, on me, threefold distress'd,
Pour all your tears, I am your sorrow's nurse,
And I will pamper it with lamentations.

Dor. Comfort, dear mother; God is much displeas'd,
That you take with unthankfulness his doing:
In common worldly things, 'tis call'd-ungrateful,
With dull unwillingness to repay a debt,

Which with a bounteous hand was kindly lent;
Much more, to be thus opposite with heaven,7
For it requires the royal debt it lent you.

Riv. Madam, bethink you, like a careful mother,
Of the young prince your son: send straight for him,
Let him be crown'd; in him your comfort lives:
Drown desperate sorrow in dead Edward's grave,
And plant your joys in living Edward's throne.
Enter GLOSTER, BUCKINGHAM, STANLEY, HASTINGS,
RATCLIFF, and Others.

Glo. Sister, have comfort: all of us have cause
To wail the dimming of our shining star;
But none can cure their harms by wailing them.-
Madam, my mother, I do cry you mercy,

I did not see your grace:– Humbly on my knee

which a collation of the quartos with each other and with the first folio affords) would soon convince them that my supposition is not a mere offspring of imagination. In the plays, of which there is no authentick copy but the first folio, there is no means of proving such omissions to have happened; but the present and other - proofs of their having actually happened in the other plays, lay surely a reasonable ground for conjecturing that similar errors have happened in those pieces, of which there is only a single ancient copy extant, and entitle such conjectures to indulgence.

See Vol. VII, p. 87, n. 4; Vol. VIII, p. 51, n. 2, and p. 296, n. 2; Vol. X, p. 220, n. 5; Coriolanus, Vol. XIII, Act II, sc. iii; and Antony and Cleopatra, Vol. XIII, Act IV, sc. x.

In this note, and throughout this play, where I have spoken of the quarto, without any specification of the year when printed, I meant the quarto 1598, the earliest which I had then seen. quarto 1597, I find, corresponds with the text. Malone.

The

6 Comfort, dear mother; &c.] This line and the following eleven

lines are found only in the folio. Malone.

7to be thus opposite with heaven,] This was the phraseology of the time. Malone.

8 For it requires - i. e. because. So, in Othello:

66 Haply, for I am black"

Steevens.

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