Did lately mect in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual, well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way; and be no more oppos'd
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies:
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,
No more shall cut his master. Therefore, friends,
As far as to the sepulchre of Christ,
(Whose soldier now, under whose blessed cross
We are impressed and engag'd to fight,)
Forthwith a power of English shall we levy,'
Whose arms were moulded in their mother's womb,
To chase these pagans, in those holy fields,
Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet,
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.
But this our purpose is a twelvemonth old,
And bootless 'tis to tell you-we will go;
Therefore we meet not now:-Then let me hear
Of you, my gentle cousin Westmoreland,
What yesternight our council did decree,
In forwarding this dear expedience.

West. My liege, this haste was hot in question,
And many limits of the charge set down
But yesternight when, all athwart, there came
A post from Wales, loaden with heavy news;
Whose worst was,-that the noble Mortimer,
Leading the men of Herefordshire to fight
Against the irregular and wild Glendower,
Was by the rude hands of that Welshman taken,
And a thousand of his people butchered:
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly, shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done, as may not be,
Without much shame, retold or spoken of.

K. Hen. It seems, then, that the tidings of this broil

Brake off our business for the Holy Land.

West. This, match'd with other, did, my gracious lord;

For more uneven and unwelcome news
Came from the north, and thus it did import.
On Holyrood-day,' the gallant Hotspur there,
Young Harry Percy, and brave Archibald,"
That ever-valiant and approved Scot,

At Holmedon met,

Where they did spend a sad and bloody hour;
As by discharge of their artillery,

And shape of likelihood, the news was told;
For he that brought them, in the very heat
And pride of their contention did take horse,
Uncertain of the issue any way.

K. Hen. Here is a dear and true-industrious friend,

from that of Malone - No more shall this soil have the lips of her thirsty entrance (i. e. surface) daubed with the blood of her own children. The soil is personified, and called the mother of those who live upon her surface; as in the following passage of King Richard II.:sweet soil, adieu,

My mother and my nurse, that bears me yet.' 1 To levy a power to a place has been shown by Mr. Gifford to be either unexampled nor corrupt, but good authorized English. Scipio, before he levied his force to the walls of Carthage, gave his soldiers the print of the city on a cake to be devoured.'-Gosson's School of Abuse, 1587, E. 4.

6 This Harry Percy was surnamed, for his often pricking, Henry Hotspur, as one that seldom times rested, if there were anie service to be done abroad.'Holinshed's Hist. of Scotland, p. 240.

7 Archibald Douglas, Earl Douglas.

Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse,
Stain'de with the variation of each soil
Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours;
And he hath brought us smooth and welcome news.
The earl of Douglas is discomfited;

Ten thousand bold Scots, two-and-twenty knights,
Balk'd' in their own blood, did Sir Walter see
On Holmedon's plains: Of prisoners, Hotspur took
Mordake earl of Fife, and eldest son

To beaten Douglas, and the earls of Athol,
Of Murray, Angus, and Menteith."
And is not this an honourable spoil?
A gallant prize? ha, cousin, is it not?
West. In faith,

It is a conquest for a prince to boast of.

K. Hen. Yea, there thou mak'st me sad, and mak'st me sin

In envy that my lord Northumberland
Should be the father of so blest a son:
A son, who is the theme of honour's tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet fortune's minion, and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry. O, that it could be prov'd,
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang'd
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine-Percy, his-Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.
But let him from my thoughts:-What think you,
coz,

Of this young Percy's pride? the prisoners,12
Which he in this adventure hath surpris'd,
To his own use he keeps; and sends me word,
I shall have none but Mordake earl of Fife.
West. That is his uncle's teaching, this is Wor
cester,

Malevolent to you in all aspects;13

Which makes him prune14 himself, and bristle up The crest of youth against your dignity.

K. Hen. But I have sent for him to answer this:
And, for this cause, awhile we must neglect
Our holy purpose to Jerusalem.

Cousin, on Wednesday next our council we
Will hold at Windsor; so inform the lords:
But come yourself with speed to us again;
For more is to be said, and to be done,
Than out of anger can be uttered.''
West. I will, my liege.
SCENE II. The same.

[Exeunt.

Another Room in the Palace. Enter HENRY, Prince of Wales, and FALSTAFF.

Fal. Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?

was to throw up the earth so as to form those heaps or banks. It was sometimes used in the sense of monceau, Fr. for a heap or hill.

10 Mordake, earl of Fife, who was son to the duke of Albany, regent of Scotland, is here called the son of Earl Douglas, through a mistake, into which the poet was led by the omission of a comma in the passage from whence he took this account of the Scottish prisoners.

11 This is a mistake of Holinshed in his English His. tory, for in that of Scotland, pp. 259, 262, 419, he speaks of the earl of Fife and Menteith as one and the same person.

12 Percy had an exclusive right to these prisoners, except the earl of Fife. By the law of arms, every man who had taken any captive, whose redemption did not exceed ten thousand crowns, had him clearly to himself to acquit or ransom at his pleasure. But Percy could not refuse the earl of Fife to the king; for, being a prince of the royal blood, (son to the duke of Albany, brother to King Robert III.) Henry might justly claim him, by his acknowledged military prerogative.

13 An astrological allusion. Worcester is represented as a malignant star, that influenced the conduct of Hotspur.

P. Hen. Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou would'st truly know. What the devil hast thou to do with the time of the day? unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench. in flamecoloured taffata, I see no reason why thou should'st be so superfluous to demand the time of the day. Fal. Indeed, you come near me now, Hal; for we, that take purses, go by the moon and seven stars; and not by Phoebus,-he, that wandering knight so fuir. And, I pray thee, sweet wag, when thou art king,-as, God save thy grace-(majesty, I should say for grace thou will have none,)

P. Hen. What, none?

Fal. No, by my troth; not so much as will serve to be prologue to an egg and butter.

P. Hen. Well, how then? come, roundly, roundly. Fal. Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us, that are squires of the night's body, be called thieves of the day's beauty; let us beDiana's foresters, gentleinen of the shade, minions of the moon: And let men say, we be men of good government: being governed as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we-steal.

P. Hen. Thou say'st well; and it holds well too; for the fortune of us, that are the moon's men, doth ebb and flow like the sea; being governed as the sea is, by the moon. As, for proof, now: A purse of gold most resolutely snatched on Monday night, and most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning; got with swearing-lay by ; and spent with crying -bring in: now, in as low an ebb as the foot of the ladder; and, by and by, in as high a flow as the ridge of the gallows.

Fal. By the Lord, thou say'st true, lad. And is not my hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench? P. Hen. As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle." And is not a buff jerkin, a most sweet robe of durance?"

Fal. How now, how now, mad wag? what, in thy quips, and thy quiddities? what a plague have I to do with a buff jerkin?

1 Falstaff, with great propriety, according to vulgar astronomy, calls the sun a wandering knight, and by this expression evidently alludes to some knight of romance; perhaps The Knight of the Sun; el Cavallero del Febo, a popular book in his time. The words may be part of some forgtoten ballad.

2 Let not us who are body squires to the night (i. e. adorn the night) be called a disgrace to the day. To take away the beauty of the day may probably mean to disgrace it. A squire of the body originally signified the attendant of a knight. It became afterwards the cant term for a pimp. Falstaff puns on the words knight and beauty, quasi booty.

3 Exile and slander are justly me awarded,

My wife and heire lacke lands and lawful right; And me their lord made dame Diana's knight. This is the lament of Thomas Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, in The Mirror for Magistrates. Hall, in his Chronicles, says that certain persons who appeared as foresters in a pageant exhibited in the reign of King Henry VIII. were called Diana's knights.

To lay by is to be still. It occurs again in King Henry VI

Even the billows of the sea

Hung their heads, and then lay by.' Steevens says that it is a term adopted from navigation. 5 i. e. bring in more wine.'

6 Old lad of the castle. This passage has been supposed to have a reference to the name of Sir John Oldcastle. Rowe says that there was a tradition that the part of Falstaff was originally written by Shakspeare under that name. Fuller, in his Church History, book iv. p. 168, mentions this change in the following manher Stage poets have themselves been very bold with, and others very merry at, the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, whom they have fancied a boon companion, a jovial royster, and a coward to boot. The best is, Sir John Falstaff hath relieved the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, and of late is substituted buffoon in his place

P. Hen. Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?

Fal. Well, thou hast called her to a reckoning, many a time and oft.

P. Hen. Did I ever call for thee to pay thy part? Fal. No; I'll give thee thy duc, thou hast paid all there.

P. Hen. Yea, and elsewhere, so far as my com would stretch; and where it would not, I have used my credit.

Fal. Yea, and so use it, that were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent,-But, I pr’ythee, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? and resolution thus fobbed as it is, with the rusty curb of old father antic the law? Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.

P. Hen. No; thou shalt.

Fal. Shall I? O rare! By the Lord, I'll be a brave judge.

P. Hen. Thou judgest false already; I mean, thou shalt have the hanging of the thieves, and so become a rare hangman.

Fal. Well, Hal, well; and in some sort it jumps with my humour, as well as waiting in the court, I can tell you.

P. Hen. For obtaining of suits?

Fal. Yea, for obtaining of suits: whereof the hangman hath no lean wardrobe. 'Sblood, I am as melancholy as a gib cat, or a lugged bear. P. Hen. Or an old lion; or a lover's lute. Fal. Yea, or the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe.

P. Hen. What sayest thou to a hare,!" or the melancholy of Moor-ditch ?11

Fal. Thou hast the most unsavoury similes; and art, indeed, the most comparative, rascalliest,sweet young prince,—But, Hal, I pr'ythee, trouble me no more with vanity. I would to God, thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought: An old lord of the council rated me the other day in the street about you, sir; but I marked him not and yet he talk'd very wisely; but I regarded him not: and yet he talk'd wisely, and in the street too.

P. Hen. Thou did'st well; for wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.1a

In confirmation of this, it may be remarked that one of Falstafe's speeches in the first edition has Old, instead of Falst. prefixed to it: and in the epilogue to the Se cond Part of King Henry IV. the poet makes a kind of retractation for having made too free with Sir John (13castle's name- Where, for any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless he be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.

7 The buff, or leather jerkin, was the common habet of a serjeant, or sheriff's officer, and is called a robe of durance on that account, as well as for its durability: an equivoque is intended. In the Comedy of Errors, Act iv. Sc. 2, it is called an everlasting garment. Durance might also have signified some lasting kind of stuff, such as is at present called everlasting.

8 A gib cat is a male cat, from Gilbert, the northern name for a he cat. Tom cat is now the usual term. 9 Lincolnshire bagpipes' is a proverbial saying; the allusion is as yet unexplained. Perhaps it was a la vourite instrument in that county, as well as in the north.

10 The hare was esteemed a melancholy animal, from her solitary siting in her form; and, according to the physic of the times, the flesh of it was supposed to generate melancholy.

11 Moor-ditch, a part of the ditch surrounding the city of London, between Bishopsgate and Cripplegate, opened to an unwholesome, impassable morass, and was consequently not frequented by the citizens, like other suburbial fields, and therefore had an air of melancholy. Thus in Taylor's Pennylesse Pilgrimage, 1618- my body being tired with travel, and my mind attired with moody muddy, Moore-ditch melancholy." 12 Comparative; this epithet, which is used here for one who is fond of making comparisons, occurs again in Act iii. Sc. 2, of this play.

20 and 24 13 This is a scriptural expression. See Proverbe i

Poins. Sir John, I pr'ythee, leave the prince and me alone; I will lay him down such reasons for this adventure, that he shall go.

speakest may move, and what he hears may be be

Enter POINS, at a distance.

the devil.

Poins. But, my lads, my lads, to-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill: There are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses: have visors for you all, you have horses for your selves; Gadshill lies to-night in Rochester; I have bespoke supper to-morrow night in Eastcheap; we may do it as secure as sleep: If you will go, I will stuff your purses full of crowns; If you will not, tarry at home, and be hanged.

Fal. Hear me, Yedward; if I tarry at home, and go not, I'll hang you for going. Poins. You will, chops?

Fal. Hal, wilt thou make one?

P. Hen. Who, I rob? I a thief? not I, by my

faith.

Fal. There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship in thee, nor thou camest not of the blood royal, if thou darest not stand for ten shillings."

1 i. e. thou hast a wicked trick of repetition, and (by the misapplication of holy texts) art indeed able to corrupt a saint.

2 To bafle is to use contemptuously, or treat with ignominy; to unknight. It was originally a punishment of infamy inflicted on recreant knights, one part of which was hanging them up by the heels. Hall, in his Chronicle, p. 40, mentions it as still practised in Scotland. Something of the same kind is implied in a subsequent scene, where Falstaff says: hang me up by the heels for a rabbit sucker, or a poulterer's hare. See King Richard II. Act i. Sc. 1.

3 To set a match is to make an appointment. So in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, Peace, sir, they'll be angry if they hear you eaves-dropping, now they are setting their match. The folio reads set a watch; match is the reading of the quarto. 4 Honest.

5 After all the discussion about Falstaff's favourite beverage, here mentioned for the first time, it appears to have been the Spanish wine which we now call sherry. Falstaff expressly calls it sherris-sack, that is sack from Xeres. Sherry sack, so called from Xeres, a sea town of Corduba, in Spain, where that kind of sack is made.'-Blount's Glossographia. It derives its name of sack probably from being a dry wine, vin sec. And it was anciently written seck. Your best sacke,' says Gervase Markham, are of Seres in Spaine.'-Engl. Housewife. The difficulty about it has arisen from the later inportation of sweet wines from Malaga, the Ca

prove a false thief; for the poor abuses of the time want countenance. Farewell: you shall find me in Eastcheap.

P. Hen. Farewell, thou latter spring! Farewell All-hallown summer! [Exit FALSTAFF. with us to-morrow; I have a jest to execute, that I Poins. Now, my good sweet honey lord, ride and Gadshill, shall rob those men that we have cannot manage alone. Falstaff, Bardolph, Peto, already way-laid; yourself, and I, will not be there: rob them, cut this head from my shoulders. and when they have the booty, if you and I do not

P. Hen. But how shall we part with them in setting forth?

Poins. Why, we will set forth before or after it is at our pleasure to fail; and then will they adthem, and appoint them a place of meeting, wherein shall have no sooner achieved, but we'll set upon venture upon the exploit themselves; which they them.

us, by our horses, by our habits, and by every other P. Hen. Ay, but, 'tis like, that they will know appointment, to be ourselves.

tie them in the wood; our visors we will change, Poins. Tut! our horses they shall not see; I'll after we leave them; and sirrah, I have cases of ward garments. buckram for the nonce,1° to immask our noted out

forswear arms.

P. Hen. But, I doubt, they will be too hard for us, Poins. Well, for two of them, I know them to be the third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll as true-bred cowards as ever turned back; and for incomprehensible lies that this same fat rogue will The virtue of this jest will be, the tell us, when we meet at supper: how thirty, at least, he fought with; what wards, what blows, of this, lies the jest. what extremities he endured; and, in the reproof1í

things necessary, and meet me to-morrow night' P. Hen. Well, I'll go with thee: provide us all in Eastcheap; there I'll sup. Farewell.

Poins. Farewell, my lord.

[Exit POINS.

Who, on my soul, hath wilfully betray'd
The lives of those that he did lead to fight
Against the great magician, damn'd Glendower;
Whose daughter, as we hear, the earl of March'
Hath lately married. Shall our coffers then
Be emptied, to redeem a traitor home?
Shall we buy treason? and indent' with fears,
When they have lost and forfeited themselves?
No, on the barren mountains let him starve ;
For I shall never hold that man my friend,
Whose tongue shall ask me for one penny cost
To ransom home revolted Mortimer.

Hot. Revolted Mortimer!

He never did fall off, my sovereign liege,
But by the chance of war ;--To prove that true,
Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,
Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took,
When on the gentle Severn's sedgy bank,
In single opposition, hand to hand,

He did confound the best part of an hour
In changing hardiment with great Glendower:
Three times they breath'd, and three times did they
drink,

Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood;
Who, then affrighted with their bloody looks,
Ran fearfully among the trembling reeds,
And hid his crisp head in the hollow bank,
Blood-stained with these valiant combatants.
Never did bare and rotten policy

Colour her working with such deadly wounds;
Nor never could the noble Mortimer
Receive so many, and all willingly:
Then let him not be slander'd with revolt.

mad.

North. Brother, the king nath made your nephew [To WORCESTER, Wor. Who struck this heat up, after I was gone? Hot. He will, forsooth, have all my prisoners; And when I urg'd the ransom once again

Of my wife's brother, then his cheek look'd pale;
And on my face he turn'd an eye of death,
Trembling even at the name of Mortimer.
Wor. I cannot blame him: Was he not pro-
claim'd,

By Richard that dead is, the next of blood?"
North. He was; I heard the proclamation :
And then it was, when the unhappy king
(Whose wrongs in us God pardon!) did set forth
Upon his Irish expedition;

From whence he, intercepted, did return
To be depos'd, and shortly, murdered.

Wor. And for whose death, we in the world's wide mouth

Live scandaliz'd, and foully spoken of.

Hot. But, soft, I pray you; Did King Richard

then

Proclaim my brother Edmund Mortimer
Heir to the crown?
North.
He did; myself did hear it.
Hot. Nay, then I cannot blame his cousin king,
That wish'd him on the barren mountains starv'd.
But shall it be, that you,-that set the crown
Upon the head of this forgetful man;
And, for his sake, wear the detested blot
Of murd'rous subornation,-shall it be,
That you a world of curses undergo;
Being the agents, or base second means,

belie him;

He never did encounter with Glendower;

I tell thee,

He durst as well have met the devil alone,
As Owen Glendower for an enemy.

Art thou not asham'd? But, sirrah, henceforth
Let me not hear you speak of Mortimer :
Send me your prisoners with the speediest means,
Or you shall hear in such a kind from me
As will displease you.-My Lord Northumberland,
We license your departure with your son:-
Send us your prisoners, or you'll hear of it.

[Exeunt KING HENRY, BLUNT, and Train.
Hot. And if the devil come and roar for them,
I will not send them;-I will after straight,
And tell him so; for I will ease my heart,
Although it be with hazard of my head.

O, pardon me, that I descend so low,
To show the line, and the predicament,
Wherein you range under this subtle king.-
Shall it, for shame, be spoken in these days,
Or fill up chronicles in time to come,
That men of your nobility and power,
Did gage them both in an unjust behalf,-
As both of you, God pardon it! have done,--
To put
down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,
And plant this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?
And shall it, in more shame, be further spoken,
That you are fool'd, discarded, and shook off
By him, for whom these shames ye underwent?
No; yet time serves, wherein you may redeem
Your banish'd honours, and restore yourselves
Into the good thoughts of the world again :
Revenge the jeering, and disdain'd' contempt,

awhile;

Here comes your uncle.

Re-enter WORCESTER.

Hot. Speak of Mortimer? 'Zounds, I will speak of him; and let my soul Want mercy, if I do not join with him: Yea, on his part, I'll empty all these veins, And shed my dear blood drop by drop i' the dust, But I will lift the down-trod Mortimer As high i' the air as this unthankful king, As this ingrate and canker'd Bolingbroke. This inconsistency may be accounted for as follows; it appears from Dugdale and Sandford's account of the Mortimer family, that there were two of them taken prisoners at different times by Glendower, each of them bearing the name of Edmund; one being Edmund, Earl of Murch, nephew to Lady Percy, and the proper Mortimer of this play; the other Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle to the former, and brother to Lady Percy. The poet has confounded the two persons.

1 To indent with feurs is to enter into compact with cowards. To make a covenant or to indent with one.

Paciscor.-Baret.

2 Shakspeare uses confound for spending or losing time.

Crisp is curled. Thus in Kyd's Cornelia, 1595:O beauteous Tyber, with thine easy streams That glide as smoothly as a Parthian shaft, Turn not thy crispy tides, like silver curls, Back to thy grass-green banks to welcome us.' 4 Some of the quarto copies read base.

To answer all the debt he owes to you,
Even with the bloody payment of your deaths.
Therefore, I say,

Wor.

Peace, cousin, say no more:

And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I'll read you matter deep and dangerous;
As full of peril, and advent'rous spirit,
As to o'erwalk a current, roaring loud,
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.

5 Roger Mortimer, earl of March, was declared heir apparent to the crown in 1385; but he was killed in Ireland in 1398. The person who was proclaimed heir apparent by Richard If. previous to his last voyage to Ireland, was Edmund Mortimer, son of Roger, who was then but seven years old: he was not Lady Percy's brother, but her nephew. He was the undoubted heir to the crown after the death of Richard. Thomas Walsingham asserts that he married a daughter of Owen Glendower, and the subsequent historians copied him. Sandford says that he married Anne Stafford, daughter of Edmund earl of Stafford. Glendower's daughter was married to his antagonist Lord Grey of Ruthven. Holinshed led Shakspeare into the error. This Edmund, who is the Mortimer of the present play, was born in 1392, and consequently, at the time when this play is supposed to commence, was little more than ten years old. The prince of Wales was not fifteen.

6 The canker-rose is the dog-rose, the flower of the Cynosbaton. So in Much Ado about Nothing :-"I had rather be a canker in a hedge, than a rose in his grace 7 i. e. disdainful.