  Act i. Valentine's speech:— “One without substance,” &c. The present text, and that proposed by Seward, are equally vile. I have endeavoured to make the lines sense, though the whole is, I suspect, incurable except by bold conjectural reformation. I would read thus:— “One without substance of herself, that's woman; Without the pleasure of her life, that's wanton; Tho' she be young, forgetting it; tho' fair, Making her glass the eyes of honest men, Not her own admiration.” “That's wanton,” or, “that is to say, wantonness.” Act ii. Valentine's speech:— “Of half-a crown a week for pins and puppets.” “As there is a syllable wanting in the measure here.”—Seward. A syllable wanting! Had this Seward neither ears nor fingers? The line is a more than usually regular iambic hendecasyllable. Ib.— “With one man satisfied, with one rein guided; With one faith, one content, one bed; Aged, she makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue; A widow is,” &c. Is “apaid”—contented—too obsolete for B. and F.? If not, we might read it thus:— “Content with one faith, with one bed apaid, She makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue;”— Or, it may be,— ... “with one breed apaid”— that is, satisfied with one set of children, in opposition to,— “A widow is a Christmas-box,” &c. Colman's note on Seward's attempt to put this play into metre. The editors, and their contemporaries in general, were ignorant of any but the regular iambic verse. A study of the Aristophanic and Plautine metres would have enabled them to reduce B. and F. throughout into metre, except where prose is really intended. |
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