Antigonus warmly defends her and assures the King that he has been "abused by some putters-on who will be damn'd for't," and he adds,
"Would I knew the villain,
I would land-damn him."
The idea is that this may be a misprint for laudanum, meaning, "I would poison him." It must be added that this explanation does not find much favour, and perhaps it is rather far-fetched. It is mentioned by Stevens as having been proposed by Dr. Farmer, but Furness thinks that Stevens was poking fun at the solemn nonsense of his learned friend. But the other interpretations are not much better. There is, it appears, an old dialect word "lan-dan" which meant following a man with kettles and other rough music. Another suggested meaning is an association with an old Saxon word (hland) for urine, conveying the notion that the villain is to be made ill by a suppression of urine. Both these explanations seem ludicrously insufficient to express the anger of the speaker. Damn him up with land, that is, bury him alive, is gruesome enough, but this is an obscure way of expressing the proposal. Johnson disposes of the term by the theory that it was "a word which caprice brought into fashion, and reason and grammar drove irrevocably away. It has also been assumed, and this looks likely, that the punctuation has got misplaced and that the sentence should read "I would—Lord damn him."
Shakespeare's favourite daughter Susannah was married to Dr. John Hall, and it is possible that the doctor and his wife lived with the poet in his later years at Stratford. Dr. Hall was a practitioner of some eminence, and wrote a book in Latin (translated into English in 1657 by James Cook) entitled "Select
