Page:Henry IV Part 2 (1921) Yale.djvu/147

King Henry the Fourth comb and the carrion.' The application is to the Prince and his low company.

 medicine potable. 'There has long prevailed an opinion that a solution of gold has great medicinal virtues, and that the incorruptibility of gold might be communicated to the body impregnated with it.' Johnson.

 mode. The key in which music is written, used figuratively and associated with 'mood' in the sense of state of mind.

 cock and pie. The origin of this common Elizabethan oath is obscure. Cock is probably a corruption of God, as in the oath Cock's wounds; and pie is perhaps the Roman service book which was sometimes so called, though the word pie applies more properly to the index of the service book. By Shakespeare's time the meaning of the oath was forgotten, and Justice Shallow doubtless thinks he is swearing by a cock and a magpie.

 'Which goes against the grain with one in your position.'

 This allusion helps to fix the date of the play. Amurath the Fourth succeeded his father on the Turkish throne in 1596. Upon his accession he invited his brothers to dinner and had them all strangled.

 This strange remark of the Prince seems to mean that inasmuch as his own wild affections and desires died at the moment of his father's death, they are now, as it were, buried with his father. Hence his father may be said to be buried with wild affections, or to have 'gone wild into his grave.'

 dub me knight. The reference is to the Elizabethan custom of giving the title of knight for the evening to a man who, kneeling to his mistress, drained a mighty bumper to her health.