Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/115

flesh, how art thou fishified! Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady was but[C 1] a kitchen-wench; marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her; Dido,45 a dowdy;[E 1] Cleopatra, a gipsy;[E 2] Helen and Hero, hildings[E 3] and harlots; Thisbe, a grey eye[E 4] or so, but not[E 5] to the purpose.—Signior Romeo, bon jour! there's a French salutation to your French slop.[E 6] You gave us the50 counterfeit fairly last night.

Rom.	Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?

Mer.	The slip,[E 7] sir, the slip; can you not con- ceive?55

1. 44. was but] Q1; was Q, F.

1. 46. dowdy] slattern. Rich, Farewell to Military Profession (1581): "If plaine or homely, we say she is a doudie or a slut."
2. 46. gipsy] because Egyptian, and dark of hue. This passage is jestingly alluded to in The Returne from Parnassus, iii. i. (p. 57, ed. Macray).
3. 47. hildings] worthless persons; used by Shakespeare of both men and women. See iii. v. 168.
4. 47, 48. grey eye] In Two Gent. of Verona, iv. iv. 197, we have (Chaucer's comparison) eyes, "grey as glass"; in Sir Eglamour line 861: "eyen grey as crystalle stone"; in The Returne from Parnassus, i. i. (p. 31, ed. Macray), of silver money: "my purse wants these grey silver eyes that stand idelye in the face of a citizen's daughter." It is certain, however, that grey in Elizabethan literature (and I think in a few passages of Shakespeare) means sometimes bluish. Cotgrave has "Bluard, gray, skie coloured, blewish." Cæsius is explained by Cooper, Thesaurus (1573): "Gray, skie colour with speckes of gray, blunket" (i.e. greyish blue); Glaucus, says Cooper, "is commonly taken for blewe or gray like the skie with speckes as Cæsius is, but I thinke it rather reddie," etc. Unless we understand grey as bluish, Shakespeare nowhere speaks of blue eyes in our meaning. He praises blue-veined eyelids. "Blue eyes" with him means having a bluish circle round the eyes.
5. 48. but not] Hanmer (after Warburton) reads but now.
6. 50. French slop] large, loose trousers, as in Much Ado, iii. ii. 36.
7. 54. slip] a piece of false money (with a play on the word). Greene, in Thieves falling out, has: "certain slips, which are counterfeit pieces of money." So Troilus and Cressida, ii. iii. 27: "If I could have remembered a gilt counterfeit, thou wouldst not have slipped out of my contemplation."