Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/125

Love's Labour's Lost to common, was that in separate or private ownership. Katharine also calls her lips several as being more than one, or as being parted.

margent. Alluding to the habit of printing explanatory notes on the margin (rather than the foot) of the page.

Concolinel. Not satisfactorily explained. It has been interpreted as a corruption of the Irish words 'Can cailin gheal' (pronounced con colleen yal), i.e. 'sing, maiden fair.' Marshall suggests that it is French, 'Quand Colinelle,' which is at least as likely.

brawl. French branle. Defined as the oldest of figure dances.

canary. The canary was a very lively dance, allowing the improvisation of new steps.

The hobby-horse is forgot. The 'hobby-horse,' a dancer made up to look like a horse, was a favorite figure in morris dances, and a special subject of Puritan invective. The line, 'O, the hobby-horse is forgot,' which Shakespeare uses again in Hamlet, III. ii. 145, has been supposed to come from a ballad.

no salve in the mail, sir. That is, no quacksalver's remedy. Costard apprehends that Armado is calling for exotic (and hence suspect) remedies for the broken shin.

is not l'envoy a salve? A pun on the Latin salve, used in salutations. The envoi, or concluding section, of a mediæval ballade ordinarily contained an address to the person to whom the poem was written.

The boy hath sold him a bargain. This is usually explained as 'has got the better of him, made a fool of him,'—a sense which the idiom, to sell one a bargain, undoubtedly had. But I think the context shows that Costard, in the innocence of his rustic heart, really conjectures that l'envoy means goose, and that the goose mentioned in the incomprehensible