Page:King Lear (1917) Yale.djvu/149

King Lear letter, its necessary work being done by S. Remember that Z is pronounced Zed in England today.

holy cords, etc. The holy cords are the bonds of affection between father and daughters: intrinse means either tightly drawn or intricate.

halcyon. The kingfisher: the popular superstition was that if a dead kingfisher were hung up, his bill would point toward the quarter from which the wind was blowing.

Camelot. Supposed to have been in Somerset, but the Elizabethans identified it with Winchester and believed that King Arthur's round table was still to be seen there (see the play of Eastward Hoe, composed about a year before King Lear.) Winchester is about a day's journey by foot from Sarum (Salisbury) Plain. It is possible that Kent's words, Goose cackling  Camelot, imply an allusion to an unsavory disease known to Shakespeare as 'Winchester goose.'

Ajax. Possibly it means that Ajax, the Greek warrior, could not begin to brag with Oswald. But has Oswald bragged? Ajax was pronounced A-jakes, and there may have been a vulgar pun, which would account for Cornwall's rage. Just such a pun occurs in Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii. 578. Or, it may be that Kent meant that Oswald was making a fool out of Cornwall, as cheap rascals could out of the powerful and unsuspecting Ajax.

away. This has the sense of hither in the boys' street game, often played in New England, 1870–1890, 'Come away!' In 1893, in Michigan, I heard a hostess call from the dining-room, 'Come away! supper is ready.'

sun. An old proverb. Malone cites Howell's Collection of English Proverbs in his Dictionary, 1660: 'He goes out of God's blessing to the warm sun,' viz., from good to worse. It occurs also in Lyly's novel, Euphues (1579).