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Musicke . . . is vnder the Stage Steevens: Holinshed, describing a very curious device or spectacle presented before Queen Elizabeth, insists particularly on the secret or mysterious music of some felicitous nymphs, ‘which,’ he adds, ‘sure had beene a noble hearing, and the more melodious for the varietie thereof, and bicause it should come secretlie and strangelie out of the earth.’—vol. iii, p. 1297.— [It is hardly correct to say that the spectacle was presented before Queen Elizabeth; in fact the show did not come off at all. Just as the queen was about ‘to come unto hir coch, . . . there fell such a showre of raine (& in the necke thereof came such a terrible thunder) that euerie one of vs were driuen to seeke for couert, insomuch . . . that it was a greater pastime to see vs looke like drowned rats, than to haue beheld the vttermost of the shewes rehearsed.’—Ed.]
It signes well Theobald: That is, is it a good omen? Does it portend well to our General?—Walker (Crit. iii, 306) unaccountably prefers sings (see Text. Notes).
whom Anthony loued Capell (i, 43): The words are right, and should not have been chang'd by the moderns into—who lov'd Antony; for thus the author who furnish'd them,—‘they thought that it was the god unto whom Antonius bare singular devotion:’ But the Poet has put a wrong god, and perhaps by design; for Bacchus, the god his author intended, could not stand in his verse along with these words: Hercules, he knew, was honour'd by Antony, as well as Bacchus; and he might think it a matter indifferent, which god these same signs were ascrib'd to: 'tis observable, he speaks only of ‘musick’; and has omitted the other signs mention'd, which determine them to have proceeded from Bacchus.
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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