SCENE V. The same. Enter DIOMEDES and a Servant. DIO. Go, go, my servant, take thou Troilus' horse; 2 Present the fair steed to my lady Cressid: SERV. I go, my lord. Enter AGAMEMNON. AGAM. Renew, renew! The fierce Polydamus Hath beat down Menon :3 bastard Margarelon+ ⚫ take thou Troilus' horse ;] So, in Lydgate: "To Cressida," &c. STEEVENS. 3 Hath beat down Menon:] So, in Caxton's Recuyl, &c.: "And by grete yre assayllid the kynge Menon, cosyn of Achilles, and gaf hym so many strokes wyth his sword upon hys helme, that he slewe hym," &c. STEEVENS. 4 -bastard Margarelon-] The introduction of a bastard son of Priam, under the name of Margarelon, is one of the circumstances taken from the story book of The Three Destructions of Troy. THEobald. The circumstance was taken from Lydgate, p. 194: "Which when the valiant knight, Margareton, "One of king Priam's bastard children," &c. STEEVENS. Hath Doreus prisoner; And stands colossus-wise, waving his beam," 5 7 waving his beam,] i. e. his lance like a weaver's beam, as Goliath's spear is described. So, in Spenser's Fairy Queen, B. III. vii. 40: 6 "All were the beame in bignes like a mast.” STEEVENS. —pashed-] i. e. bruised, crushed. So, before, Ajax says: "I'll pash him o'er the face." STEEVENS. "the dreadful Sagittary Appals our numbers;] "Beyonde the royalme of Amasonne came an auncyent kynge, wyse and dyscreete, named Epystrophus, and brought a M. knyghtes, and a mervayllouse beste that was called SAGITTAYRE, that behynde the myddes was an horse, and to fore, a man: this beste was heery like an horse, and had his eyen rede as a cole, and shotte well with a bowe: this beste made the Grekes sore aferde, and slewe many of them with his bowe." The Three Destructions of Troy, printed by Caxton. THEOBALD. A more circumstantial account of this Sagittary is to be found in Lydgate's Auncient Historie, &c. 1555: "And with hym Guydo sayth that he hadde "Or the lyghtnyng that falleth from ye heauen; Enter NESTOR. NEST. Go, bear Patroclus' body to Achilles; And bid the snail-pac'd Ajax arm for shame.There is a thousand Hectors in the field: 8 Now here he fights on Galathe his horse, 8 "Dredeful of loke, and rede as fyre of chere, "So sterne he was that many of them quoke," &c. STEEVENS. -on Galathe his horse,] From The Three Destructions of Troy is taken this name given to Hector's horse. THEOBALD. "Cal'd Galathe (the which is said to have been) "The goodliest horse," &c. Lydgate, p. 142. Again, p. 175: "And sought, by all the means he could, to take Heywood, in his Iron Age, 1632, has likewise continued the same appellation to Hector's horse: 66 My armour, and my trusty Galatee.” Heywood has taken many circumstances in his play from Lydgate. John Stephens, the author of Cinthia's Revenge, 1613, (a play commended by Ben Jonson in some lines prefixed to it,) has mounted Hector on an elephant. STEEVENS. 9 - scaled sculls-] Sculls are great numbers of fishes swimming together. The modern editors, not being acquainted with the term, changed it into shoals. My knowledge of this word is derived from Bullokar's English Expositor, London, printed by John Legatt, 1616. The word likewise occurs in Lyly's Midas, 1592: "He hath, by this, started a covey of bucks, or roused a scull of pheasants." The humour of this short speech consists in a misapplication of the appropriate terms of one amusement to another. Again, in Milton's Paradise Lost, B. VII. v. 399, &c. : Before the belching whale;' then is he yonder, "With fry innumerable swarms, and shoals "Of fish, that with their fins and shining scales Again, in the 26th Song of Drayton's Polyclbion: 66 My silver-scaled sculs about my streams do sweep." STEEVENS. Scaled means here dispersed, put to flight. See Vol. VI. p. 312, n. 5; and Vol. XVI. p. 9, n. 8. This is proved decisively by the original reading of the quarto, scaling, which was either changed by the poet himself to scaled, (with the same sense,) or by the editor of the folio. If the latter was the case, it is probable that not being sufficiently acquainted with our author's manner, who frequently uses the active for the passive participle, he supposed that the epithet was merely descriptive of some quality in the thing described. The passage quoted above from Drayton does not militate against this interpretation. There the added epithet silver shows that the word scaled is used in its common sense; as the context here (to say nothing of the evidence arising from the reading of the oldest copy) ascertains it to been employed with the less usual signification already stated. "The cod from the banks of Newfoundland (says a late writer) pursues the whiting, which flies before it even to the southern shores of Spain. The cachalot, a species of whale, is said, in the same manner, to pursue a shoal of herrings, and to swallow hundreds in a mouthful." Knox's History of Fish, 8vo. 1787. The throat of the cachalot (the species of whale alluded to by Shakspeare) is so large, that, according to Goldsmith, he could with ease swallow an ox. MALONE. Sculls and shoals have not only one and the same meaning, but are actually, or at least originally, one and the same word. A scull of herrings (and it is to those fish that the speaker alludes) so termed on the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, is elsewhere called a shoal. RITSON. 1 -the belching whale;] So, in Pericles: "And humming water, must o'erwhelm thy corse." Homer also compares Achilles to a dolphin driving other fishes before him, Iliad XXI. v. 22: σε Ὡς δ ̓ ὑπὸ δελφῖνος μεγακήτεις ἰχθύες αλλοι And there the strawy Greeks, ripe for his edge, Fall down before him, like the mower's swath:3 Here, there, and every where, he leaves, and takes; Dexterity so obeying appetite, That what he will, he does; and does so much, That proof is call'd impossibility. Enter ULYSSES. ULYSS. O, courage, courage, princes! great Achilles Is arming, weeping, cursing, vowing vengeance: Patroclus' wounds have rous'd his drowsy blood, Together with his mangled Myrmidons, That noseless, handless, hack'd and chipp'd, come to him, Crying on Hector. Ajax hath lost a friend, And foams at mouth, and he is arm'd, and at it, Roaring for Troilus; who hath done to-day Mad and fantastick execution; Engaging and redeeming of himself, With such a careless force, and forceless care, the strawy Greeks,] In the folio it is the straying Greeks. JOHNSON. 3 the mower's swath:] Swath is the quantity of grass cut down by a single stroke of the mower's scythe. So, Tusser: "With tossing and raking, and setting on cocks, "Grass, lately in swathes, is meat for an ox." STEEVENS. |