Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/123

Love's Labour's Lost to important characters both in King John and in 3 Henry VI. See note on the latter play, I. i. 239, in this edition.

And much too little of that good I saw Is my report to his great worthiness. My testimony to his worthiness is summed up in saying that I had much too little opportunity to observe it.

That aged ears play truant at his tales. The aged are tempted away from business to listen to his tales.

Being but the one half of an entire sum. That is, the sum which Navarre's father had lent to France amounted to two hundred thousand crowns. See Appendix A, p. 130.

let it blood. Alluding to the nearly inevitable practice of blood-letting in sickness.

No point. A pun on the English word, 'point' (i.e. my eye is not sharp enough), and the French negative, ne point. Maria makes the same poor joke in V. ii. 278.

The heir of Alençon, Katharine her name. Both the Quarto and Folio texts here print 'Rosalin' instead of Katharine, and in line 208 'Katherin(e)' instead of Rosaline. This is one of the chief points used by Mr. Dover Wilson in an ingenious elaboration of a theory proposed by Mr. Charlton in 1917 (The Library, vol. viii, pp. 355–370); namely, that Shakespeare, in the first version of the play, intended the ladies to be masked and Boyet to mix their names when the lovers inquire of him, and that in the revised version he intended to omit this motive of confused identity because of its employment later in V. ii. Mr. Wilson thinks that an unintentional blending of the two versions can be seen in the text of the present scene. There are very strong reasons against these assumptions. The only basis for the idea that the three ladies (unlike the