MACB. There's comfort yet; they are assailable; Then be thou jocund: Ere the bat hath flown His cloister'd flight; ere, to black Hecate's sum mons, The shard-borne beetle, with his drowsy hums, (to use a Scriptural phrase) man, as formed after the Deity, though not, like him, immortal. So, in King Henry VIII. : 66 how shall man, "The image of his Maker, hope to thrive by't?" Or, as Milton expresses the same idea, Comus, v. 69: the human countenance, 66 "Th' express resemblance of the gods —." But, (as Mr. M. Mason observes,) in support of Dr. Johnson's explanation, we find that Macbeth, in his next speech but one, alluding to the intended murder of Banquo and Fleance, says: "Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Mr. M. Mason, however, adds, that by "nature's copy," Shakspeare might only mean-the human form divine. STEEVENS. The allusion is to an estate for lives held by copy of court-roll. It is clear, from numberless allusions of the same kind, that Shakspeare had been an attorney's clerk. RITSON. 7 the bat hath flown His CLOISTER'D flight;] Bats are often seen flying round cloisters, in the dusk of the evening, for a considerable length of time. MALONE. The bats wheeling round the dim cloisters of Queen's College, Cambridge, have frequently impressed on me the singular propriety of this original epithet. STEEVENS. The SHARD-BORNE beetle,] i. e. the beetle hatched in clefts of wood. So, in Antony and Cleopatra: "They are his shards, and he their beetle." WARBURTON. The shard-borne beetle is the beetle borne along the air by its shards or scaly wings. From a passage in Gower, De Confessione Amantis, it appears that shards signified scales: "She sigh, her thought, a dragon tho, "Whose scherdes shynen as the sonne." L. VI. fol. 138. and hence the upper or outward wings of the beetle were called shards, they being of a scaly substance. To have an outward pair of wings of a scaly hardness, serving as integuments to a filmy pair beneath them, is the characteristick of the beetle kind. Ben Jonson, in his Sad Shepherd, says "The scaly beetles with their habergeons, "That make a humming murmur as they fly." Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done A deed of dreadful note. In Cymbeline, Shakspeare applies this epithet again to the beetle : Here there is a manifest opposition intended between the wings and flight of the insect and the bird. The beetle, whose sharded wings can but raise him above the ground, is often in a state of greater security than the vast-winged eagle, that can soar to any height. As Shakspeare is here describing the beetle in the act of flying, (for he never makes his humming noise but when he flies,) it is more natural to suppose the epithet should allude to the peculiarity of his wings, than to the circumstance of his origin, or his place of habitation, both of which are common to him with several other creatures of the insect kind. Such another description of the beetle occurs in Chapman's Eugenia, 4to. 1614: 66 66 The beetle there did raise "With his Irate wings his most unwieldie paise; "And with his knollike humming gave the dor Of death to men It is almost needless to say, that the word irate, in the second line, must be a corruption. The quotation from Antony and Cleopatra, seems to make against Dr. Warburton's explanation. The meaning of Enonarbus, in that passage, is evidently as follows: Lepidus, says he, is the beetle of the trumvirate, a dull, blind creature, that would but crawl on the earth, if Octavius and Antony, his more active colleagues in power, did not serve him for shards or wings to raise him a little above the ground. What idea is afforded, if we say that Octavius and Antony are two clefts in the old wood in which Lepidus was hatched? STEEVENS. The "shard-born beetle" is the beetle born in dung. Aristotle and Pliny mention beetles that breed in dung. Poets as well as natural historians have made the same observation. See Drayton's Ideas, 31: "I scorn all earthly dung-bred scarabies." So, Ben Jonson, Whalley's edit. vol. i. p. 59: "But men of thy condition feed on sloth, LADY M. What's to be done? MACB. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck", That shard signifies dung, is well known in the North of Staffordshire, where cowshard is the word generally used for cowdung. So, in A petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasure, p. 165: "The humble-bee taketh no scorn to loge on a cowe's foule shard." Again, in Bacon's Natural History, exp. 775: “Turf and peat, and cow sheards, are cheap fuels, and last long." "Sharded beetle," in Cymbeline, means the "beetle lodged in dung;" and there the humble earthly abode of the beetle is opposed to the lofty eyry of the eagle in "the cedar, whose topbranch overpeer'd Jove's spreading tree," as the poet observes, in The Third Part of King Henry VI. Act V. Sc. II. TOLLET. The shard-born beetle is, perhaps, the beetle born among shards, i. e. (not cow's dung, for that is only a secondary or metonymical signification of the word, and not even so, generally, but) pieces of broken pots, tiles, and such-like things, which are frequently thrown together in corners as rubbish, and under which these beetles may usually breed, or (what is the same) may have been supposed so to do. Thus, in Hamlet, the Priest says of Ophelia : "Shards, flints, and pebbles, should be thrown on her." Would Mr. Tollet say that cow's dung was to be thrown into the grave? It is true, however, that sharded beetle seems scarcely reconcilable to the above explanation. Mr. Steevens may be right; but Dr. Warburton and Mr. Tollet are certainly wrong. RITSON. Sir W. D'Avenant appears not to have understood this epithet, for he has given instead of it 66 the sharp-brow'd beetle." Mr. Steevens's interpretation is, I think, the true one, in the passage before us. MALONE. Mr. Steevens's interpretation is no doubt the most suitable to the context. The succeeding passages, however, make in favour of Mr. Tollet's explanation. In A briefe Discourse of the Spanish State, 1590, p. 3, there is, "How that nation rising like the beetle from the cowshern hurtleth against al things." And in Dryden, The Hind and the Panther: 9 "Such souls as shards produce, such beetle things, dearest CHUCK,] I meet with this term of endearment, (which is probably corrupted from chick or chicken,) in many of our ancient writers. So, in Warner's Albion's England, b. v. c. xxvii. : Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night', And, with thy bloody and invisible hand, immortal she-egg chuck of Tyndarus his wife." It occurs also in our author's Twelfth Night: I 66 how dost thou chuck? - Ay, biddy, come with me." STEEVENS. - Come, SEELING night,] Seeling, i. e. blinding. It is a term in falconry. WARBURTON. So, in The Booke of Hawkyng, Huntyng, &c. bl. 1. no date: "And he must take wyth hym nedle and threde, to ensyle the haukes that bene taken. And in thys maner they must be ensiled. Take the nedel and thryde, and put it through the over eye lyd, and soe of that other, and make them fast under the becke that she se not," &c. Again, in Chapman's version of the thirteenth Iliad : did seele "Th' assailer's eyes up." Again, in the thirteenth Odyssey: "--that sleep might sweetly seel "His restful eyes." STEEVENS. 2 Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond Which keeps me pale!] This may be well explained by the following passage in King Richard III.: Cancel his bond of life, dear God, I pray." Agsin, in Cymbeline, Act V. Sc. IV.: 3 take this life, "And cancel these cold bonds." STEEVENS. LIGHT THICKENS; and the crow, &c.] By the expression, "light thickens," Shakspeare means, "the light grows dull or muddy." In this sense he uses it in Antony and Cleopatra : my lustre thickens 66 "When he shines by."--EDWARDS'S MSS. It may be added, that in The Second Part of King Henry IV. Prince John of Lancaster tells Falstaff, that "his desert is too thick to shine." Again, in The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, Act I. Sc. ult. : "Fold your flocks up, for the air "Gins to thicken, and the sun "Already his great course hath run." STEEVENS. Again, in Spenser's Calendar, 1579: Makes wing to the rooky wood *: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; rouse ". preys do "But see, the welkin thicks apace, MALONE. 4 Makes wing to the ROOKY Wood:] Rooky may mean damp, misty, steaming with exhalations. It is only a North country variation of dialect from reeky. In Coriolanus, Shakspeare mentions the reek of th' rotten fens." And in Caltha Poetarum, &c. 1599: "Comes in a vapour like a rookish ryme." "Rooky wood," indeed, may signify a rookery, the wood that abounds with rooks; yet, merely to say of the crow that he is flying to a wood inhabited by rooks, is to add little immediately pertinent to the succeeding observation, viz. that— 66 things of day begin to droop and drowse." I cannot, therefore, help supposing our author wrote— 66 i. e. to roost in it. Ruck, or Rouke, Sax. So, in King Henry VI. Part I. Act V. Sc. VI. : “The raven-rook'd her on the chimney's top." See note on this passage. Again, in Chaucer's Nonnes Preestes Tale : "O false morderour, rucking in thy den." Again, in Gower, de Confessione Amantis, lib. iv. fol. 72: "But how their rucken in her nest." Again, in the fifteenth book of A. Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis: "He rucketh down upon the same, and in the spices dies." Again, in The Contention betwyxte Churchyeard and Camell, &c. 1560: 66 All day to rucken on my taile, and poren on a booke.” The harmless crow, that merely flew to the rooky wood, for aught we are conscious of on this occasion, might have taken a second flight from it; but the same bird, when become drowsy, would naturally ruck or roost where it settled, while the agents of nocturnal mischief were hastening to their prey. The quiescent state of innoxious birds is thus forcibly contrasted with the active vigilance of destructive beings. So Milton, in the concluding lines of the first book of his Paradise Regained: |