Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/47

 12 S. IV. FEB., 1918 ]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

41

" And this balet was song at the Crosse " <E.E.T.S. Extra Series, vol. Ixxxvii. p. 118). In the pageant is represented the character of St. George, and I wish therefore to refer to what is perhaps a late survival of the use of irrelevant ballad song at the end of the more or less popular drama. In ' The English and Scottish Popular Ballads," vol. v. p. 291, ed. Child, there is given a version of the ballad ' The Twa Brothers,' with the following note :

" Communicated by Mr. J. K. Hudson of Manchester. Sung after a St. George play regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a village a few miles from Chester, and written down for Mr. Hudson by one of the performers, a lad of 16. The play was introduced by a song called 4 Souling ' . . . . and followed by two songs, of which this is the last, the whole dramatic company singing."

JOSEPH J. MACSWEENEY.

Howth, co. Dublin.

' 1 HENRY IV.,' I. i. 5 :

No more the thirsty Entrance of this Soile Shall daube her lippes with her own childrens blood.

The Globe editors obelize this passage, but, when the lines are rightly understood, the difficulty would seem to be more apparent than real.

In the " Arden " edition (1914), edited by R. P. Cowl and A. E. Morgan, it is stated that " ' entrance ' is here used collectively for the pores in the jsoil, the cracks and crannies of the earth, the language being intentionally vague in order to veil the boldness of the figure." And Onions in his 'Shakespeare Glossary' (1911) defines the word as meaning " surface " " the parched surface of the earth " : a meaning which appears to be not uncommonly adopted by editors.

It is difficult, however, to see how the " pores " or " cracks and crannies " or " surface " or " entrance " of the soil could daub its " lips." " Entrance " cannot well be correct in point of sense because, if it means anything here, it means practically the same thing as " lips." The " soil " is personified and endowed with certain physical organs and attributes of humanity, including thirst, lips, and such other organ or organs as " entrance " represents. This the publishers of the Fourth Folio long since hit xipon when they correctly sub- stituted entrails for " entrance," the mean- ing then being, " No more shall the soil's thirsty entrails daub the soil's lips with the blood of the soil's own children." " En- trance " is clearly one of the multitudinous rrors of the Folio ; and that entrails is the

true reading is conclusively proved by the fact that in the 1611 quarto of Marlowe's ' Doctor Faustus ' there appears exactly the same misprint " entrance " ; whilst in the quarto of 1604 the word is correctly printed, viz., intrailes : Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist, Into the intrailes of yon labring cloude, That when you vomite foorth into the ayre, My limbes may issue from your smoaky mouthes. (See Tucker-Brooke's edition, Clar. Press, 1910, ' Doctor Faustus,' 11. 1445-8.)

It is significant here to find entrails dis- tinguished from mouths, just as " entrails " in the ' Henry IV.' passage is to be dis- tinguished from " lips," which latter word exactly parallels Marlowe's " mouthes."

The figure is quite common, e.g., in ' The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine ' (1595), I. i. 78, we find :

Wele either rent [i.e., rend] the bowels of the earth Searching the entrailes of the brutish earth ; ?:&., I. i. 169 :

A gift more rich than are the wealthy mines Found in the bowels of America ;

in ' The Tempest,' I. ii. 295, the " knotty entrails of an oak " ; " the bowels of the deep " in ' Richard III.,' III. iv. 103 ; "of the land," ib., V. ii. 3; of "cannons" in 'K. John,' II. i. 210; " of the harmless earth " in ' 1 Henry IV.,' I. iii. 61, &c.

The corruption " entrance " will no doubt be defended on the score that it is in fact the Folio reading and that some sense, however strained, can be extracted from it, even though " the wind of the poor phrase " is " cracked " in the process. But if we are to attach any weight to the above arguments, there can be no reasonable doubt as to what Shakespeare actually wrote. The inference is irresistible that the printers of 1623 repeated the blunder of the printers of 1611.

HENBY CUNINGHAM.

' HAMLET,' I. ii. 66 : "A LITTLE MOEE THAN KIN." I had occasion recently to look up at the Record Office " Chancery Pro- ceedings, 1563, Series 2, Bundle 176-20," a bill of complaint " before Sir Nicolas Bakon, Knt., Lord Reaper of the great seale of England." The complainant, " your dayly orator," who resides in the county of Stafford, is suing three Welsh defendants in respect of " three hundred acres of lande medowe leasso [leasow] and pasture at Cru- gyon [now Criggion, near Shrewsbury] in the County of Montgomery," and inter alia complains that he "is a mere stranger in the saide county of Montgomery, while the saide defendants go frynded, kynned, and