“You do not meet a man, but frowns: our bloods
No more obey the heavens, than our courtiers’
Still seem, as does the king’s.”
There can be little doubt of Mr. Tyrwhitt’s emendations of “courtiers” and
“king,” as to the sense;—only it is not impossible that Shakespeare’s
dramatic language may allow of the word “brows” or “faces” being
understood after the word “courtiers’,” which might then remain in the
genitive case plural. But the nominative plural makes excellent sense, and
is sufficiently elegant, and sounds to my ear Shakespearian. What,
however, is meant by “our bloods no more obey the heavens?”—Dr. Johnson’s
assertion that “bloods” signify “countenances,” is, I think, mistaken both
in the thought conveyed—(for it was never a popular belief that the stars
governed men’s countenances)—and in the usage, which requires an
antithesis of the blood,—or the temperament of the four humours, choler,
melancholy, phlegm, and the red globules, or the sanguine portion, which
was supposed not to be in our own power, but to be dependent on the
influences of the heavenly bodies,—and the countenances which are in our
power really, though from flattery we bring them into a no less apparent
dependence on the sovereign, than the former are in actual dependence on
the constellations.
I have sometimes thought that the word “courtiers” was a misprint for
“countenances,” arising from an anticipation, by foreglance of the
compositor’s eye, of the word “courtier” a few lines below. The written
_r_ is easily and often confounded with, the written _n_. The compositor
read the first syllable _court_, and—his eye at the same time catching the
word “courtier” lower down—he completed the word without reconsulting the
copy. It is not unlikely that Shakespeare intended first to express,
generally, the same thought, which a little afterwards he repeats with a
particular application to the persons meant;—a common usage of the
pronominal “our,” where the speaker does not really mean to include
himself; and the word “you” is an additional confirmation of the “our,”
being used in this place for “men” generally and indefinitely,—just as
“you do not meet” is the same as “one does not meet.”