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Notes and Queries Five Notes on the Text of
The Spanish Tragedy
Five Notes on the Text of The Spanish Tragedy
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63
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english
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Notes and Queries
DOI:
10.1093/notesj/gjw158
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September, 2016
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September 2016 NOTES AND QUERIES 11 Tyllney, Topographical Descriptions, 62, 65. Never Too Late, sig. C4v. John Leland, The Itinerary, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London, 1907), I, 55. 14 Robert Greene, Francescos Fortunes (London, 1590), sig. F1v. 15 W. T. Jackman, The Development of Transportation in Modern England (Cambridge, 1916), I, 89–90; Charles G. Harper, Stage-coach and Mail in Days of Yore (London, 1903), I, 75. 12 13 We can be certain of a few things at this point. First, when Greene wrote about ‘the Citie of Caerbranck’ in Never Too Late and Francescos Fortunes he indubitably had York in mind, and future editions of the texts should be glossed accordingly. Secondly, editors of texts like the Flores Historiarum and historians of York ought to take seriously the variant spelling of the city’s ancient name, given that it found its way not only into key sixteenth-century chronicles but also into literary works like Greene’s. Lastly, assuming that autobiographical elements are truly embedded in works like Never Too Late and Francescos Fortunes, Greene’s biographers have been led astray by the misidentification of Caerbranck and may very well have failed to locate the exact place of his marriage.16 Indeed, if they have looked in any place other than Yorkshire, then they have been looking for love in all the wrong parishes. RONALD A. TUMELSON, II Dover, TN doi:10.1093/notesj/gjw157 ß The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication 24 July, 2016 16 See Richardson, ‘Robert Greene’s Yorkshire Connexions’, 173; Charles W. Crupi, Robert Greene (Boston, 1986), 10. FIVE NOTES ON THE TEXT OF THE SPANISH TRAGEDY 1. III.iv.29–37 Lor. Hath Pedringano murdered Serberine? My lord, let me entreat you to take the paines To exasperate and hasten his reuenge With your complaintes vnto my L<ord> the King. This their dissention breeds a greater doubt. Bal. Assure thee, Don Lorenzo, he shall dye, Or; els his Highnes hardly shall deny. Meane while ile haste the Marshall Sessions: For die he shall for this his damned deed.1 1 I use Boas’s text of the play in my discussion. See Frederick S. Boas (ed.), ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, in The Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 just two cities for the region’s three counties (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire): Norwich and Ely.11 Greene, like Tyllney, probably had a clear sense as to what constituted a city and what constituted a borough, town, or village. Corby? Brancaster? The word city was hardly appropriate for either of these places. Another clue to Caerbranck’s identification is its proximity to an unnamed abbey. We recall that the house of Isabel’s father, Fregoso, is located in an abbey ‘not far from Caerbranck’.12 If, as seems evident, Greene had York in mind in constructing Francesco’s narrative, then he might also have been thinking of that city’s famed St Mary’s Abbey ‘without Boudom gate’, as the antiquary John Leland put it.13 When the abbey was despoiled under Henry VIII, the abbot’s house (Fregoso’s house?) became repurposed as the King’s Manor, and it served as the meeting place for the Council of the North well into the seventeenth century. Finally, the distance separating Caerbranck from Troynovant is a suggestively subtle clue. Having resolved at last to return to Isabel, Francesco ‘put spurres to his horse’, arriving in Caerbranck ‘within fiue daies’.14 Riding between Leeds and London in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Ralph Thoresby made his journey in as few as four days, whenever the weather was favourable, and in as many as eight when it was not. Similarly, according to some of the earliest extant records, stage coaches advertised the ability to make the trek from London to York in four days, ‘if God permits’.15 Albeit far from Dick Turpin’s pace, Francesco’s represents a respectable amount of time to make the journey, and this detail in Greene’s fiction is tinged with verisimilitude for readers who know that Troynovant and Caerbranck are London and York, respectively. 383 384 NOTES AND QUERIES Lor. Hath Pedringano murdered Serberine? My Lord, let me entreat you to take the paines, To exasperate and hasten his reuenge. With your complaints vnto my L. the King. This their dissention breeds a greater doubt. Bal. Assure thee Don Lorenzo he shall dye, Or els his Highnes hardly shall deny. Meane while, ile haste the Marshall Sessions, For die he shall for this his damned deed. The punctuation is puzzling. The three full stops at the end of ll. 31, 32 and 33 render the text ambiguous. Two diametrically different senses can be derived depending on whether l. 32 (‘With your complaints vnto my L. the King’) is taken as a modifier of ‘exasperate and hasten’ (l. 31) or as a part belonging to the sentence below in l. 33 (‘This their dissention breeds a greater doubt’). According to the former, Lorenzo urges Balthazar to go and plead with the king (let’s call it Reading A for the sake of convenience); but the latter Works of Thomas Kyd (Oxford, 1901). Apart from the earliest quartos of 1592, 1599, 1602 and the four editions of Robert Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays, modern editions of the play that are involved in this article are Philip Edwards (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy (London, 1959); J. R. Mulryne (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy (London, 1970); William Tydeman (ed.), ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, in Two Tudor Tragedies (London, 1992); David Bevington (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy (Manchester, 1996); Colin Gibson (ed.), ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, in Six Renaissance Tragedies (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1997). would have a completely different purport— Lorenzo warns Balthazar not to address his complaints to the king (let’s call it Reading B). The 1599 edition repeats the punctuation here. The 1602 quarto changes the full stop at the end of l. 31 to a comma and thus guides the text to Reading A, which has almost unanimously been followed by later editors. Robert Dodsley holds an invaluably different view in his treatment of the play in his Select Collection of Old Plays. He was cautious in his treatment of the text, staying largely in keeping with the reading as we see in the 1592 and 1599 quartos, except for the emendation of the full stops at the end of l. 31 and l. 32 to commas, thus leaving the text open to the two interpretations we have discussed above. But the second edition of the book, which, generally believed to be prepared by Isaac Reed and incorporating the findings of Octavius Gilchrist, came out 16 years after Dodsley’s in 1780, and decided in favour of Reading B, with ll. 30–33 as follows: My lord, let me intreat you to take the pains To exasperate and hasten his revenge; With your complaints unto my lord the king, This their dissention breeds a greater doubt. In 1825 J. P. Collier turned out a ‘new edition’ of Dodsley’s Collection and kept the above reading.2 Walter Scott followed the reading in his Ancient British Drama, an undertaking professed to be completed on the basis of Dodsley’s work.3 But a turning point came with William Carew Hazlitt’s fourth edition of Dodsley’s book (1874–1876). Hazlitt deviated from his predecessors and adopted the reading of the 1602 quarto, or Reading A, which has generally 2 Robert Dodsley published A Select Collection of Old Plays in 12 vols. in London in 1744. The second edition, revised by Isaac Reed, was printed in London 16 years after Dodsley’s death in 1780. John Payne Collier prepared ‘A New Edition’ of the book, which was published in London in 1825. There is, however, another version of the history of the book. According to Collier, Reed was not the formally contracted editor of the 1780 edition. His notes were appended in manuscript ‘to a copy of the Old Plays of 1780’, which somehow passed into the hand of Octavius Gilchrist, an amateur scholar. It was Collier himself that incorporated the notes of Reed’s and Gilchrist’s, together with the findings of some others, into Dodsley’s original work. See Collier’s ‘Advertisement to the Present Edition’, I, i–ii. 3 See ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, in The Ancient British Drama (3 vols), ed. Walter Scott (London, 1810), I. Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 Editors have been troubled by l. 35, because ‘hardly shall deny’, the three otherwise clear enough words, seem not to fit into the context. Two readings are dominant. Boas opines that ‘hardly shall deny’ means ‘shall with difficulty resist my pleadings’. Edwards disagrees and suggests the reading ‘shall show harshness in denying me’. But neither Boas’s nor Edwards’s interpretation has eased the difficulty. Perhaps the crux of the problem lies not in the predicate of the ‘or else’ clause, but rather in the subject: Balthazar uses ‘his Highnes’ to refer to himself, not to the king of Spain. This is related to the reading of the previous few lines, in clarification of which it is necessary to bring into the discussion the earliest editions of the play and the work of the eighteenth-century editors, Robert Dodsley and his collaborators. In the 1592 quarto, the passage under discussion reads: September 2016 September 2016 NOTES AND QUERIES 4 The fourth edition of Dodsley’s work, ‘now first chronologically arranged, revised and enlarged with the notes of all the commentators, and new notes by W. Carew Hazlitt’ was published in London in 1874–6. Boas’s or Edwards’s reading. In their readings, Balthazar would cut a figure that is overconfident of imposing himself on the king, which is obviously not in keeping with his status as a prisoner of war. Throughout the play, while the king of Spain is addressed alternately as ‘his maiestie’, ‘his highnes’, ‘my Lord’, or ‘dread Lord’; both the viceroy of Portugal and Prince Balthazar are styled as ‘highnes’. Here Balthazar refers to himself by ‘his highnes’ in a spirit of sarcastic jest, assuming the persona of Pedringano—he must die, otherwise his highness would be in trouble. Perhaps he simply takes up the Page’s tone when the latter answers him that ‘Your Highnes man’ Serberine was slain (l. 22). I admit that it is not common for a prince to address himself as highness, assuming the persona of another or not. But if we find that, of the two readings of A and B of the present passage, there is difficulty with Reading A and that Reading B is more plausible, the above provides an explanation for the latter. 2. III.v.1–6 My Maister hath forbidden me to looke in this box; and by my troth tis likely, if he had not warned me, I should not haue had so much idle time: for wee mens-kinde, in our minoritie, are like women in their vncertaintie: that, they are most forbidden, they will soonest attempt: so I now.—By my bare honesty, heeres nothing but the bare emptie box . . . As a principle in textual scholarship, editors should not allow themselves to interfere with the text except where there are ‘obvious’ errors or bibliographical evidence for emendation. But the principle is not easy to follow in practice, for there is no obvious criterion for ‘obvious’ errors. The word ‘minoritie’ in l. 3 of the above passage is a challenge to the principle. Although no editors seem to have cast doubt on it, that the word ‘minoritie’ should be emended to ‘curiosity’ is perhaps not too bold a suggestion. It involves no compositorial error and there are no different readings found in other editions. It is just pragmatically untenable in the context. The boy’s speech is a justification of his looking into the empty box against his master’s instruction. He explains Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 been followed by later editors including Boas and has not been questioned.4 Although Reading A has prevailed in later editions, Dodsley’s treatment of the text is noteworthy and perhaps advantageous. Several lines earlier, before the Page turns up to report the news of Pedringano’s murder of Serberine, Lorenzo almost openly discusses with Balthazar his intention to dispose of ‘those base confederates’ (III.iii.10, referring doubtlessly to Serberine and Pedringano), for fear they would reveal their masters’ crime in Horatio’s assassination. Therefore, now that one of the two is killed, Lorenzo prompts Balthazar to ‘hasten’ the death of the other in the name of revenge. At the treacherous instigation, Balthazar, never so guileless as Lorenzo thinks, pretends indignation and replies that he will act to effect Pedringano’s quick death by ‘hast[ing] the Marshal Sessions’. In fact, as it turns out in the later development of the plot, Balthazar is never to plead with the king for Serberine’s revenge. After all, as both Lorenzo and Balthazar must understand, it is safer for them to have Pedringano executed in as quick and inconspicuous a way as possible rather than to draw attention through loud protests. So—if we accept the reading in the second edition of Dodsley’s Select Collection of Old Plays— Lorenzo expresses his apprehension that the fatal ‘dissension’ between Pedringano and Serberine would raise ‘greater doubt’ if Balthazar chooses to make complaints to the king rather than take measures to quicken Pedringano’s execution. Now against this context, l. 35 will be easy to understand. In reply to Lorenzo’s concern, Balthazar assures him that he will do as Lorenzo wishes and seek Pedringano’s quick execution, for otherwise if Pedringano escapes the penalty of death, all revealed, Balthazar himself ‘shall hardly deny’ the role he played in Horatio’s murder. With ‘Or els his Highnes hardly shall deny’, he simply echoes Lorenzo’s apprehension about the unfavorable situation they would find themselves in if Pedringano did not die. This is more plausible than either 385 386 NOTES AND QUERIES 3. III.vi.1–16 Hier. Thus must we toyle in other mens extreames, That know not how to remedie our owne; And doe them iustice, when vniustly we, For all our wrongs can compasse no redresse. But shall I neuer liue to see the day, That I may come (by iustice of the heauens) To know the cause that may my cares allay? This toyles my body, this consumeth age, That onely I to all men iust must be, And neither Gods nor men be iust to me. Dep. Worthy Hieronimo, your office askes A care to punish such as doe transgresse. Hier. So ist my duety to regarde his death, Who, when he liued, deserued my dearest blood: But come, for that we came for: lets begin, For heere lyes that which bids me to be gone. Boas suggests that, by ‘heere’ in the last line, ‘Hieronimo probably refers to the handkerchief dipped in Horatio’s blood [cf. II.v.51] which lies concealed near his heart.’ This has generally been followed. For instance, Edwards glosses ‘heere’ as ‘in his heart or his head, which he touches’. Bevington even follows up and observes that, with the line, ‘the actor gestures, perhaps indicating the bloody handkerchief worn near his heart.’ But this seems to overinterpret the text; the language provides no clue to such a construction. Actually the meaning is clear enough in light of the immediate context. The whole of Hieronimo’s speech in the passage consists of two semantic parts, with the Deputy interposing, urging Hieronimo to leave off complaining about his own wrongs and proceed as judge to deal with the Pedringano murder case. Before the adversative ‘But’ (l. 15), Hieronimo dwells on the injustice he has endured and, for that reason, the irony in his capacity as judge to remedy ‘other mens extreames’. After ‘But’, upon the Deputy’s urge, Hieronimo manages to regain himself and channel his mind to the case at hand. The line under discussion belongs to the second part. If we treat Kyd’s text as ‘a cohesive and coherent piece of discourse’, to use a linguistic term, we cannot but conclude that, by ‘heere’, Hieronimo refers to the Pedringano case. The syntax of the very sentence points to the same conclusion. Within the sentence, the clause introduced by ‘For’, which makes up l. 16, explains the reason for the action taken in the preceding clause ‘lets begin’ (semantically, a repetition of ‘But come, for that we came for’). Of course, Hieronimo and the Deputy ‘came for’ the Pedringano case, the legal proceeding of which they are to ‘begin’ with the very next line. The phrase ‘to be gone’ also needs elaborating. On a first look, the phrase is comparable to Jonson’s ‘Bid him be gone’ (The Alchemist, IV.vii.) and Shakespeare’s ‘. . . when nature calls thee to be gone’ (‘Sonnet 4’). Then the text can only be read according to either of the following two senses as are listed in OED: ‘to depart (promptly or finally), to take oneself off’ or to be ‘dead; departed from life’ (‘go’, 48a, 48c). but it makes no sense for Hieronimo to say he feels that something—be it the bloody handkerchief as Boas and others interpret the line or the Pedringano case as I propose—calls him to depart or to die. Kyd’s usage of the phrase is closer to the way it is used in the following: ‘Lords, let us be gone / Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 himself by observing that he is going to do what all ‘mens-kinde’ will do in similar situations. He is motivated by a typical male propensity: ‘they are most forbidden, they will soonest attempt’. Obviously, the word that sums up the propensity is ‘curiosity’, not ‘minoritie’. In pragmatic terms, a youth who regards himself as among the grownup ‘menskinde’—whether in fact he is still ‘in minoritie’ or not—and sophisticated enough to talk about women’s ‘vncertaintie’ is unlikely to justify himself by accentuating his being ‘in minoritie’. Further, though the phrase ‘mens-kinde in minoritie’ makes sense, meaning ‘men under age’ if read in isolation from the entire sentence, it does not bear the comparison—the comparison built between women’s ‘vncertaintie’ and a quality likewise supposedly characteristic of men. A word that most naturally answers the comparison in the present context seems no other than ‘curiosity’. September 2016 September 2016 NOTES AND QUERIES 387 ‘without reflecting carefully’ are logically contrary to the effort to ‘thinke vpon a meane to . . .’. And, if we complete their sentences, both Bevington and Gibson portray Hieronimo as a heartless father who has all along been striving to find a means to ‘let [his son’s] death be vnreveng’d’ and is now entreating Bel-imperia not to take him otherwise. This is of course not the case. Read in the context of the whole of IV.i., here Hieronimo speaks in reply to BelImperia’s accusation that he, brazening ‘dishonour’ and ‘the hate of men’, has been trying to find ‘excuses’ to dodge the obligation to revenge Horatio’s murder (ll. 8–13). If we follow OED, the meaning is clear enough. Hieronimo makes two points in the four lines: (1) he tries to convince Bel-Imperia that he has good reasons to be cautious with her letter; (2) he asks her not to conceive of him as trying to hit upon a means to rationalize his inaction and leave Horatio’s death unrevenged. If we follow the language closely, l. 40 can be paraphrased as ‘Please do not think that I would, hard to understand to all, think upon a means . . .’ 4. IV.i.38–41 5. IV.iv.117–21 Pardon, O pardon, Bel-imperia, My feare and care in not beleeuing it; Nor thinke I thoughtles thinke vpon a meane To let his death be vnreveng’d at full: ... ... OED lists the above four lines as the first example for the word ‘thoughtless’ under 1b, ‘without construction’. But this has generally been ignored. It has neither been followed nor responded to in modern editions of the play. Of the few editors who provide annotations here, Mulryne glosses ‘thoughtles’ as ‘unconcerned’, Tydeman explains the word as meaning ‘without reflecting carefully’, Bevington interprets l. 40 as ‘and do not imagine me so unconcerned as not to think upon a means’, and Gibson provides the note that ‘thoughtless think upon’ means ‘give no thought to’. I would like to suggest that OED be followed here. To gloss ‘thoughtles’ as either ‘unconcerned’ or ‘without reflecting carefully’ is erroneous in that ‘unconcerned’ and And you, my L<ord>, whose reconciled sonne Marcht in a net, and thought himselfe vnseene, And rated me for brainsicke lunacie, With God amend that mad Hieronimo, How can you brook our plaies Catastrophe? ‘Marcht in a net’ (l. 118), as Boas and other later editors note, is a proverbial phrase denoting ‘a transparent attempt at deceit’. I would like to suggest that the word ‘reconciled’ (l. 117) should be understood in the same vein of sarcasm. Mulryne, Tydeman, and Bevington all believe that, by ‘reconciled’, Hieronimo refers to his pretended reconciliation with Lorenzo at III.xiv.130–64. This is incorrect and also seems to miss the real locus of the irony. Lorenzo stops Hieronimo from pleading with the king and says Hieronimo is ‘Distract, and in a manner lunatick’ at III.xii., earlier than the pretended reconciliation occurs. That is, he ‘Marcht . . .’, ‘thought . . .’, and ‘rated . . .’ before he can be Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 To solemnize two mariages in one’ (anonymous, The Costly Whore, V.i.322–3), ‘But now I must be gone to buy a slave’ (Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, II.Iii.97), and ‘sure I think she be gone a-fishing for her’ (Thomas Middleton, The Chaste Maid in Cheapside, IV.ii.17). A subsequent action or a purpose is suggested. That is, ‘to be gone’, in effect, means ‘to go (to do something)’. The action for Hieronimo to go to perform is too obvious to be verbally articulated: he feels that, ‘heare’ in the case of Pedringano’s murder of Serberine, as in Don Basulto’s supplication for his murdered son (III.xiii), there is something that naturally calls him—as judge and a bereft father—to attend to. Read in this way, the dramatic irony of the Pedringano episode is saved. While the audience knows all the facts of his tragedy, Hieronimo himself remains in ignorance. Deciding that ‘heere lyes that which bids me to be gone’, he is heading to the direction he should go. Yet true to his role as a tragic protagonist, when he is so close to hitting upon the secret of his son’s death, he practically veers away, sentencing the criminal to a quick death. 388 NOTES AND QUERIES doi:10.1093/notesj/gjw158 ß The Author (2016). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Advance Access publication 24 July, 2016 THOMAS WATSON’S INFLUENCE ON THE SPANISH TRAGEDY THOMAS Watson (1556?–92), who was best known for the rhetorical experimentation and Petrarchism in his sonnet sequence Hecatompathia (1582), was linked with Thomas Kyd in contemporary groupings of dramatists. In Palladis Tamia (1598), Francis Meres places Kyd between Watson and Shakespeare in a list of writers ‘best for Tragedie’.1 Thomas Dekker in a Knight’s Conjuring (1607) depicts ‘Learned Watson, industrious Kyd, ingenious Atchlow’ in the Elysian Fields and credits them with the molding ‘out of their pennes . . . inimitable Bentley’.2 Dekker establishes that Kyd and Watson belonged to a group that created roles for the noted actor John Bentley.3 I would like to substantiate Meres’s and Dekker’s assessment of their literary relationship by tracing Watson’s influence on Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Levin Schucking argued that The Spanish Tragedy was the collaborative effort of Kyd and Watson because lines from Watson’s Hecatompathia and An Eglogue Upon the Death of Francis Walsingham (1590) are used in the play and also because Watson’s 1 Quoted in The Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. F. S. Boas (1901; rpt. Oxford, 1955), lxxviii. 2 Quoted in Arthur Freeman, Thomas Kyd, Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1969), 13. 3 Ibid, 13. Petrarchan style pervades the love triangle of Bel-imperia, Horatio, and Balthazar. Schucking dated The Spanish Tragedy 1586– 87, and, consequently, he maintained that Kyd could not have been influenced by Watson’s Eglogue. Rather, Watson went back to his collaboration with Kyd to borrow the lines (III.viii.15–22) for his poem on Walsingham’s death.4 But Philip Edwards, who, like me, dates The Spanish Tragedy 1590–91, concludes that the play is influenced by Watson’s poem because of the compressed method of adaptation that Kyd employs.5 Thus, it is not necessary to claim co-authorship to account for Watson’s strong presence in Kyd’s play. Rather, the influence results from Kyd’s dramatic adaptation of Watsonian elements of Petrarchism, Protestant nationalism, classical drama, and Empedoclean philosophy. Watson’s major influence on Kyd occurs in Lorenzo’s encouragement of Balthazar to continue wooing his obdurate sister: ‘In time the savage Bull sustains the yoke, / In time all haggard hawks will stoop to lure’(II.i.1–7).6 But Balthazar insists that ‘she is . . . more hard withal, / Than beast, or bird, or tree, or stony wall’ (II.i.9–10). These sentiments are borrowed from Watson’s sonnet xlvii in the Hecatompathia in which the lover laments that, although In time the Bull is brought to weare the yoake; . . . More fierce is my sweete love, more hard withall, Then Beast, or Birde, then Tree, or Stony wall.7 Kyd confers a new compactness and energy by endowing the trope with dramatic complexity in the stichomythic exchanges between 4 Levin Schucking, Die Verfasserschaft der ‘Spanishen Tragodie’ (Nordlingen, Germany, 1963), 19. 5 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards (London, 1959), 144. All references to the play will be from this edition and will be cited within the text. 6 Edwards (33n) also indicates the parallel between II.i.119–29 and sonnet 41 of the Hecatompathia. 7 ThomasWatson, Poems, ed. Edward Arber (1870; rpt. New York, 1966), 83. Subsequent references to Watson’s works will be from this edition and will be cited within the text according to page numbers. Downloaded from http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/ at Freie Universitaet Berlin on January 16, 2017 termed the duke’s ‘reconciled sonne’. I would suggest that ‘reconciled’ is used in the sense ‘to bring (a person) into a state of acquiescence with, acceptance of, or submission to a thing, situation, etc.’ (OED). What Hieronimo means—and where the irony lies—is that, now dead, your son is reconciled to the fact that he was but marching in a net. YAOPING ZHANG Shanxi University, China September 2016