Page:Hamlet - The Arden Shakespeare - 1899.djvu/43

Ber. I think it be no other but e'en so:^{[a 1]}
Well may it sort^{[b 1]} that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch, so like the king 110
That was and is the question of these wars.

Hor. A mote^{[b 2]} it is to trouble the mind's eye.
In the most high and palmy state^{[b 3]} of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead^{[b 4]} 115
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:^{[b 5]}
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star.
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:120
And even the like precurse of fierce^{[a 2]} events,
As harbingers preceding still^{[b 6]} the fates

1. 108–125. Ber. I think . . . countrymen] Q, omitted in F.
2. 121. fierce] Q 4 (fearce), feare Q fear'd Collier's conjecture.

1. 109. sort] suit, as in Midsummer Night's Dream, V. 55, "not sorting with a nuptial ceremony." Schmidt supposes it may mean "fall out," "have an issue," as in other passages of Shakespeare.
2. 112. mote] The moth of Q is only an obsolete spelling of mote.
3. 113. state] Wilson (Christopher North) pleads for "State" meaning Reigning City.
4. 115-120.] Plutarch describes the prodigies preceding and following Cæsar's death—fires in the elements, spirits running up and down in the night, a pale sun, which gave little light or heat. Compare Julius Cæsar, I. iii. Such prodigies are very impressively described in Marlowe's Lucan's First Booke translated, published in 1600.
5. 117, 118.] Perhaps a line following 116 has been lost; it may have mentioned prodigies in the heavens, or may have told of warriors fighting upon the clouds; in Julius Cæsar, II. ii. we read of such warriors who were "fiery," and from their encounters there "drizzled blood." Of many attempted emendations none is satisfactory. Malone conjectured "Astres with . . . Disastrous dimm'd the sun"; astre or aster is found in Florio's Ital. Dict. under "Stella" and in his translation of Montaigne. New Eng. Dict. explains "disasters" here as unfavourable aspects. The "moist star" is the moon—governess of floods; so in Winter's Tale, I. ii. 1: "Nine changes of the watery star."
6. 122. still] constantly, as in Tempest, I. ii. 229: "the still vex'd Bermoothes."