magnas opes habuit.' Nicholas Grimald's translation of the De Officiis (1556) renders the phrase, 'Bargulus, that Illyrian robber.'
IV. i. 117. Pene gelidus timor occupat artus. 'Cold fear almost seizes my joints.' The Folio gives the first word as 'Pine,' which most editors omit as meaningless. Theobald interpreted it as 'pœnæ," (fear) of punishment, and Malone as 'pene,' almost.
IV. i. 127. let my head . . . sooner dance upon a bloody pole. 'There is, indeed, one detail in the drama of the period which may be regarded as symbolical of the whole dramatic tendency of the time, namely, the swinging about of a human head, cut from its body, on the stage. This cut-off head was a stage-property that had survived from the time of the mystery-plays, when it was meant to represent the head of the unfortunate John the Baptist at the gruesome crowning point of the dance of Salome. It survived in several specimens, a favourite stage-property, in the popular theatre, certain, as we may presume, at every appearance of drawing the ironical applause of experienced theatre-goers, and probably known to the actors, whose sense of the comic was at all times keen, by some droll nickname now forgotten. In the three parts of the old drama of Henry VI this head appears at different times. Queen Margaret (2 Henry VI, IV. iv.) presses it to her bosom as the head of her dead lover, Suffolk. A few scenes later it appears in duplicate and with a different signification, again further on (V. i.) as the head of the rebel Cade.' (Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays, 1922, p. 19 f.)
IV. i. 137. savage islanders. Pompey was slain in Egypt, 48 B. C., not by savage islanders, but by Egyptians and renegade soldiers of his own. The error is not found in the Contention. It is a coincidence that in Chapman's Tragedy of Cæsar and Pompey (printed 1631) Pompey is murdered on the island of Lesbos.
