heavy (melancholy) nothing, though in thinking I think on no real thought.' The Queen plays on the words 'heavy,' 'nothing,' and 'think' until the meaning is nearly lost. Bushy's subsequent speech is fully justified, ''Tis nothing but conceit.'
II. ii. 37. 'Or else the nothing that I am grieving about has something to it.'
II. ii. 38. in reversion. Referring to the state of affairs in which a payment or benefit is to be received only after a stipulated event.
II. ii. 57. This is the First Quarto reading; the Folio has, 'And the rest of the revolted faction, Traitors?' In the present reading, 'revolted faction' may be taken as appositive to 'rest.'
II. ii. 116, 117. These lines are hopelessly unmetrical, but need not on that account be considered textually corrupt.
II. iii. 21. young Harry Percy. Hotspur was actually thirty-six in 1399, two years older than Bolingbroke, but Shakespeare here and in 1 Henry IV prefers to regard him as a fiery youth, precocious in the art of war.
II. iii. 128. to the bay. A figure from hunting, to pursue the quarry until it will run no longer, but stops and turns on the hunters.
II. iv. Richard, learning of Bolingbroke's landing a few days after it occurred, sent the Earl of Salisbury ahead of him from Ireland to Wales to gather him an army. He collected, Holinshed says, forty thousand men of Cheshire and Wales, but a rumor that the king was dead disheartened them so that they dispersed at the end of a fortnight. The portents mentioned (ll. 8–10) are from Holinshed, but not in this connection.
III. i. 25. impress. In Elizabethan usage, a symbolic figure with an appropriate motto attached, distinguished from an heraldic emblem in that it was
