This page has been validated.
158
ROMEO AND JULIET
[ACT IV.
| Rom. | If I may trust the flattering truth[C 2][E 1] of sleep, My dreams presage some joyful news at hand: My bosom's lord[E 2] sits lightly in his throne, And all this day an[E 3] unaccustom'd spirit Shifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts.5 I dreamt my lady came and found me dead— Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think!— And breathed[E 4] such life with kisses in my lips |
- ↑ 1. truth] I do not doubt that Shakespeare originally wrote eye Q 1—"eye of sleep" meaning visions of the night. We have in Sonnets, xxxiii., "flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye"; in Richard III. I. iv. 271, "if thine eye be not a flatterer"; in King John, II. i. 503, "the flattering table of her eye"; compare also Julius Cæsar, IV. iii. 89, 90. But, as Daniel notes, in Q 1 of the present play for II. ii. 141, we have "Too flattering true to be substantial"; possibly when flattering truth here was substituted for flattering eye, the flattering true of the earlier passage became flattering sweet. Mr. Fleay suggested that flattering means in both passages (when connected with true and truth) seeming. It is an old saying that morning dreams come true; can "flattering truth of sleep" mean a flattering morning-dream? Various emendations of truth have been made or proposed; Warburton, ruth; Collier (MS.) death; Singer soother (for "truth of"); White sooth, in the sense of augury.
- ↑ 3. bosom's lord] Steevens notes that, in Chester's Love's Martyr (1601), the line "How his deepe bosomes lord the dutchess thwarted" is explained in a marginal note "Cupid." Malone compares Othello, III. iii. 448: "Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne." Again, in Twelfth Night, I. i. 38, the heart is the throne, the lover its king; and in the same play, II. iv. 21, "the seat where Love is throned" seems to mean the heart. Bosom's lord perhaps, then, means Love; but perhaps, more obviously, it means the heart.
- ↑ 4. this day an] Misprinted "this an day an" in F, and altered in F 2 to "this winged."
- ↑ 8. breathed] Steevens suggests that Shakespeare remembered Marlowe's
