This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
wag'd equal with him Steevens: It is not easy to determine the precise meaning of the word wage. In Othello, it occurs again: ‘To wake, and wage a danger profitless.’ [I, iii, 38, of this ed., with note]. It may signify to oppose. The sense will then be, ‘his taints and honours were an equal match,’ i. e. were opposed to each other in just proportions, like the counterparts of a wager.—Ritson: Read, weigh, with F2, where it is only mis-spelled ‘way.’ So in Shore's Wife, by A. Chute, 1593: ‘notes her myndes disquyet To be so great she seemes downe wayed by it.’—[As concerns the meaning, there is little to choose between wage and weight, if we accept wage in the sense of opposing, contending, as we find it in Lear, ‘To wage against the enmity of the air’ (II, iv, 206). It is to such cases that the scholastic law applies, durior lectio preferenda est, and this, I think, points to ‘wag'd.’—Ed.] with For this use of ‘with,’ which Abbott (§ 193) says is here equivalent to in, see I, i, 72.
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.
NSF, NEH: Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2 provided support for entering this text.