Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies by Samuel Johnson
page 46 of 398 (11%)
page 46 of 398 (11%)
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V.iv.8 (521,1) the confident tyrant/Keeps still in Dunsinane, and will endure/Our setting down before't] He was _confident_ of success; so _confident_ that he would not fly, but endure their _setting down_ before his castle. V.iv.11 (521,2) For where there is advantage to be given,/ Both more and less have given him the revolt] The impropriety of the expression, _advantage to be given_, and the disagreeable repetition of the word _given_ in the next line, incline me to read, --_where there is_ a 'vantage _to be_ gone, _Both more and less have given him the revolt._ _Advantage or 'vantage_, in the time of Shakespeare, signified _opportunity_. _He shut up himself and his soldiers_, (says Malcolm) _in the castle, because when there is an opportunity to be gone they all desert him_. _More and less_ is the same with _greater and less_. So in the interpolated _Mandeville_, a book of that age, there is a chapter of _India the More and the Less_. V.iv.20 (522,4) arbitrate]--_arbitrate_ is _determine_. V.v.11 (523,3) fell of hair] My hairy part, my _capillitium_. _Fell_ is _skin_. V.v.17 (523,7) She should have dy'd hereafter;/ There would have been a time for such a word] This passage has very justly been suspected of |
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