Page:King Lear (1917) Yale.djvu/148

132 trust I am none of the wicked that eate fish a Fridaies.' There was a proverb, 'He's an honest man, and eats no fish.'

football. Football was a rough game for rough lads, not regarded as a gentleman's sport.

A pestilent gall to me! Probably refers, not to Oswald, as most commentators think, but to the Fool, who is continually reminding Lear of his folly.

Learn more than thou trowest. Trowest may mean believest in the sense of accept; but it probably means knowest. The precept is, 'never be satisfied with the present state of your knowledge, but strive ever to learn more than you already know.'

if I had a monopoly out. This alludes to a common commercial abuse in Shakespeare's time. Individuals or companies were granted the exclusive right to trade in various commodities (as wine, sugar, etc.), and often thus amassed huge fortunes.

Whoop, Jug! Probably mere nonsense, though many ingenious explanations have been suggested.

Lipsbury pinfold. Unknown reference, perhaps Finsbury; a pinfold is a cattle-pound.

three-suited. This is often taken to indicate poverty of wardrobe, but cf. III. iv. 139, who hath had three suits to his back, where Edgar plainly alludes to a former state of affluence. It may refer to a servant's liveries, and thus would be a natural term of contempt applied to Oswald; and Edgar, in the later passage, would refer to the 'enough and to spare' enjoyed by hired servants. At the extortionate price of Elizabethan clothes the possession of three suits was quite beyond the ordinary man. Similarly hundred-pound and worsted-stocking suggest luxury. Kent is contrasting the pampered lackey's outward exquisiteness with his mental and moral poverty.

zed. Z was regarded as a superfluous