"with him in his court; and to all that would persevere in their former like conversation, he gave "express commandment, upon pain of their heads, never after that day to come in his presence." STEEVENS. 107 si fortuna me tormenta, spera me contenta.] Sir Tho. Hanmer reads, " Si fortuna me tormenta, il sperare me contenta," which is undoubtedly the true reading, but perhaps it was intended that Pistol should corrupt it. JOHNSON. Pistol is only a copy of Hannibal Gonsaga, who vaunted on yielding himself a prisoner, as you may read in an old collection of tales, called Wits, Fits, and Fancies. "Si fortuna me tormenta "Il speranza me contenta." And Sir Richard Hawkins, in his Voyage to the South Sea, 1593, throws out the same gingling distich on the loss of his pinnace. FARMER. 108 Come, will you hence?] I fancy every reader, when he ends this play, cries out with Desdemona, "O most lame and impotent conclusion!" As this play was not, to our knowledge, divided into acts by the author, I could be content to conclude it with the death of Henry the Fourth. In that Jerusalem shall Harry die. These scenes which now make the fifth act of Henry the Fourth might then be the first of Henry the Fifth; but the truth is, that they do unite very commodiously to either play. When these plays were represented, I believe they ended as they are now ended in the books; but Shakspeare seems to have designed that the whole series of action from the beginning of Richard the Second, to the end of Henry the Fifth, should be considered by the reader as one work, upon one plan, only broken into parts by the necessity of exhibition. |