Page:Henry IV Part 2 (1921) Yale.djvu/145

King Henry the Fourth pounds, forty shillings from each of the two men, but decides to keep a commission of twenty-five per cent.

 gibbets. A brewer's gibbet was the yoke worn across the shoulders for carrying buckets of beer from the vat to the barrels. Falstaff refers to the dexterity with which brewers' men swing the buckets on to the gibbet.

 Sir Dagonet was King Arthur's fool. Arthur's show was an exhibition of archery held annually at Mile-end Green by a society called The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie laudable of Prince Arthur and his Knightly Armoury of the Round Table. There were fifty-eight members and each took the name of one of the knights in the old romances.

 Vice's dagger. The Vice, a character in the old Morality plays, carried a thin wooden dagger.

 philosopher's two stones. The philosophers' stone is the reputed stone of the alchemists which transmutes base metals into gold. Falstaff decides that Justice Shallow will be as valuable to him as two philosophers' stones!

 This passage is obviously corrupt. The archbishop means in general: 'I make this my quarrel on both public and private grounds, that is, because of the sufferings of the commonwealth and of my own family at the hands of King Henry.' The Archbishop's brother, an adherent of King Richard, had been executed by King Henry's order; cf. 1 Henry IV, I. iii. 270.

 This contest is described in the first act of Shakespeare's Richard II.

 consigned. The Quarto and Folio read confin'd; consign'd is Johnson's emendation. The meaning seems to be that the terms of surrender in-