To eke it, and to draw it out in length, To stay you from election. Let me choose; For, as I am, I live upon the rack. Por. Upon the rack, Bassanio? then confess What treason there is mingled with your love. Bass. None, but that ugly treason of mistrust, Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love: There may as well be amity and life "Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love. Por. Ay, but, I fear, you speak upon the rack, Where men enforced do speak any thing. Bass. Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth. Por. Well then, confess, and live. Bass. Had been the very sum of Confess, and love, my confession: O happy torment, when my torturer Doth teach me answers for deliverance! Por. Away then: I am lock'd in one of them; Let musick sound, while he doth make his choice; May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream, 3 Alluding to the opinion which long prevailed that the swan uttered a plaintive musical sound at the approach of death; there' is something so touching in this ancient superstition that one feels loath to be undeceived. With no less presence, but with much more love, SONG. 1. Tell me, where is fancy bred, 2. It is engender'd in the eyes, Bass.-So may selves; the outward shows be least them The world is still deceiv'd with ornament". 4 i. e. dignity of mien. 5 See Ovid. Metamorph. lib. xi. ver. 199. Malone says, Shakspeare had read the account of this adventure in the Old Legend of the Destruction of Troy. 6 Love. 7 Bassanio begins abruptly, the first part of the argument has passed in his mind. 8 Pleasing; winning favour. 9 i. e. justify it. Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? To be the dowry of a second head, The scull that bred them, in the sepulchre 11. The seeming truth which cunning times put on Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge 13 10 That is, what a little higher is called the beard of Hercules. Excrement, from excresco, is used for every thing which appears to grow or vegetate upon the human body, as the hair, the beard, the nails. So in The Winter's Tale, Act iv. Sc. 3: 'Let me pocket up my pedler's excrement.' 11 Shakspeare has also satirized this fashion of false hair in Love's Labour's Lost. Its prevalence in his time is evinced by the Satire of Barnabe Rich, in The Honestie of this Age, or the World never honest till now;' and by passages in other cotemporary writers. 12 Guiled for guiling, or treacherous. 13 I could wish to read thou stale and common drudge;' for so I think the poet wrote. Steevens cites a passage in George "Tween man and man: but thou, thou meager lead, Which rather threat'nest, than dost promise aught, Thy paleness 14 moves me more than eloquence, And here choose I; Joy be the consequence! Por. How all the other passions fleet to air, As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac'd despair, And shudd'ring fear and green-ey'd jealousy. O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess; I feel too much thy blessing, make it less, For fear I surfeit! Bass. What find I here? [Opening the leaden casket. Fair Portia's counterfeit 15? What demi-god Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes? Or whether, riding on the balls of mine, Seem they in motion? Here are sever'd lips, Parted with sugar breath; so sweet a bar Should sunder such sweet friends: Here in her hairs The painter plays the spider; and hath woven Chapman's Hymnus in Noctem, 1594, in confirmation of the reading of the text: To whom pale day (with whoredom soked quite) But shining or bright would have been considered by our ancestors more characteristic of silver than paleness. 14 In order to avoid the repetition of the epithet pale, Warburton altered this to plainness, and he has been followed in the modern editions, but the reading of the old copy, which I have restored, is the true one. That paleness was an epithet peculiar to lead is shown in Baret's Alvearie, Letter P. No. 46: Paleness or wannesse like lead.-Ternissure.' See also Cotgrave in that word. Thus Skelton in The Boke of Philip Sparow, 1568: 'My visage pale and dead Wan and blue as lead.' 15 Counterfeit anciently signified a likeness, a resemblance. So in The Wit of a Woman, 1634: I will see if I can agree with this stranger for the drawing of my daughter's counterfeit.' And Hamlet calls the pictures he shows to his mother, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.' A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men, Doth limp behind the substance.—Here's the scroll, You that choose not by the view, And claim her with a loving kiss. [Kissing her. 16 i.e. unfurnished with a companion or fellow. In Fletcher's Lover's Progress, Alcidon says to Clarangé, on delivering Lidian's challenge, which Clarangé accepts: you are a noble gentleman, Will't please you bring a friend; we are two of us, The hint for this passage appears to have been taken from Greene's History of Faire Bellora; afterwards published under the title of A Paire of Turtle Doves: 'If Apelles had beene tasked to have drawne her counterfeit, her two bright burning lampes would have so dazzled his quick-seeing sences, that quite dispairing to expresse with his cunning pensill so admirable a worke of nature, he had been inforced to have staid his hand, and left this earthly Venus unfinished. A preceding passage in Bassanio's speech might have been suggested by the same novel: 'What are our curled and crisped lockes, but snares and nets to catch and entangle the hearts of gazers, &c.' |