Page:Merchant of Venice (1923) Yale.djvu/112

98  he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian. Englishmen being, then as now, notorious for their ignorance of other languages. Many believe that Shakespeare would not have written this passage if he had been himself thus ignorant; but the criticism is playful, as that about the Englishman's clothes a few lines below.

 the Frenchman became his surety. A characteristic English gibe at the consistent but half-hearted way in which the French sided with the Scots in their frequent quarrels with the English. In the Folio (1623) the 'Scottish lord' of line 82 is called simply the 'other lord,' to avoid irritating the Scotch King James, who had become King of England in the interval since the play was first produced.

 Sibylla. The Cumaean Sibyl. Apollo promised her that her years should equal the number of grains of sand she held in her hand.

 The four strangers. Six have been definitely mentioned, but Shakespeare was careless of minor consistencies.

 the Nazarite. Commentators have charged Shakespeare with error in applying this word to Christ, since Nazarene is the ordinary term for 'man of Nazareth.' Nazarite is properly the name of an Old Testament Jewish sect who vowed 'to separate themselves unto the Lord' (Numbers 6. 2); but the distinction between Nazarite and Nazarene was not always observed. The allusion in the word 'habitation' is of course to the transfer of the devils from two men into a herd of swine (Matthew 8. 28 ff.).

 peel'd me. 'Me' is here the 'ethical dative,' which is frequent in Shakespeare, but nearly impossible to render in modern English. It slightly stresses the speaker's interest in the action of the verb, but does not otherwise affect the meaning of the sentence and would be omitted in a paraphrase.