Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/94

50 Speak to my gossip Venus one fair word, One nickname for her purblind son and heir , Young Adam Cupid, 13. Adam Cupid] Upton's conjecture Adam (easily misread Abram) is generally accepted, the allusion being to the great archer, Adam Bell, famous in ballad poetry. Compare Much Ado, i. 260: "shoot at me; and he that hits me let him be clapped on the shoulder, and called Adam." The Abraham of Q1, Qq, Ff may be right. If the source of Cophetua ballad were found, which may lurk in some old book on Africa, a bowman named Abraham might be discovered. An Ethiopian king (448–470) was so named. If "young Abraham" is named after the patriarch, the nickname must mean "father of many nations" (Genesis xvii. 5), not wholly inappropriate to Cupid. Knight supposed that cheat was meant, the allusion being to the Abraham-men of Elizabethan days—vagabonds, bare-armed and bare-legged, pretending madness. In S. Rowlands' Martin Mark-all (about 1609), he gives Abram as a slang word meaning mad. In Street Robberies consider'd (about 1700) Abram is given as a cant word for naked, which would suit Cupid well, but, though clearly a relic of the Abraham-men, I have found no earlier example in this sense. Again, as Theobald observed, abraham and abram are old spellings of auburn (e.g. Coriolanus, iii. 21, F text); many examples might be cited. Italian poets name Cupid "Il biondo Dio," and W. Thomas, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer, 1567, explains biondo, as "the aberne (auburn) colour, that is betwene white and yelow." White reads "auburn" here. Finally, the nickname may be an allusion to some forgotten Elizabethan contemporary, whose name (such, for example, as S[ir] Abra[ham] Bowerman, who wrote verses in the British Museum copy of Nash's Jack Wilton) or whose fame in archery invited a jest. he that shot so trim When King Cophetua loved the beggar-maid.— He heareth not, he stirreth not, he moveth not; The ape is dead, and I must conjure him.— I conjure thee by Rosaline's bright eyes, By her high forehead, and her scarlet lip, By her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh,