Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/121

An old hare hoar, And an old hare hoar,145 Is very good meat in Lent: But a hare that is hoar, Is too much for a score, When it hoars ere it be spent.— Romeo, will you come to your father's? we'll150 to dinner thither.

Rom.	I will follow you.

Mer.	Farewell, ancient lady; farewell, [singing][C 1] "lady, lady, lady."[E 1] [Exeunt Mercutio and Benvolio.

Nurse.

Marry, farewell![C 2]—I pray you, sir, what155 saucy merchant[E 2] was this, that was so full of his ropery?[E 3]

Rom.	A gentleman, nurse, that loves to hear him- self talk, and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month.160

1. 153. singing] Dyce (Farmer conj.).
2. 155. Marry, farewell!] Q1; omitted Q, F.

1. 154. "lady … lady"] from the ballad of Susanna, quoted in Twelfth Night, ii. iii. 85. Perhaps part of the mockery lies in bringing the Nurse into relation with the "woman fair and virtuous, Lady, lady" of the ballad. See "a goodly lady, O lady, lady" in The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune (1589), Hazlitt's Dodsley's Old Plays, vi. p. 198.
2. 156. saucy merchant] impudent fellow; merchant is used like chap, a shortened form of chapman. Steevens quotes Churchyard's Chance, 1580: "What sausie merchaunt speaketh now, saied Venus." So Udall, Diotrephes (1588), p. ii, ed. Arber.
3. 157. ropery] rascality; altered to roguery in F4. The same change was made in Beaumont and Fletcher, The Chances, iii. i., where the first folio reads: "You'll leave this ropery When you come to my years." Steevens quotes The Three Ladies of London, 1584: "Thou art very pleasant and full of thy roperye.' Q1 has roperipe, which, as an adjective, meant ripe for hanging, lewd, ungracious, and so appears in Minsheu's and Rider's Dictionaries. Compare rope-tricks in Taming of the Shrew, i. ii. 112.