In the following passage of _All's Well that Ends Well_, Act i. Sc. 3.,
where Helena is confessing to Bertram's mother, the Countess, her love for
him, these two words occur in an unusual sense, if not in a sense peculiar
to the great poet:--
"I love your son:--
My friends were poor, but honest, so's my love:
Be not offended, for it hurts not him,
That he is lov'd of me: I follow him not
By any token of presumptuous suit;
Nor would I have him till I do deserve him:
Yet never know how that desert may be.
I know I love in vain; strive against hope;
Yet, in this _captious and intenible_ sieve
I still pour in the waters of my love,
And lack not to lose still."
Johnson was perplexed about the word _captious_; "which (says he) I never
found in this sense, yet I cannot tell what to substitute, unless _carious_
for rotten!" Farmer supposed _captious_ to be a contraction of _capacious_!
Steevens believed that _captious_ meant _recipient_, capable of receiving;
which interpretation Malone adopts. Mr. Collier, in his recent edition of
Shakspeare, after stating Johnson's and Farmer's suggestions, says, "where
is the difficulty? It is true that this sense of _captious_ may not have an
exact parallel; but the intention of Shakspeare is very evident: _captious_
means, as Malone says, capable of _taking_ or _receiving_; and _intenible_
(printed _intemible_ in the first folio, and rightly in the second)
incapable of _retaining_. Two more appropriate epithets could hardly be
found, and a simile more happily expressive."
We no doubt all know, by intuition as it were, what Shakspeare meant; but
"the great master of English," as MR. HICKSON very justly calls him, would
never have used _captious_, as applied figuratively to a _sieve_, for
_capable of taking or receiving_.
_Intenible_, notwithstanding the hypercriticism of Mr. Nares (that "it is
incorrectly used by Shakspeare for _unable to hold_;" and that "it should
properly mean _not to be held_, as we now use _untenable_") was undoubtedly
used in the former sense, and it was most probably so accepted in the
poet's time; for in the _Glossagraphia Anglicana Nova_, 1719, we have
"Untenable, that _will not or cannot hold_ or be holden long."
With regard to _captious_, it is not so much a matter of surprise that none
of all these learned commentators should fail in their _guesses_ at the
meaning, as that none of them should have remarked that the sense of the
Latin _captiosus_, and of its congeners in Italian and old French, is
_deceitful_, _fallacious_; and Bacon uses the word for _insidious,
ensnaring_. There can be no doubt that this is the sense in which
Shakspeare used it. Helen speaks of her hopeless love for Bertram, and
says:
"I know I love in vain, strive against hope; yet in this _fallacious_
and _unholding_ sieve I still pour in the waters of my love, and fail
not to lose still."
When we speak of a _captious_ person, do we mean one _capable of taking or
receiving_? Then how much more absurd would it be to take it in that
impossible sense, when figuratively applied in the passage before us!
Bertram shows himself _incapable of receiving_ Helena's love: he is truly
_captious_ in that respect.
In French the word _captieux_, according to the Academy, is only applied to
language, though we may say _un homme captieux_ to signify a man who has
the art of _deceiving_ or leading into error by captious language.
It is not impossible that the poet may have had in his mind the fruitless
labour imposed upon the Danaïdes as a punishment, for it has been thus
moralised:
"These virgins, who in the flower of their age pour water into pierced
vessels which they can never fill, what is it but to be always
bestowing over love and benefits upon the ungrateful."