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Court of Guard Steevens: That is, the guard-room, the place where the guard musters.
a shrew'd one Craik (p. 141): Both to shrew and to beshrew are used by our old writers in the sense of to curse, which latter verb, again, also primarily and properly (from the A.S. cursan or cursian) signifies to vex or torment. Now, it is a strong confirmation of the derivation of shrewd from the verb to shrew that we find shrewd and curst applied to the disposition and temper by our old writers in almost, or rather in precisely, the same sense. Shakespeare himself affords us several instances. Thus, in Much Ado About Nothing (II, i), Leonato having remarked to Beatrice, ‘By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get a husband if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue,’ his brother Antonio adds, assentingly, ‘In faith, she's too curst.’ So, in A Midsummer Night's Dream (III, ii), Helena, declining to reply to a torrent of abuse from Hermia, says, ‘I was never curst; I have no gift at all in shrewishness.’ And in The Taming of the Shrew (I, ii), first we have Hortensio describing Katharine to his friend Petruchio as ‘intolerable curst, and shrewd, and froward,’ and then we have Katharine, the shrew, repeatedly designated ‘Katharine the curst.’ At the end of the Play she is called ‘a curst shrew,’ that is, as we might otherwise express it, an ill-tempered shrew. . . . As it is in words that ill-temper finds the readiest and most frequent vent, the terms curst, and shrew, and shrewd, and shrewish are often used with a special reference to the tongue. But sharpness of tongue, again, always implies some sharpness of understanding as well as of temper. The terms shrewd and shrewdly, accordingly, have come to convey usually something of both of these qualities,—at one time, perhaps, most of the one, at another of the other. The sort of ability that we call shrewdness never suggests the notion of anything very high: the word has always a touch in it of the sarcastic or disparaging. But, on the other hand, the disparagement which it expresses is never without an admission of something also that is creditable or flattering. Hence it has come to pass that a person does not hesitate to use the terms in question even of himself and his own judgments or conjectures. We say, ‘I shrewdly suspect or guess.’ or ‘I have a shrewd guess, or suspicion,’ taking the liberty of thus asserting or assuming our own intellectual acumen under cover of the modest confession at the same time of some little ill-nature in the exercise of it. Even when shrewd is used without any personal reference, the sharpness which it implies is generally, if not always, a more or less unpleasant sharpness. ‘This last day was a shrewd one to us,’ says one of the Soldiers of Octavius to his comrade, in [the present passage], after the encounter in which they had been driven back by Antony near Alexandria.
Oh beare me . . . list him Walker (Crit. iii, 307) proposes to arrange these two lines as one, wherein I can discover no possible gain, either to eye or ear. It seems, on the contrary, objectionable, inasmuch as it leaves ‘a shrewd one to us,’ an isolated line, which certainly requires no such emphasis.—Ed. 16. Oh Soueraigne Mistris, etc.] Capell (i, 45): To which of the fabulous deities is this prayer of Enobarbus address'd? It cannot be Night; for she is desir'd to ‘despunge,’ or pour down upon him, ‘the poisonous damp of night:’ it must therefore be Hecate, the Night's companion in classicks, and in Shakespeare himself.—[It is strange that Capell did not see that Enobarbus was continuing his address to the moon.—Ed.]
dispunge Steevens: That is, discharge, as a sponge, when squeezed, discharges the moisture it had imbibed. So in Hamlet, ‘it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again.’ [This is the earliest reference given in the N. E. D.] 19, etc. Throw my heart, etc.] Johnson: The pathetick of Shakspeare too often ends in the ridiculous. It is painful to find the gloomy dignity of this noble scene destroyed by the intrusion of a conceit so far-fetched and unaffecting.
in thine owne particular That is, in your own separate personal capacity, or, as Deighton says, as far as you, individually, are concerned. See ‘my more particular,’ I, iii, 69.
Register That is, in its record, list, catalogue. But Blades, who endeav ours to prove that Shakespeare had an intimate and special knowledge of Typography, observes (p. 53) that ‘the forme then went to the Press-room, where considerable ingenuity was required to make “register”; that is, to print one side so exactly upon the other, that when the sheet was held up to the light the lines on each side would exactly back one another. The accuracy of judgement required for this is thus glanced at [in the present passage].’
Oh Anthony! Hazlitt (p. 102): The repentance of Enobarbus after his treachery to his master is the most affecting part of the play.
Swoonds For the pronunciation, see As You Like It, III, v, 19; and for the spelling, see Wint. Tale, IV, iv, 17 of this edition.
Was neuer yet for sleepe Collier (Notes, etc., p. 500): Instead of ‘for sleep’ we ought to read ‘'fore sleep,’ or before sleep, and the word is altered in the MS accordingly: the sense is, that so bad a prayer, as Enobarbus had ended with, was never uttered before sleep.—[Singer adopted this emendation without acknowledgement, as was his wont in the majority of his notes. Collier (ed. ii) severely taxed him with it. Thereupon, in his Shakespeare Vindicated (p. 295), without mentioning that he had adopted 'fore in his text, Singer remarks that the emendation ‘seems unnecessary.’ Anon. (Blackwood, Oct. 1853, p. 468) had, however, a different opinion; he observes that 'fore is ‘entitled to very favourable consideration.’]— Staunton: Another instance, we apprehend, where ‘for’ is either intended to represent fore, or has been misprinted instead of that word.—[It seems to me that the Soldier would protest too much if he were to say that such a bad prayer had never yet been uttered before going to sleep. Such an assertion was hardly within his knowledge. But he was probably right in saying that so bad a prayer had never yet been said for the purpose of seeking repose in sleep.—Ed.]
raught The past participle of to reach. See N. E. D. or Franz, § 7.
Drummes demurely wake Warburton: That is, ‘demurely,’ for solemnly.—[In the propriety of this definition the Shakespearian world seems to be gradually acquiescing, after a temporary flurry started in 1853 by the publication of the MS emendations in Collier's Second Folio. The change, therein prescribed, from ‘demurely’ to do early, coupled with Collier's assertion that the adverb ‘demurely’ ‘is surely ill suited to the sound of drums,’ seems to have demurely wakened the sleeping critics, always so zealously at hand to help Shakespeare express his thoughts and endow his purposes with words. The Text. Notes show the result. As none of these emendations has been approved by anybody but the emenders themselves, it seems needless to rehearse the arguments by which they are maintained. The latest interpretation, fully in accord with Warburton's, is authoritative, and with many critics will close all discussion once and for ever. Dr Murray (N. E. D. s. v. † b.) thus defines ‘demurely’ in the present passage: ‘In a subdued manner.’ Why ‘demurely’ is thus appropriate is set forth by Dr B. Nicholson (Notes & Qu. IV. viii, 41): Cæsar, like Antony, would renew the combat, and taking advantage of ‘the shining’ of the cloudless night, and a precaution from it, ordered the embattling of his forces to begin as early as 2 a.m. It would, therefore, only be in accord with his careful and exact discipline that any notes of preparation should, in presence of a hostile and almost victorious force, be made in a subdued tone. Otherwise the enemy might have unnecessary information and forewarning, or even make such notes of preparation their signal of attack, and come upon him while defiling out of camp and before his line of battle had been taken up. But there is yet another and second meaning which may be given to the word demure. If not now, yet at all events in 1814 the drum-reveillé of the non-Latin races was not a lively, merry, or clamorous din, but a measured and somewhat solemn beat; and, judging from this and from the discipline of Gustavus Adolphus and other considerations, it seems not unlikely that the drum-reveillé of the Low Country, or German Protestant armies of Elizabeth's time, was of the same character, even if it were not founded on a psalm tune. In one of those inartificial touches of reality and circumstance which give such a charm to the tales of Erckmann and Chatrian, the soldier-conscript of the first Napoleon (Waterloo, ch. xviii) incidentally tells us—‘Notre diane commence toujours avant celle des Prussiens, des Russes, des Autrichiens, et de tous nos ennemis; c'est comme le chant de l'alouette au tout petit jour. Les autres, avec leurs larges tambours, commencent après leurs roulements sourds, qui vous donnent des idées d'enterrement.’ (‘The others, with their big drums, begin later, and their dull-sounding rolls awake in one the remembrance of a burial.’） Now this I take to be a perfect gloss on demurely in the sense of solemnly, as explained by Warburton. But the one meaning does not exclude the other, and both would be easily understood by an audience, since they were interpreted by actual beat of drum within. This piece of stage arrangement furnishes, moreover, another important argument in their favour. Even an inferior artist would not foolishly mar with the ill accord of a lively rataplan the close of so touching and effective a scene. Nor could Shakespeare do so; but he would make use of that which he knew would harmonise with and heighten the feelings he had produced, and the measured, low-toned and far-off beats that demurely woke the sleepers were heard as the knell of one whom the hand of death had already raught, the funeral march for the erring but repentant soldier.
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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