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Menecrates, and Menas Johnson: The persons are so named in the first edition. I know not why Menecrates appears; Menas can do all without him. [In the following note, Capell endeavours to prove that a judicious discrimination will distinguish Menas from Menecrates; that ‘Mene,’ in line 5, should be Menas; and that, furthermore, Warburton's emendation, delay's for ‘decayes’ is just.] Capell (i, 31): All the speeches in this scene, except one by Varrius, are given by the Folios to Pompey and Menecrates only; this was such a palpable error with respect to one of them [line 49] that it stands corrected in all the moderns, and of that speech Menas is made the speaker, and so he should be of [that in line 5]. A little reflection upon the characters of the parties in question, will set the whole of this scene in the clearest light; and shew, withal, the propriety of both these corrections [namely, Menas for Mene. in line 5, and Warburton's delay's]: The character of Pompey is mark'd by—a high sense of honour; and by a natural honesty, join'd with irresolution and a backwardness to engage in great actions: that of Menas has nothing particular, but that he is Pompey's fast friend: Menecrates is also his friend; but not in favour, like Menas, from being discontented, and disapproving his patron's conduct: Thus stated, the characters themselves will point out who the speeches belong to: he who speaks in the second agrees with Pompey, in thinking—that the gods would befriend them at last; but, delivering his opinion in the form of a maxim, ‘what they do delay, they not deny,’ the other takes occasion from one of those words to tell him—that there was a delay which he should make his chief petition to heaven, meaning—a delay of the preparations against him: this is taken up by Menecrates, whose dissent is worded also in maxims, a respectful way of expressing dissent; intimating by them,—that his opinion was rather, that Pompey himself should prepare, and attack the triumvirs before their whole strength was gather'd together: and this speech of Menecrates is a most unanswerable argument in favour of the latter amendment [delay's], and no small one in that of the first [Menas for Mene.]; for, unless delay's be admitted, no reason can be assign'd for making the reflections contain'd in it; and, if he be the maker of them, he could not be so of that in the other speech, their tendencies being so contrary. Malone: I have given the first two speeches to Menecrates, and the rest to Menas. It is a matter of little consequence. [For Johnson's suggestion that this Scene might be included in the First Act, see the beginning of the next Scene.]
they shall assist Staunton: The precision now observable in the employment of shall and will in the best writers was not regarded in Shakespeare's day. He commonly follows the old custom of using the former for the latter to denote futur ity, whether in the second and third persons or in the first. [There is more than simple futurity in the present ‘shall;’ there is a futurity so inevitable that it is equivalent to must. Abbott (§ 315) has gathered several similar uses of shall.—Ed.]
decayes Warburton: This nonsense should read thus: delay's. Menecrates had said, ‘The Gods do not deny that which they delay.’ The other turns his words to a different meaning, and replies, ‘Delay is the very thing we beg of them,’ i. e. the delay of our enemies in making preparations against us; which he explains afterwards, by saying Mark Antony was tied up by lust in Egypt; Cæsar by avarice at Rome; and Lepidus employed in keeping well with both. [This emendation of Warburton would have been relegated to the Text. Notes, had it not beguiled as sensible an editor as Capell.] Heath: (p. 453): This emendation of Mr Warburton's is certainly nonsense, whatever becomes of the common text which he is pleased to call so. Who ever prayed for success in any enterprize, and at the same time prayed that that success might be delayed as long as he should pray for it? Besides the reply of Menecrates plainly implies that delay was not the thing sued for; but something else which was for the present denied; which could not be delay, since Pompey was already in possession of that, but must be the attainment of the empire. The ancient reading is undoubtedly the true one. The sense is, While we are wearying the Gods with prayers, the very thing we are praying for, that is the empire, is falling into decay and ruin by the ill conduct of my competitors, by the luxurious indolence of Antony, the avaricious extortions of Cæsar, and by the insincerity and private views of all the three triumvirs. Johnson: The meaning is, ‘While we are praying, the thing for which we pray is losing its value.’
We ignorant of our selues, . . . By loosing of our Prayers Theobald refers to the parallelism between these lines and the following from Juvenal's Tenth Satire. ‘Quid enim ratione timemus, Aut cupimus? quid tam dextro pede concipis, ut te Conatûs non pœniteat, votique peracti? Evertêre domos totas, optantibus ipsis, Di faciles. [lines 4-8]. . . . Si consilium vis, Permittes ipsis expendere numinibus, quid Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris. Nam, pro jucundis, aptissima quæque dabunt Di. Carior est illis homo, quam sibi.’ [Lines 346-350.] Walker (Crit. i, 153) also calls attention to these lines of Juvenal; and J. Churton Collins (Studies, etc., p. 29) says that we cannot ‘attribute to mere coincidence the terse translation’ given of the foregoing lines in the present passage. ‘Again’ observes Collins, p. 28, ‘Juvenal was not translated into English until after Shakespeare's death, but that he had read him seems certain.’
By loosing of our Prayers See Abbott (§ 178) for other examples of the use of of after verbal nouns, and especially where there is a preposition before the verbal noun rendering the substantive use of the latter evident. 15, 16. My powers are Cressent, and my Auguring hope Sayes it will come to'th'full] Theobald: What does the relative ‘it’ refer to? It cannot in sense relate to ‘hope’, nor in concord to ‘powers.’ It is evident beyond a doubt, that the poet's allusion is to the moon; and that Pompey would say, He is yet but a halfmoon, or crescent; but his hopes tell him, that crescent will come to a full orb. Dyce: Theobald's change though adopted by all his successors, except Mr Collier, appears to me a very hasty alteration:—our old writers frequently make ‘it’ refer to a preceding plural substantive. [It is to be regretted that Dyce did not give some of these instances. It is probable that in all of them there would have been found some noun, in the singular, interposed between the plural antecedent and its singular relative, whereby the relative becomes singular by attraction. In the present case, ‘it’ refers to ‘powers,’ but ‘crescent,’ although an adjective, is, in the imagination of the speaker, a singular and, consequently, by its proximity, throws the relative ‘it’ into the singular also.—Ed.]
he neither loues That is, neither Cæsar nor Anthony.
Salt That is, most wanton. soften thy wand lip Theobald (Nichols, ii, 501) ‘suspects’ that ‘wand,’ or as he has it in his text, after Pope, wan, should be warm, but as he made no later allusion to this conjecture, it is to be inferred that he withdrew it. Johnson makes the same conjecture, as well as ‘perhaps, fond.’ Steevens: ‘Wand,’ if it stand, is either a corruption of wan, the adjective, or a contraction of wanned, or made wan, a participle. So, in Hamlet: ‘That, from her working, all his visage wan'd.’ Again, in Beau. and Fl. Queen of Corinth: ‘Now you look wan and pale; lips' ghosts you are.’ [IV, i.] Or perhaps waned lip, i. e. decreased, like the moon, in its beauty. Yet this expression of Pompey's, perhaps, after all, implies a wish only, that every charm of love may confer additional softness on the lips of Cleopatra: i. e. that her beauty may improve to the ruin of her lover; or, as Ritson expresses the same idea, that ‘her lip, which was become pale and dry with age, may recover the colour and softness of her sallad days.’ The epithet wan might indeed have been added, only to show the speaker's private contempt of it. Percy: Shakspeare's orthography often adds a d at the end of a word. Thus, ‘vile’ is (in the old editions) everywhere spelt vild. ‘Laund’ is given instead of lawn: why not therefore wand for wan here? If this however should not be accepted, suppose we read with the addition only of an apostrophe, wan'd; i. e. waned, declined, gone off from its perfection; comparing Cleopatra's beauty to the moon past the full. Collier (ed. i): It may be doubted whether ‘wand’ and ‘lip’ ought not to be united by a hyphen; ‘wand’ probably has reference to Cleopatra's power of enchantment,—that her lip is as potent as a magician's wand; and this construction seems warranted by what immediately follows: ‘Let witchcraft join with beauty.’ ‘Wand’ is the ‘witchcraft’ and ‘lip’ the ‘beauty.’ Dyce (Remarks, p. 245): What Mr Collier says here about Cleopatra's ‘wand-lip,’ i. e. lip as potent as a magician's wand, cannot be allowed the merit of originality; at least, it had been previously said in that mass of folly, ignorance, and conceit, Jackson's Shakespeare's Genius Justified; and one can hardly suppose that such a wild fancy would spring up spontaneously in the brains of two commentators. Not even in Lycophron, the most enigmatical of poets, is there any expression half so far-fetched or so strangely compounded as wand-lip! Whether the word be written wand or wan'd, it is evidently the past participle of the verb wane; Cleopatra herself has previously touched on the decrease of her beauty: ‘with Phœbus' amorous pinches black And wrinkled deep in time.’ Collier, in his Second Edition makes no allusion to his extravagant suggestion of a wizard's wand, —it cannot be enlivening to be coupled with Zachary Jackson,—but restricts himself to recording that his MS has warm, and the safe remark that ‘“wan'd” ought probably to be taken as waned, i. e. a lip that is on the wane.’ Keightley's text reads wanton ‘in the sense of soft, yielding, like “the wanton rushes,”—1 Hen. IV: III, i,’ and he ‘strongly suspects [Exp. p. 313] that the poet's word may have been tann'd, spelt of course tand. She is more than once called gypsy; she has “a tawny front.”’ [Keightley's tann'd can be upheld only at the expense of physiology; there are, I believe, no pigmentary cells in the lips which can be affected by the sun's rays. I cannot accept Dyce's assertion that ‘wand’ is ‘evidently the past participle of the verb wane.’ I see no reason why it should not be the same ‘wand’ which the Quartos give us in Hamlet, ‘all his visage wand’ (II, ii, 527) where almost every modern editor to the complete satisfaction of himself and of his readers prints wann'd that is, made wan. And, moreover, this interpretation is not lacking in fitness. Cleopatra's lips, at the age of thirty-eight, as has been suggested, could hardly be as ‘ripe in show’ as the lips of Helena, ‘those kissing cherries’ as Demetrius calls them; and it is to be remembered that it is not an admirer of Cleopatra that terms her lips wan. To Anthony, one kiss from them, wan'd or not, ‘repaid all that he had lost.’—Ed.]
Tye vp the Libertine in a field of Feasts Collier (ed. ii): The MS thus alters this line:—‘Lay up the libertine in a flood of feasts;’ but we do not feel warranted in deserting the old editions, although it is true that in Othello, I, i, we have seen ‘Laying’ misprinted Tying, as here Lay may have been misprinted ‘Tie.’ As to ‘field of feasts’ we hardly know what is to be understood by the expression, but ‘flood of feasts’ seems almost equally objectionable, though intelligible; however, if any part of this play, as published, were derived from shorthand notes, ‘field’ and flood would be spelt with the same letters, and hence possibly the confusion. W. W[illiams] (Parthenon, 17 May, 1862): Assuredly, Shakespeare has no metaphor similar [to ‘field of feasts’] throughout his works. ‘Field’ is defined by Johnson as being strictly ‘ground not inclosed, the open country;’ and to ‘tie,’ he tells us, is ‘to constrain or confine, up being little more than an emphatical addition.’ Pompey, wishing to fasten Antony to a particular spot, would scarcely desire the security of an open space. But there is a word, for which, by a very probable misreading, ‘field’ may have been substituted. Fold, says Johnson, is an ‘enclosure of any kind,’ and a fold would therefore exactly suit Pompey's purpose. The most rigid foliantist cannot object to weigh for a moment whether the true meaning may not be,—‘Tie up the libertine in a fold of feasts.’ We have then a figure of which Shakespeare is particularly fond. . . . A reference to a Concordance will save me any parade of confirmatory passages. [The phrase is certainly obscure, and yet I venture to think that the Folio needs no alteration. Pompey's train of thought is, let me imagine, somewhat as follows: At all hazards, Anthony must be kept in Egypt, a prisoner to his passions; within this boundary the libertine must be tied up. But the very idea of a libertine involves a certain freedom of motion; a libertine cannot be tied up to a single feast, else he would cease to be a libertine in feasts; there must be many feasts; in using the word ‘libertine’ there may have then crept into Shakespeare's mind that charming simile which elsewhere he twice uses, whereby the air becomes a ‘chartered libertine,’ blowing wheresoever it pleases, over hill and dale, and a single feast hereby expands, in imagination, into a whole field of feasts. Some limitations there must be; what better than a field of vague extent, wherein a libertine could be confined and indulge in endless feasting, day and night. Thus, for the preservation of the text of the Folio, feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.—Ed.] Libertine There is one Article in Walker's Versification (XL, p. 201) which, for the sake of that fine scholar's reputation, even his admirers would, I think, like to see expunged. Its title is: ‘The i in -ity is almost uniformly dropt in pronunciation,’ and, in proof, he quotes upwards of twenty instances where he assumes that this barbarous pronunciation must be adopted. Apparently, warming with his subject, he goes from bad to worse until, toward the close, he recommends such words as hostil'ty, virgin'ty, pur'ty and ‘suspects that the Elizabethan poets extended this rule to all substantives ending in -ty, as honesty, liberty, poverty, etc. Hence it is that majesty is almost uniformly a disyllable in Shakespeare.’ His last quotation is this present line, wherein he asserts that ‘libertine’ is ‘used in the same way,’ and, therefore, to be pronounced lib' tine.—Ed.
Epicurean In Greek names, Shakespeare usually followed, not the Latin, but the Greek accent, which was the method of Reuchlin, the accepted authority of his day; thus, Ἐρικούπειος. Thus, too, Βαπαββα_ς in The Mer. of Ven. Walker overlooked this fact, which would have spared him trouble in compiling his Article XLII, Vers. p. 211. ‘Euphrates’ in I, ii, 113, is an exception.—Ed.
feeding may prorogue his Honour Steevens: This undoubtedly means ‘to delay his sense of honour from exerting itself till he become habitually sluggish.’ Deighton: To ‘prorogue,’ from Lat. pro, publicly, and rogare, to ask (the technical term for proposing a measure to a legislative body), properly means to propose a further extension of office, thence to carry forward from one meeting to another, and so to defer. Staunton: Shakespeare certainly uses ‘prorogue’ here, as he employs it in Pericles, V, i, 24, ‘nor taken sustenance But to prorogue his grief,’—in the sense of deaden or benumb.
Lethied dulnesse The Cam. Edd. record an Anonymous conjecture of ‘Lethe dulness,’ which seems probable. It must have been difficult for the ear of the compositor to escape from hearing the d of ‘dulness’ transferred to Lethe. —Ed.
Varrius See Dram. Pers.
'tis A space for farther Trauaile Steevens: That is, since he quitted Egypt, a space of time has elapsed in which a longer journey might have been performed than from Egypt to Rome. Abbott (§ 405) suggests that there is merely a not unusual ellipsis after ‘is;’ in the present case sufficient is probably to be supplied after ‘space.’
Menas Steevens: I cannot help supposing, on account of the present irregularity of metre, that the name ‘Menas’ is an interpolation, and that the passage originally stood:—‘I could have given Less matter better ear.—I did not think—.’
Egypts Widdow Steevens: Julius Cæsar had married her to young Ptolemy, who was afterwards drowned.
The neere Lust-wearied Anthony Rowe and Pope having followed the Third and Fourth Folios, Theobald (Sh. Restored, p. 184) proved that the First Folio is right by printing ‘ne'er lust-wearied,’ and restored sense to the passage, which means, he says, ‘if Antony, though never tired of luxury, yet moved from that charm upon Pompey's stirring, it was reason for Pompey to pride himself upon being of such consequence.’ 49. I cannot hope, etc.] Steevens: Mr Tyrwhitt observes, that to ‘hope,’ on this occasion, means to expect. So, in The Reve's Tale, v. 4027: ‘Our mancyple, as I hope, he wil be deed.’—Boswell: Yet from the following passage in Puttenham, it would seem to have been considered as a blundering expression in the days of Queen Elizabeth: ‘Such manner of vncouth speech did the Tanner of Tamworth vse to king Edward the fourth, which Tanner hauing a great while mistaken him, and vsed very broad talke with him, at length perceiuing by his traine that it was the king, was afraide he should be punished for it, said thus with a certaine rude repentance: “I hope I shall be hanged to-morrow!” For [I feare me] I shall be hanged, whereat the king laughed a good, not only to see the Tanners vaine feare, but also to heare his ill shapen terme.’ [—Arber's Reprint, p. 263.]—Daniel (p. 80): It was not Menas' cue to hope that they would; his hope, if he was true to Pompey, must have been the other way; read, therefore,—I cannot hold.
Cæsar and Anthony shall well greet together If we accept ‘greet’ in its prominent sense of to salute, it becomes difficult to comprehend how two men can ‘greet together.’ It would be still more difficult, I think, to find, throughout English literature, a second example of the phrase. The N. E. D. knows none such,—as far as I can discover. May it not be, however, that ‘greet’ is an error of the compositor, who, deceived either by his mental ear or the voice of his reader, has added to the verb gree the t of the next word, ‘together’? and that the true reading is ‘Cæsar and Anthony shall well gree together’?—Schmidt (Lex.) gives many instances, and the N. E. D. still more, of the use of gree in the sense of to agree, to be in accord, etc. The past participle, ‘greed’ occurs in II, vi, 47, ‘this greed vpon, To part with vnhackt edges,’ etc.—Ed.
wan'd vpon him See ‘He stayes vpon your will,’ I, ii, 131. 54. I know not Menas, etc.] Thiselton (p. 11): Modern editors have taken great liberties with the Folio punctuation of this speech, in total disregard of the point on which Pompey is enlarging, viz., that Anthony's accession to the side of Cæsar and Lepidus will, if it prove to be a fact, indicate the strength of Pompey's menace. As usually punctuated the speech is self-contradictory, for Pompey is thereby made to say first that he knows not how it is, then to explain how it is, and finally to reassert that he knows not how it is. On the other hand, according to the Folio punctuation, Pompey states the only possible ground that occurs to him for Anthony's reported movements; he would rather expect Anthony to remain on quarrelsome terms with his colleagues of the Triumvirate; he therefore awaits confirmation of the report, holding it, if true, as a proof of his power and, at the same time, of the necessity of using that power to the uttermost against such a combination.
pregnant Nares (Gloss. s. v.) discusses the various meanings of this word, and, under the fourth head, says that it signifies ‘full of force or conviction, or full of proof in itself.’ This definition, Dyce (Gloss.) quotes as the interpretation of the word in the present passage. Nares, in conclusion, says that ‘this word was used with great laxity, and sometimes abused, as fashionable terms are; but may be generally referred to the ruling sense of being full, or productive of something.’ they should square That is, quarrel. Cotgrave has: ‘Se quarrer. To strout, or square it, looke big on't, carrie his armes a kemboll braggadochio-like.’ See, if need be, ‘But they do square, that all their Elues for feare,’ etc.—Mid N. Dream, II, i, 29, of this edition.
it onely stands Our liues vpon Staunton: Our existence solely depends, etc., or it is incumbent on us for our lives' sake, etc. [For other examples of this idiom, see Abbott, § 204.]
Exeunt Vischer (p. 91): This scene could have been dispensed with. [It is omitted in the version which Capell made for Garrick.—Ed.]
William Shakespeare. Horace Howard Furness. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra. Philadelphia and London. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1907.
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