Shakspere's Twelfth night Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES ACT I Scene I 3. and so die: i.e., "the appetite" for music (and not " love " for Olivia) may so die. 5-7. like the sweet sound, etc.: A poetic... more » image uniting two senses ("sound" and "odour") which needs no dissection to be felt and understood. 9. quick : lively, volatile. 12. validity and pitch: value and worth — contrasted with "abatement and low price" in the next line. " Pitch " is technically a hunting term and denotes the "height" to which a falcon rises. 14. fancy : love — as often in Shakspere. 15. alone : beyond any comparison; fantastical, imaginative," full of shapes." 16. go hunt: "hunt" is a frequent infinitive construction. It was losing sight of this, after the inflectional ending was lost, that has given rise to the modern idiom, "go and hunt." 21—3. turn'd into a hart, etc.: The illustration is taken from the myth of Actseon, as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, iii, 138-252. Actseon, while out hunting, came upon Diana and her companions bathing, and that he should never be able to say that he had seen Diana naked, was changed into a stag ("hart"), mistakenly set upon by his own dogs and devoured. There is an obvious play on words in the text between "hart" and "heart." 26. element: air or sky. According to the old philosophy, the four "elements," of which all things consisted, were air, earth, water, and fire, seven years' heat, i.e., seven summers. Or, more probably, heat may be a participle, i.e., heated. 28. cloistress: nun. 30. eye-offending brine : means simply "tears." 32. remembrance is metrically pronounced as four syllables, the r being trilled, i.e., " re-mem-ber-ance." 35. rich golden shaft: i.e., Cupid's arrow, the wound from which caused love. 36. flock : crowd, number. 37. liver, brain arid he...« less