her winds and waters, sighes and teares Malone: I once idly supposed that Shakespeare wrote—‘We cannot call her sighs and tears, winds and waters;’—which is certainly the phraseology we should now use. . . . The passage, however, may be understood without any inversion. ‘We cannot call the clamourous heavings of her breast, and the copious streams which flow from her eyes, by the ordinary name of sighs and tears; they are greater storms,’ etc. [It is doubtful that Zachary Jackson, or his copesmate Andrew Becket, or Lord Chedworth, who makes a good third, ever wrote a more trying note than this of Malone. In supposing this sentence of Enobarbus to be inverted, Malone betrayed his misapprehension of its meaning, and I think that he made his feeble conjecture before he had read the rest of the speech. If, in speaking of Mont Blanc we should say ‘we cannot call Mont Blanc a molehill’ is there any phraseology of any time or of any people in which this expression would be termed an inversion? However, before he finished his comment Malone discovered his error, but he should have cancelled the first portion of his note.—Ed.]
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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