"It lies as sightly on the back of him
As great Alcides' shoes upon an ass."--_King John_, Act II. Sc. 1.
"The ass was to _wear_ the shoes, and not to bear them on his back, as
Theobald supposed, and therefore would read _shows_. The 'shoes of
Hercules' were as commonly alluded to by our old poets, as the _ex pede
Herculem_ was a familiar allusion of the learned." (Mr. Knight in
1839.)
Fourteen years' additional consideration has not altered Mr. Knight's view
of this passage. In 1853 we find him putting forth a prospectus for a new
edition of Shakspeare, to be called "The Stratford Edition," various
portions from which he sets before the public by way of sample. Here we
have over again the same note as above, a little diversified, and placed
parallel to Theobald's edition in this way:
"It lies as sightly on the back of him
As great Alcides' _shows_ upon an ass."
"The folio reads 'Great Alcides' shoes.' Theobald says, 'But why
_shoes_, in the name of propriety? For let Hercules and his _shoes_
have been really as big as they were ever supposed to be, yet they (I
mean the _shoes_) would not have been an overload for an ass.'"
"The 'shoes of Hercules' were as commonly alluded to in our old poets,
as the _ex pede Herculem_ was a familiar allusion of the learned. It
was not necessary that the ass should be overloaded with the shoes--he
might be _shod_ (shoed) with them."
Now who, in reading these parallel notes, but would suppose that it is Mr.
Knight who restores _shoes_ to the text, and that it is Mr. Knight who
points out the common allusion by our old poets to the shoes of Hercules?
Who would imagine that the substance of this correction of Theobald was
written by Steevens a couple of generations back, and that, consequently,
Theobald's proposed alteration had never been adopted?
I should not think of pointing out this, but that Mr. Knight himself, in
this same prospectus, has taken Mr. Collier to task for the very same
thing; that is, for taking credit, in his _Notes and Emendations_, for all
the folio MS. corrections, whether known or unknown, necessary or
unnecessary.
Indeed, the very words of Mr. Knight's complaint against Mr. Collier are
curiously applicable to himself:
"It requires the most fixed attention to the nice distinctions of such
constantly-recurring 'notes and emendations,' to disembarrass the
cursory reader from the notion that these are _bona fide_ corrections
of the common text....
"Who cares to know what errors are corrected in" (the forthcoming
Stratford edition), "that exist in no other, and which have never been
introduced into the modern text?"--_Specimen_, &c., p. xxiv.
The impression one would receive from Mr. Knight's note upon Theobald is,
that Shakspeare had his notion of _the shoes_ from "our old poets," while
_the learned_ had _theirs_ from _ex pede Herculem_; but where the analogy
lies, wherein the point, or what the application, is not explained.
Steevens' original note was superior to this, in so much that he quoted the
words of these old poets, thereby giving his readers an opportunity of
considering the justness of the deduction. The only set-off to this
omission by Mr. Knight is the introduction of "ex pede Herculem," the merit
of which is doubtless his own.
But it so happens that the size of the foot of Hercules has no more to do
with the real point of the allusion than the length of Prester John's;
therefore _ex pede Herculem_ is a most unfortunate
illustration,--particularly awkward in a specimen sample, the excellence of
which may be questioned. {29}
It is singular enough, and it says a great deal for Theobald's common
sense, that _he_ saw what the true intention of the allusion must be,
although he did not know how to reconcile it with the existing letter of
the text. He wished to preserve _the spirit_ by the sacrifice of _the
letter_, while Mr. Knight preserves the letter but misinterprets the
spirit.
Theobald's word "shows," in the sense of externals, is very nearly what
Shakspeare meant by _shoes_, except that _shoes_ implies a great deal more
than _shows_,--it implies the assumption of the character as well as the
externals of Hercules.
Out of five quotations from our old poets, given by Steevens in the first
edition of his note, there is not one in which _the shoes_ are not provided
with _feet_. But Malone, to his immortal honour, was the first to furnish
them with _hoofs_:
"Upon an ass; _i.e._ upon the hoofs of an ass."--_Malone._
But Shakspeare nowhere alludes to feet! His ass most probably _had feet_,
and so had Juvenal's verse (when he talks of his "satyra sumente
cothurnum"); but neither Shakspeare nor Juvenal dreamed of any necessary
connexion between the feet and the shoes.
Therein lies the difference between Shakspeare and "our old poets;" a
difference that ought to be sufficient, of itself, to put down the common
cry,--that Shakspeare borrowed his allusions from them. If so, how is it
that his expositors, with these old poets before their eyes all this time,
together with their own scholarship to boot, have so widely mistaken the
true point of his allusion? It is precisely because they _have_ confined
their researches to these old poets, and have _not_ followed Shakspeare to
the fountain head.
There is a passage in Quintilian which, very probably, has been the common
source of both Shakspeare's version, and that of the old poets; with this
difference, that he understood the original and they did not.
Quintilian is cautioning against the introduction of solemn bombast in
trifling affairs:
"To get up," says he, "this sort of pompous tragedy about mean matters,
is as though you would dress up children with the _mask_ and _buskins_
of Hercules."
["Nam in parvis quidem litibus has tragoedias movere tale est quale si
_personam_ Herculis et _cothurnos_ aptare infantibus velis."]
Here the addition of the _mask_ proves that the allusion is purely
theatrical. The mask and buskins are put for the stage trappings, or
_properties_, of the part of Hercules: of these, one of the items was the
_lion's skin_; and hence the extreme aptitude of the allusion, as applied
by the Bastard, in _King John_, to Austria, who was assuming the importance
of Coeur de Lion!
It is interesting to observe how nearly Theobald's plain, homely sense, led
him to the necessity of the context. The real points of the allusion can
scarcely be expressed in better words than his own:
"Faulconbridge, in his resentment, would say this to Austria, 'That
lion's skin which my great father, King Richard, once wore, looks as
uncouthly on thy back, as that other noble hide, which was borne by
Hercules, would look on the back of an ass!' A double allusion was
intended: first, to the fable of the ass in the lion's skin; then
Richard I. is finely set in competition with Alcides, as Austria is
satirically coupled with the ass."
One step farther, and Theobald would have discovered the true solution: he
only required to know that _the shoes_, by a figure of rhetoric called
synecdoche, may stand for the whole character and attributes of Hercules,
to have saved himself the trouble of conjecturing an ingenious, though
infinitely worse word, as a substitute.
As for subsequent annotators, it must be from the mental preoccupation of
this unlucky "ex pede Herculem," that _they_ have so often put their foot
in it. They have worked up Alcides' shoe into a sort of antithesis to
Cinderella's; and, like Procrustes, they are resolved to stretch everything
to fit.