William Shakespeare, Critical Commentary of The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra
Horace Howard Furness, Ed.

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This blowes my hart Johnson: This generosity (says Enobarbus) swells my heart, so that it will quickly break, ‘if thought break it not, a swifter mean.’— Steevens: That to ‘blow’ means to puff or swell, the following instance, in V, ii, 419, of this play, will sufficiently prove: ‘on her breast There is a vent of Bloud, and something blowne.’—[This interpretation of ‘blowe’ seems to me weak, and far from adequate to Enobarbus's deep emotion. And yet I have none better to offer, except by hermeneutical torture. To give it force, Dr Johnson has to add, ‘so that it will quickly break,’ but this is wholly his addition, and is not, of necessity, inherent in the simple word ‘blows.’ Unquestionably, Shakespeare frequently uses ‘blow’ in the sense of swell, puff up, etc.; and there is a passage in Lear which seems strongly to strengthen this sense in the present sentence. It is where Lear says, ‘O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!’—(II, iv, 54.) And yet I am not satisfied. The hermeneutical torture, as pedantic schoolmen would say, to which I referred, is based on the right to use any extreme, legitimate interpretation. Now Shakespeare does, once or twice, use ‘blow’ in the sense of break, shatter, as the result of an explosion. Hamlet says, ‘'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with

his own petar; and 't shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines, And blow them at the moon.’ I know the phrase here is ‘blow at,’ which differentiates it from ‘blow,’ used absolutely. Yet the drift of the sentence is that ‘blow’ is here used as a result of a sudden and violent force, and we may well imagine that its effect was shattering. Again, to return to the interpretative torture, at the close of Henry the Eighth, the Porter's Man, speaking of a fellow in the crowd with a fiery nose, says ‘he stands there, like a mortar piece, to blow us.’—V, iv, 48. Wherefore, I should like, on this faint possibility, to found a belief that in ‘This blows my heart’ there lies in ‘blows’ a meaning stronger than swells,—one that involves the idea of breaking. It is possibly noteworthy that the punctuation of the Folio after ‘heart’ and ‘not’ has been uniformly, and perhaps justly, discarded for that of Rowe. Although the punctuation of Shakespeare's compositors is not, in general, of an all-commanding value, yet, in the present instance, it seems to imply that the thought of his turpitude will break his heart, if it be not already broken by swift remorse.—Ed.]