Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/126

114 speeches he has just listened to is a veritable bird, over the price of which Armado and Moth have been haggling.

And he ended the market. There was a proverb: 'Three women and a goose make a market.'

A very beadle to a humorous sigh. The beadle was an inferior kind of constable who whipped small offenders. See 2 Henry VI II. i. 135. 'Humorous' is here used in the sense of sentimental.

This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid. The early editions, both quarto and folio, read 'This signior Iunios giant-dwarf, dan Cupid.' It may be better, instead of Hanmer's emendation as given in the text, to print with Hart: 'This signior junior,' i.e. Mr. Youngster.

O heresy in fair, fit for these days! The recent Cambridge editors, following a suggestion of Hart, see in this line and in lines 30–33 below 'a direct allusion to the conversion of Henry IV' to Romanism, July, 1593. The detached lines mentioned fit the historical situation well enough, but the Princess' speech as a whole does not. In his early plays Shakespeare is very fond of introducing passages of reflective moralizing such as this, generally without any suggestion of topical interest.

The thickest, and the tallest. As Marshall remarks, Costard's otherwise dull and uncivil joke gains point if one remembers that the ladies' parts were performed by boys. The wit apparently lies in the fact that the Princess was represented by the oldest and stoutest of this group, whose figure was outgrowing its suitability to feminine rôles.

Break up this capon. To break up a fowl was to carve it. Capon is used figuratively, like the French poulet, for a love-letter.

the Nemean lion. The lion slain by Hercules in performance of his first labor. Here and