356 SD Peto This is the sole appearance of Peto in this play, and he serves only as a court messenger. For a discussion of his identity, see 2.2.0.1n. and 1H4 1.2.154n.

  351 vict’lers] Q (vitlars), F (Victuallers), Kittredge What’s] Q; What is F 356 SD] Q (Peyto); not in F 357 to th’] Q (too th’); to the F 358 SD] this edn; not in QF 358.1] F; not in Q 359 Peto] Q (Peyto), F

  361 twenty i.e. many: used to signify an indefinite number (Ard1)

  posts express couriers

  363 a dozen like twenty (361), probably signifies an indefinite number

  364 Bare-headed a detail demonstrative of urgency and haste (Cam1). Hats were de rigueur for gentlemen (certainly those with the status of captain), who would wear them even at church and mealtimes and remove them only at court or in the presence of royalty.

  365 asking … Falstaff possibly an allusion to Falstaff’s neglect of duty, but just as possibly a wry glance at the reputation for valour Falstaff falsely won at Shrewsbury – a reputation which would make his services sought for the wars in the north, as he himself notes with pride at 379–82.

  368 tempest of commotion a storm of insurrection (OED commotion sb. 4). Cf. 4.1.36.

  south south wind, bringer of storms. Cf. 1H4 5.1.3–6: ‘The southern wind / … Foretells a tempest and a blustering day’, and AYL 3.5.51: ‘Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain’.

  369 Borne … vapour laden with dense fog or black clouds

  melt dissolve into rain (OED v. 2c)

  370 unarmed unprotected, unprepared for battle; unarmèd

  371 Falstaff, goodnight The Prince’s pointed words of farewell are the last he speaks to Falstaff before repudiating him in 5.5. Revealing his regret for having so profaned the time (367), they signal his determination to redeem the time from idleness (a promise he has made in 1H4 1.2.206–7 and will honour when he next appears, at court, in 4.3), and they recall his exit from the comparable scene in 1H4, when, leaving Falstaff in a drunken sleep and affirming his duty to the King, he vows, ‘I’ll to the court in the morning’ (2.4.530).

  371 SD *As the t.n. attests, editors disagree about who should exit at this point. F specifies only the Prince; Q, the Prince and Poins. More recent editors, following Capell, add Peto and Bardolph to the list, though there is little reason for Bardolph to exit with the Prince, whose parting line suggests that he turns his back on Falstaff and his companions.

  360 SP] Q (Peyto), F Westminster] QaF; Weminster Qb 371] Q; F lines Cloake: / night. / 371 SD Exeunt … Poins] Q; Exit. F; [Exeunt Prince, Poi. Pet. and Bar. Capell

  372–3 the sweetest … night in this context, if spoken to Doll, suggests a time most conducive to intimacy or pleasure. Cf. 5.3.49–50: ‘the sweet a’th’ night’.

  373 must hence The verb ‘go’ is understood.

  unpicked applied to morsel, with the sense of its going untasted or unenjoyed

  376 presently at once

  377 A dozen captains The fact that all the captains would converge on the door together is perhaps inadvertently comic. For the number, see 363n.

  stay wait

  378 addressed to the Page, who would have carried his master’s purse. Cf. 1.2.233–4.

  378 SD2 *The exit of the Page with the musicians at this point allows the stage to be cleared of superfluous players before the scene’s final focus on Falstaff’s farewell. If the musicians were in a gallery above (see 226.1–2n.), presumably they would exit from there.

  380–2 The undeserver … on humorous anticipation of a sentiment in the King’s soliloquy which follows shortly, wherein he meditates on why the great remain sleepless while the poorest subjects sleep soundly (3.1.12, 4). It is characteristic of Shakespeare to precede the main event with an ironic precursor.

  383 post post-haste, right away

  373 SD Knocking within.] Capell subst; not in QF Exit Bardolph.] Ard.2; not in QF 374.1] Capell; not in QF 378 SD1] Capell (after sirrah.); not in QF SD2] this edn; not in QF

  386 SD *Neither Q nor F signals an exit for Bardolph, but his departure with Falstaff allows Doll and the Hostess to be onstage alone for a few poignant moments before he returns at 390.

  387–90 The Hostess’s valedictory to a man she has known for nearly 30 years speaks volumes about the depth of her loyalty and attachment to him. The play may offer little evidence of the honesty and true-heartedness she claims to find in him, but her lines are no doubt sincere, as the thought she leaves unfinished at 389 – her syntax choked with emotion – attests. Doll’s and the Hostess’s sorrow at Falstaff’s departure stands in marked contrast to the bitter tone of Lady Northumberland’s and Lady Percy’s farewell to Northumberland in 2.3.

  388 peascod time early summer, when peas form in their pods. Thomas Tusser, in A Hundred Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557), identifies the month precisely: ‘Good peason and leakes, to make poredge in Lent / And pescods in July, save fish to be spent’. Duffin (218–20) prints lyrics to a song called ‘In Peascod Time’, or ‘The Shepherd’s Slumber’, a pastoral fantasy first published in England’s Helicon (1600). The precision with which the Hostess dates her first meeting with Falstaff is touching.

  395 blubbered covered with tears. The fact that Doll is weeping probably explains her reluctance to go to Falstaff. The Hostess’s exhortation for her to run yields to the more sympathetic come as she encourages Doll to accompany her as she moves to the door – a credible motivation for clearing the stage. The fact that the Hostess’s lines address two different auditors has prompted some editors (see t.n.) to assign Come and Yea … Doll? to Bardolph and to leave only the explanatory She comes blubbered for her; but the import of the Hostess’s dialogue in Q is clear.

  3.1 *On the omission of this scene from the first issue of Q. Though it contributes virtually no new material to the plot other than false report of Glendower’s death at 103, the scene introduces a much-needed royal presence to weigh against the Prelate’s Rebellion. It depicts the King – now at the palace in Westminster (2.4.360) – and his nobles as political strategists, and fleshes out the official history with Richard’s prophecy that civil war will be the wages of Henry’s usurpation. Perhaps more important, the scene reinforces the themes of sickness, betrayal, guilt and political necessity which, as embodied in Henry, lend the play a tragic resonance to balance the comedy of the Falstaff plot. Without it, Henry would not appear until his deathbed scene in 4.3, leaving the rebels to bustle without a visible dramatic antagonist and causing a juxtaposition of two major comic scenes with Falstaff – 2.4 in Eastcheap and 3.2 in Gloucestershire – which would allow no time, theatrically, for him to travel from one place to the other.

  0.1 *Qb’s ‘alone’ is probably meant to suggest that the King is the only person of consequence to enter; it does not preclude attendance by the Page, who is needed to do his bidding at 3. Cf. the SD at Q 1.2.0, where Falstaff enters ‘alone, with his page bearing his sword and buckler’.

  nightgown not in the modern sense of sleepwear, but, according to Linthicum, a rich ‘ankle-length gown with long sleeves and collar varying in size from the shawl-collar of the men’s modern dressing-gown to the fur collar on ladies’ coats. It was worn for warmth both indoors and out. Previous to the reign of Henry VIII, it was frequently of worsted or woolen materials, sometimes made with a hood’ (184).

  386 SD Exit] QbF; not in Qa with Bardolph] Capell subst; not in QF 390.1] this edn; not in QF 391 SP] QF (Bard.); Bard. [within. Capell; Bard. [At the door] Cam1 394–5 Come … Doll?] Q; not in F; Bardolph. Come! / Hostess. She … blubbered. / Bardolph. Yea … Doll? (Vaughan), Cam1 395 SD] QbF; not in Qa

  1 Earls … Warwick The two Earls, Surrey and Warwick, play no role in 1H4 and are not mentioned as the King’s counsellors in any known source. Shakespeare may have confused Warwick with ‘the king-maker’ of that title in 3H6, whose family name was Richard Neville – the name Henry mistakenly gives to the present Earl (see 66n.). Surrey, however, who is mute in this scene and does not appear elsewhere, is unlikely to have been confused with the Duke of Surrey in R2 4.1: Shakespeare may simply have pulled the name out of a hat (Cam2). Holinshed records the death of ‘Thomas Beauford earle of Surrie’ in 1410 (3.536).

  2 these letters Though not identified, the letters Henry holds may have been brought by the posts mentioned late in the previous scene (2.4.361–2); alternatively, they may be letters Henry himself has written to Surrey and Warwick. To judge from remarks made in 36–44, they contain news of the Prelate’s Rebellion and Northumberland’s role in it. Because 2.3 has dramatized Northumberland’s decision to abandon the rebel cause, however, he no longer poses a threat to the King – an irony which robs this scene of much of its tension.

  3.1] Actus Tertius. Scena Prima. F; not in Q 0.1] Qb (Enter the King in his night-gowne alone.), F (Enter the King, with a Page.); not in Qa 1–108] QbF; not in Qa 1 Warwick] Qb (War.), F 3 SD1] this edn

  4–31 Henry’s apostrophe to sleep echoes Sidney’s sonnet ‘Come Sleepe, o Sleepe, the certaine knot of peace’ (Astrophel, 39) in expressing a sentiment – that the great sleep uneasily – also found in Daniel (CW, 3.115): ‘But now the king retires him to his peace, / A peace much like a feeble sicke mans sleepe’ (Ard2, Cam1). Furthermore, it anticipates Henry V’s address to ceremony wherein he envies the life of the unencumbered peasant (H5 4.1.263–81) and Macbeth’s famous lines about sleep which emphasize, more than here, the guilt of the speaker (Mac 2.2.34–42).

  5 O sleep! These words, in both Q and F, make the line oddly hypermetric, leading Dyce to speculate that they must have been interpolated. Without them, the line would be a regular iambic pentameter.

  7 That so that, or with the result that. Cf. 1.1.197.

  9 cribs hovels (OED sb. 3a)

  10 uneasy uncomfortable, with an ironic anticipation of the moral or spiritual discomfort implicit in the same word at 31

  pallets simple beds or mattresses, usually made of straw (OED sb.2 1)

  11 hushed … night-flies Qb’s punctuation, adopted here, allows personified sleep to be hushed to its slumber by buzzing flies. F’s alters the sense by having sleep, hushed by ‘bussing’ Night (a maternal image of kissing), fly to its slumber. But as sleep is addressed in the second person, F’s third-person verb ‘flyes’ is not in agreement; this suggests that Qb’s use of ‘flies’ as a noun is correct.

  13 state splendour or magnificence, befitting a person of rank (OED sb. 17a)

  15 dull heavy, drowsy, insensible (OED adj. 3). Cf. 4.1.250 and 4.2.96.

  vile people of mean estate, peasants. See also its adjectival use at 1.2.18 and 2.2.47.

  3 SD2] Rowe; Exit. F; not in Qb 10 pallets] Qb; Pallads F 11 hushed … night-flies] Qb (husht); huisht with bussing Night, flyes F 12 Than] Then QbF great,] Qb; Great? F 14 sound] Qb; sounds F 15 li’st] Qb (li’ste); F (lyest) vile] Qb; vilde F 16 leav’st] F; leauest Qb

  17 The term watch-case compares the canopied bed of state in which the King lies awake with an ornamental case for a pocket watch wherein the wound-up mechanism, like the King, prepares to strike the alarm bell. Such watches were becoming common in Shakespeare’s time – witness Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, 5.2.251–2: ‘the watch rings alarum in his pocket’ (Ard1) – though the reference would be anachronistic for a medieval king to make. The or indicates either that watch-case and ’larum bell are alternate terms for the same thing, or that they are distinctly different, in which case the reference to a pocket watch may lead Henry to imagine a more public (common) type of alarm, the bell rung by a sentinel to signal a disturbance or warn of approaching danger. Cf. Mac 2.3.75.

  18–20 Shakespeare draws the image of the young sailor asleep on the topmast from a passage in Proverbs (23.34) warning against the evils of drinking too much wine – ‘Yea, thou shalt be as though thou layest in the middest of the sea, or sleepest vpon the top of the mast of a shyp’ – possibly filtered, as Humphreys observes, through the ‘Homily Against Gluttony and Drunkenness’ which appeared in a volume of sermons in 1574 (Certain Sermons, 208) and which is more closely echoed in R3: ‘Who builds his hope in air of your good looks / Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, / Ready with every nod to tumble down / Into the fatal bowels of the deep’ (3.4.98–101).

  19 Seal up make blind; aurally indistinguishable from ‘seel up’, which in falconry meant to stitch a hawk’s eyelids together as part of its training (OED v.2 1). Cf. Oth 3.3.213: ‘To seel her father’s eyes up, close as oak’.

  20 In cradle Abbott discusses the omission of the article in a prepositional phrase with a dependent genitive (89).

  21 visitation violent or destructive force visited upon a people or country (OED sb. 8)

  24 deafing archaic form, meaning to drown out one sound with a louder one (OED deaf v. 3). Cf. KJ 2.1.147: ‘What cracker is this same that deafs our ears?’

  slippery a suggestive epithet over which editors have argued for centuries: it may refer to the clouds’ gliding swiftly through the sky, or to their capacity to change shape, or to their moisture. The image of gargantuan waves mingling with the clouds, a commonplace in Shakespeare’s day, has been variously attributed to Virgil (Aen., 1.102–3, 3.564–7), Ovid (Met., 11.497–8) and Lucan (Pharsalia, 5.642).

  25 That See 7n.

  hurly uproar or tumult

  18 mast] F; masse Qb 22 billows] F; pillowes Qb 24 deafing clamour] Qb; deaff’ning Clamors F slippery] Qb; slipp’ry F

  26 partial unfair in favouring one person over another (OED adj. 1a)

  *then As there is no clear plural antecedent for Qb’s ‘them’, F’s ‘thy’ is possibly correct; but the simplest explanation is that the compositor made an error in reading minims, substituting an m for an n. Alternatively, if Qb’s ‘season’ in the next line is an error for sea-son (see 27n.), the compositor might have conceivably misread ‘him’ as ‘them’.

  27 sea-son The suggested readings sea-son and ‘sea’s son’ are plausible alternatives for Qb’s ‘season’ and preferable to F’s ‘Sea-Boy’, a term suspiciously close to the ship-boy (19) for which it substitutes (Davison).

  29 appliances things applied as means to an end; aids (OED sb. 3). Presumably such aids to sleep would include music to dull the senses, a blindfold to keep out light, and drugs.

  to boot to advantage; or, as in modern parlance, in addition (OED boot sb. 1)

  30 This line contains 12 syllables. Shaaber (Variorum) speculates that the parentheses surrounding ‘happy’ in Qb may have been deletion marks misunderstood by the compositor; without that word, the line would be a regular iambic pentameter.

  low people of mean estate. Cf. 15n. on vile.

  31 proverbial: ‘Crowns have cares’ (Dent, C863)

  31.1 *F omits Sir John Blunt from its SD, presumably because he is a ghost character who has no lines in the scene. Neither, however, does the Earl of Surrey; the reason modern editors include him but jettison Blunt is that the King calls for Surrey at line 1. At 35, however, the King’s ‘good morrow to you all’ suggests that Warwick may be accompanied by two other nobles: although you all may arguably refer to only two addressees, as in 2H6 2.2.26, it typically requires at least three. Dramatically, therefore, there is justification for both Surrey and Blunt to accompany Warwick. Q has Blunt enter again, as a mute attendant on the new King, at 5.2.41; and as Cam1 and subsequent editions indicate, he must attend Prince John at Gaultree as well (though Blunt is not listed in the entry at 4.2.23 in either Q or F), for the Prince instructs him to lead Collevile to York at 4.2.73.

  26 then] Riv; them Qb; thy F 27 sea-son] Chester; season Qb; Sea-Boy F; sea’s son Ridley 30 happy] F; (happy) Qb 31.1] Qb; Enter Warwicke and Surrey. F

  36 letter Most editors accept F’s plural form, assuming a compositorial error in Qb; but Qb’s singular would make sense if the King sent copies of the same letter – presumably one he has written – to Surrey and Warwick (see 2n.). Thus he would logically refer to the letter as plural when giving copies to his page, but as singular when asking whether the nobles had read it.

  38–43 Elaborate metaphors of the state as a body politic, subject to diseases analogous to those that weaken a physical body such as the King’s, were commonplace in Elizabethan writings.

  39 rank foul, festering (OED adj. 14b)

  41 yet distempered still sickened: by a disproportion of the four bodily humours (blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile) which, according to medieval physiology, were thought to regulate a person’s health and temperament; distempered also suggests having a fever.

  43 little The article ‘a’ is understood. Cf. TN 5.1.167: ‘Hold little faith, though thou hast too much fear’.

  44 cooled with a play on reducing the fever implicit in distempered (41)

  46 revolution … times passage of time, or perhaps changes wrought by time. Cf. alteration, 52.

  47–9 Make … sea The imagery of natural features losing their distinct properties, melting or metamorphosing into something else, anticipates the apocalyptic imagery of later tragic heroes such as Hamlet and Antony, much as it echoes that of Sonnet 64: ‘When I have seen the hungry ocean gain / Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, / And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, / Increasing store with loss, and loss with store’ (5–8). Behind such imagery may lie Ovid, Met., 15.261–3, either in the original Latin or in Golding’s 1567 translation (Ard2).

  47 continent dry land (OED sb. 3b), or that which contains or holds (1a) as the shore does the sea.

  50–1 The … hips The shore is personified as a belt wrapped around Neptune’s waist, which, as the sea recedes, grows too wide for him: cf. 1.2.40n. on girdles. OED glosses beachy as ‘pebbly’.

  51–2 *chances … changes In the absence of any punctuation in Qb and F separating chances from mocks, editors have been inclined (1) to alter mocks to ‘mock’ as a plural verb for the subject chances, creating a parallel construction, ‘chances mock / And changes fill’ – but causing a problem with the direct object cup, which can be filled but not mocked; or (2) to assume that mocks is a contraction of mock us, thus creating parallel direct objects as well; or (3) taking a hint from F’s capitalization of ‘Chances’, to personify it as a possessive so that ‘chance’s mocks’ refers to the ironic tricks played by accident. Each of these solutions is more complicated than the one chosen here, which is to treat the three nouns in Qb as parallel subjects of the verb fill.