William Shakespeare, Critical Commentary of The Tragedie of Coriolanus
Horace Howard Furness, Jr., A. B.; Litt. D., Ed.

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To iumpe a Body Steevens: To ‘jump’ anciently signified to jolt, to give a rude concussion to anything. ‘To jump a body’ may, therefore, mean ‘to put it into a violent agitation or commotion.’ Thus Lucretius, III, 452— quassatum est corpus. [This assertion by Steevens, without any example to support it, is not borne out by fact. The N. E. D. does not give any such transitive meaning to the verb jump; his quotation from Lucretius is nothing to the purpose; quassatum is used tropically for enfeebled, weakened.—Ed.] So in Phil. Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History, bk xxv, ch. v, p. 219, ‘If we looke for good successe in our cure by ministring ellebore, &c., for certainly it putteth the patient to a jumpe or great hazard.’—Malone: From this passage in Pliny it should seem that ‘to jump a body’ meant to risk a body; and such an explication seems to me to be supported by the context in the passage before us. So in Macbeth, We'd jump the life to come,’ [I, vii, 7]. Again in Ant. & Cleo., ‘—our fortune Lies upon this jump,’ III, viii, 6. [Also Cymbeline, ‘or jump the after enquiry on your own peril,’ V, iv, 188.]—Singer (Notes & Queries, 24 July, 1852, p. 85): I read (meo periculo), ‘To impe a body,’ i. e., restore or increase its power. This term from falconry was familiar to the poet.—[In his Shakespeare Vindicated (published a year later) Singer repeats this emendation, remarking of the word ‘jump’ that ‘all attempts to give it a reasonable meaning have failed’ and ‘nothing can be made of it.’ In illustration of Shakespeare's use of the word imp as a term of falconry, used metaphorically, Singer quotes, ‘Impe out our country's broken wing,’ Richard II: II, i, 292, and thus concludes: ‘The word originally signified to insert, and, in falconry, to insert a feather into an injured or deficient wing of a hawk; but its general meaning is to mend by artificial means; this is the sense required here—to patch up.’ Thus, in The Pilgrim, Beaumont and Fletcher, I, i, ‘None of your pieced companions, pined gallants That fly to flitters, with every flaw of weather; None of your imped bravadoes.’—Singer's statement, that the general meaning of imp ‘is to mend by artificial means’ and hence ‘to patch up,’ is only partly correct. The original meaning is to engraft, from the Greek emphenein, to implant; Shakespeare was undoubtedly familiar with the term in falconry, and certainly understood it sufficiently to preclude his using it in connection with a dose of physic. Medicine is not used to patch up a sickened body; but may often be used, as Malone says, even at the risk, or hazard, of a cure. The Anonymous writer in Blackwood's Magazine (Sep., 1853, p. 322), who reviews Collier's MS. Corrections, turns aside for a moment to speak with special commendation of this emendation by Singer; but, misled by him, also asserts that ‘there is an old word imp, which signifies to patch,’ and, since no sense can be made of the words ‘to jump a body,’ imp ‘is the word which ought to stand in the text.’—Ed.]—Dyce (ed. i.): Malone's explanation of this rank corruption has, I am sorry to see, misled Dr Richardson to cite the passage in his Dictionary under ‘Jump.’ Mr Singer would read ‘To imp.’ But I have no doubt that vamp (Pope's emendation) was Shakespeare's word; ‘vamp,’ in fact, comes nearer to the ductus literarum of the old lection than does imp; ‘va’ was more likely to have been mistaken for ‘in’ than ‘i’ for ‘in.’ The proneness of printers to blunder in words beginning with v is very remarkable.—Ibid. (ed. ii.): In my former edition I read

with Pope ‘To vamp,’ but I now prefer the conjectural emendation of Mr Singer. So Fuller speaks of persons who ‘impe their credit with stollen feathers,’ Worthies, vol. ii, p. 567, ed. 1811.—Staunton: We have not presumed to change the ancient text, but have little doubt that ‘To jump’ is a misprint, and the true lection, ‘To purge a body,’ etc. Thus in Macbeth, V, ii, 27, ‘Meet we the medicine of the sickly weal And with him pour we in our country's purge.’ Again, in the same play, V, iii, 51, ‘—my land, find her disease and purge it to a sound and pristine health.’—R. G. White: ‘Jump’ was quite surely used of old substantively in the sense of risk, venture; but this use of it as a verb, transitively, is so singular in itself, and so infelicitous in the present passage, that I more than suspect corruption. Yet I cannot accept either Mr Singer's ‘To imp a body,’ or Mr Dyce's ‘To vamp a body,’ or suggest a better myself. [Had White but consulted the Variorum of 1821 he would there have seen that ‘jump’ used as a verb transitively was not as singular as he thought; also that vamp is not Dyce's emendation, but due to an earlier editor.—Ed.]—Hudson (ed. i.) quotes the passages given by Steevens and Malone in support of the Folio text meaning to risk or hazard. He admits that he was at first inclined to adopt Singer's emendation, and of that editor's remark that nothing can be made of the original reading Hudson says: ‘Mr Singer is entitled to more respect than he sometimes shows towards others who are not less worthy of it than himself. As explained and confirmed by our quotations, to jump a body is just the very thing that would needs be done by using dangerous physic; nor is anything more natural or more common than to use such physic in cases where the patient is “sure of death without it.” In other words, the sense of risk agrees much better with the context here than that of mend.’—C. & M. Cowden Clarke (Shakespeare): The original word ‘jump’ is used elsewhere by Shakespeare to express the precise meaning demanded here— ‘risk,’ ‘hazard,’ ‘jeopardise.’ [The passages from Macbeth, Ant. & Cleo., Cymbeline, and Holland's Pliny are given.] The argument throughout the passage, as well as the sentence in immediate juxtaposition, require that the original word, signifying ‘risk,’ should be retained, and not altered to one that means ‘patch up by attempted cure.’—Bailey (i, 164): If we discard ‘jump’ we want a word in its place which will help to express this, and not differ from it too much in point of sound. Of all the terms I can think of, tempt is the one that accomplishes the desired end the best: ‘To tempt a body,’ i. e., to try a body, to make an experiment upon it. So Henry VIII: I, ii, we have ‘I am much too venturous In tempt of your patience,’ [l. 55].—Leo (Coriolanus): Neither ‘vamp’ nor ‘imp’ express what Coriolanus means; he will treat the body with a dangerous physic, and hopes to ‘cure,’ not to ‘vamp’ it, and since the treatment is dangerous, he jumps, i. e., he risks the body.—W. A. Wright: That is, to run the risk of applying a dangerous remedy to a body. There is no actually parallel instance in Shakespeare of ‘jump’ in this sense, but the following may be compared: Macbeth, I, vii, 7, and Cymbeline, V, iv, 188. The difference is, of course, that in these cases the object of the verb is not that which is put in peril. [Wright quotes the passage from Holland's Pliny as ‘very much to the purpose, but credits it to Malone; as regards Pope's and Singer's changes Wright says: ‘The figure requires some word which expresses the application to a sick body of some desperate remedy, which will either kill or cure, and not one which denotes the vamping or patching it like an old boot, or the imping or repairing it like the broken wing of a hawk.’]—Kinnear

(p. 315) accepts Staunton's emendation, purge, characterising the word ‘iumpe’ as ‘an evident misprint.’ ‘Shakespeare,’ he adds, ‘never employs “jump” in a sense applicable here; nor has any appropriate use of the word been cited from other writers. Malone gave it the meaning here to risk, but that is not the sense the passage requires. In Hamlet, IV, iii, 10, “Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliances are relieved, Or not at all.” The risk is expressed in “a dangerous physic”—the action of the desperate appliance is “to purge (not to risk) a body that's sure of death without it.”’—E. K. Chambers (Warwick Sh.): That is, ‘apply a violent stimulus that may galvanize it back into life.’ [See note by Steevens ante, and comment thereon.—Ed.]—Verity (Student's Sh.) quotes in illustration the passage from Hamlet, IV, iii, 9-11, given by Kinnear, and, from the notes on the same, a passage from Lyly's Euphues: ‘But I feare me wher so straunge a sicknesse is to be recured of so vnskilfull a Phisition, that either thou wilt be too bold to practise, or my body too weake to purge. But seeing a desperate disease is to be committed to a desperate Doctor, I will follow thy counsel, and become thy cure,’—ed. Arber, p. 67. ‘The expression,’ says Verity, ‘was probably proverbial. Cunliffe quotes a similar sentiment in Seneca's Agamemnon, 153-155.’ [The phrase ‘Desperate ills require desperate remedies’ is given in Bohn's Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs, p. 7, as from the French: Aux grands maux les grands remèdes. The passage in Seneca's Agamemnon is thus translated by Studley, 1581: ‘There is no man who at the first, extremity will trye’ (Seneca: His Tenne Tragedies, p. 144). This does not, however, seem at all a parallelism.] Verity thus concludes: ‘The changes made by the old editors—vamp and imp— may seem strange in the light of what we know as to this Elizabethan use of jump; but we must remember that their sources of information on such points of language were infinitesimal compared with those at our disposal. And ignorance is the parent of most emendations; more especially ignorance of an author's own language and of contemporary usage and idiom.’—Deighton: That is, ready to run a risk by administering a dangerous medicine, etc. This seems to be the only meaning if ‘jump’ is genuine, and that word is in a measure supported by a passage which Steevens quotes from Holland's Pliny. [The quotation here given.] Though the word imp [Singer's conjecture] is used figuratively in Richard II: II, i, 292, its connection with a desperate remedy would be a very strange one. Staunton's conjecture had occurred to myself, but it is difficult to believe that any transcriber or compositor could be wrong-headed enough to substitute so uncommon and difficult a word as ‘jump’ for one so plain and common as purge.— Bucknill (Medical Knowledge, etc., p. 208): The violent Tribune's retort to Menenius' exhortation to temperance, when he wishes to execute mob-law upon the hero, conveys the same medical maxim as that referred to in Much Ado, ‘For to strange sores strangely they strain the cure,’ [IV, i, 254]. Brutus puts the same maxim in an inverted form, both the one and the other, however, being evidently founded upon the maxim of Hippocrates, that extreme diseases need extreme remedies, [Sixth Aphorism, sec. 2. See Much Adoe About Nothing, this ed., p. 219, for discussion of this doctrine.—Ed.]