Page:Romeo and Juliet (Dowden).djvu/242

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
198
APPENDIX III

spoken)." The central motive of the speech is "Come night, come Romeo." Having invoked night to spread the curtain, Juliet says, with a thought of her own joyful wakefulness, "Yonder sun may sleep" (wink having commonly this sense); and then she calls on Romeo to leap to her arms.

I am not quite sure that "untalk'd of and unseen" is rightly connected with "Romeo." Possibly we should connect it with what follows. Lovers unseen seeing is in the manner of the play. This is a secondary question; but perhaps the whole might be pointed thus:

Spread thy close curtains love-performing night!
—That [=Yonder] runaway's eyes may wink—and Romeo,
Leap to these arms! Untalk'd of and unseen,
Lovers can see, etc.

If following Delius we read runaways' eyes, the runaways (if not the stars) must be wanderers in the streets. Attempts have been made to produce an example of runaway in such a sense, but, I think, without success, and Professor Hales (Longman's Magazine, Feb. 1892) has to admit that the word in this sense is a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον not only in Shakespeare, but in all English literature. Expressions of the desire of lovers for silence and the absence of babblers can of course be found, and Spenser's Epithalamium may be compared with Juliet's soliloquy, but the points in common are not, I think, such as prove more than that a community of subject suggested like ideas.

Theobald read "That th' Runaway's" (after Warburton). Allen suggests the absorption of the by the final t in that. Commentators have named as the runaway the Night, the moon, Phaeton, Romeo, Juliet, etc. Halpin, with learning and ingenuity, argues that he is the runaway Cupid. See thirty closely printed pages on this line in Furness's Romeo and Juliet.

White, who, after resisting it, came round to War-