Page:Some Textual Difficulties in Shakespeare.djvu/23

Rh sense of "runaway's" at once and gather the beauty of this way of saying it. Being of this nature, it is a passage which I might explain quickly by internal evidence alone; but as it is a case where scholarship has been at work, almost two hundred years, any seeming solution of mine would naturally be received with skepticism even though it were plausible. I must therefore not only prove it internally but prove it again by reference to other passages in the plays which show Shakespeare's natural point of view in just such cases as Juliet's.

As all lovers of Shakespeare are not supposed to be perfect in Elizabethan English, we shall set "runaway's" aside a moment while we dispose of the word "wink." This word, in Shakespeare's time, was not confined to its present usual meaning of shutting the eyes momentarily. It meant also the shutting of the eyes with the intention of keeping them closed, in which sense it is used repeatedly by Shakespeare. This is well enough understood by Shakespeare scholars, and was known to all those editors who have made an attempt to read the passage.

Let us now turn our attention to "Henry V," v, 2, 327. We here see Shakespeare dealing with the subject of woman's modesty. Henry is trying to win the hand of Katherine the French princess. He is now conversing with Burgundy upon her reticence. Burgundy describes the princess as "a maid yet rosed over