Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/267

 Cannot you stay till I eate my porrige? and, you owe me A quarters wages: and, my coate wants a cullison: And your beere is sowre: and, blabbering with his lips, And thus keeping in his cinkapase of ieasts, When, God knows, the warme Clowne cannot make a iest, Vnlesse by chance, as the blinde man catcheth a hare: Maisters tell him of it.

Dr. B. Nicholson has argued that Kemp is the clown specially hit at; he had left Shakespeare's company. When he returned, these specialised jests were omitted. Dr. Nicholson further argues that the praise of Yorick is the praise of Tarlton, who died in 1588, and that on Kemp's return to the company the praise of Tarlton was made less pointed by altering the period during which Yorick's skull had lain in the earth from twelve to twenty-three years.

III. iii. 36–72. Q. 1603 reads:

King. O that this wet that falles upon my face Would wash the crime cleere from my conscience! When I looke up to heaven, I see my trespasse, The earth doth still crie out upon my fact, Pay me the murder of a brother and a king, And the adulterous fault I have committed: O these are sinnes that are unpardonable: Why say thy sinnes were blacker then is ieat, Yet may contrition make them as white as snowe: I but still to persever in a sinne, It is an act gainst the universall power, Most wretched man, stoope, bend thee to thy prayer, Aske grace of heaven to keepe thee from despaire.

III. iv. 136. From Exit Ghost to the close of the scene Q 1603 gives the following:

Queene. Alas, it is the weaknesse of thy braine, Which makes thy tongue to blazon thy hearts griefes: