Other Cruxes

22While all decisions regarding textual cruxes are explained in detail in the collation and commentary notes, some specific and notorious cruxes warrant special mention here.

1. "Helen" v. "Helena" TLN xxx. This edition uses "Helen" as the heroine's name. As Wells and Taylor point out, using "Helen" seems to be the only reasonable editorial choice, even though "Helena" appears in the play's first stage direction. While "Helena" appears first, it re-appears only three times throughout the play, and the disyllabic form of the name appears 25 times. See also Susan Snyder, "Naming Names" (271), where she comes to the same conclusion, pointing out that Shakespeare seems to settle into the name Helen as the play proceeds and that the name "Helen" ramifies throughout the play (if only ironically) in reference to the classical Helen over whom the Trojan war was fought.
2. "Paroles": The character is clearly allied with the French paroles – emphasizing his characteristic talkativeness – so we have chosen to use this spelling. Other spellings found in F, including "Parrolles" and "Parolles," are attractive because they make clear that the name is tri-syllabic, concluding with a long "e," but they conceal the obviously crucial pun. Indeed, we might recognize "Parrolles" and "Parolles" as typically early modern variances of spelling, so using "Paroles" is also a function of editorial standardization and modernization.
3. The "still-peering aire": When Helen receives word of Bertram's departure to the wars, she imagines bullets flying around him and she addresses these bullets in an apostrophe:

O you leaden messengers
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim, move the still-'pearing air
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord!
(TLN 1517-1520)

30The obscurity of this passage, specifically where Helen asks in F1 that the bullets "moue the still-peering aire," has often perplexed editors and a number of emendations have been offered. Two specific questions arise here: What does it mean to "move" air or "moue" air? What does it mean to describe air as "still-peering"? Suspecting some corruption in the printing shop when reading from an authorial MS, Wells, Taylor, and Snyder offer "cleave" for "move" because they suggest that "move" makes no sense. It seems curious to say that "move" makes no sense, and to quickly assume "cleave" as the intended word, when "move" can readily be made to make sense: Helen is here asking the bullets to transform the medium through which they fly – to alter it or "move" it – so that they miss their target. The "still-'pearing" also makes sense, as Werstine and Mowat suggest, if we read the phrase as a poeticized version of "still appearing." In this sense, "still-'pearing" describes air that appears to be still (or immobile) even while it sings and rushes with piercing bullets that fly through it. Reading the noisiness of air seems typical of early modern thought, as Carla Mazzio points out.

314. "Bajazeth's Mute" (TLN 1955): F1 has "Bajazeth's mule" and editors have often tried to make "mule" make sense in terms of silence or "muteness" that the context requires. Sisson, as Wells and Taylor point out, claimed that the association between mutes and mules was proverbial, but he provides no evidence to support the link and evidence of this proverbial link has proven impossible to find. Of course, when providing "Bajazeth's mute" as a reading of this passage, one is left with another question: Who is Bajazeth's mute? The record offers no specific identity for the person about whom Paroles speaks here, though the relationship between Turkish rulers and mutes was well known (or at least often imagined) in early modern Europe. According to letters of a French ambassador to the Ottoman court, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, mutes were "a class of servant highly valued by the Turks" (32). In an English, theatrical context, the quiet-loving Morose in Jonson's Epicoene also mentions "the Turk" as a love of silence: "The Turk, in this divine discipline [of silence], is admirable, exceeding all the potentates of the earth; still waited on by mutes" (2.1.24-45). Wells and Taylor point out that muteness and Turks are allied in Henry V, demonstrating concretely that Shakespeare knew of this historical relation. In light of this evidence, it seems reasonable to presume that F1's "mule" should, in fact, read "mute." Such the confusion between "mule" and "mute" in F1 can readily be explained as a printing house misreading of the MS.

325. "Insuite comming": When, at the end of the play, Bertram struggles to explain how Diana got his family ring, he dishonestly blames, according to F1, Diana's "insuite comming": "Her [insuite comming] with her modern grace / Subdued me to her rate: she got the ring . . ." (TLN 2943-2944). The phrase is perplexing, and this perplexity has led to a number of interpretations, several of which we provide here where they seem viable. Walker suggests "inf'nite cunning," which seems perhaps the most plausible, especially considering what Hunter calls "the virtual identity of 'insuite' and 'infnite' in Elizabethan writing – and even typography." Thiselton suggests that "insuite" works because it anglicizes the Latin "insuetus," or "unusual"; Fraser follows Thiselton here. The suggestion is somewhat compelling – or at least interesting and viable – though it is certainly not the most plausible explanation. A stronger reason to keep F1's "insuite," found through LEME, comes from Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1584), where "insuite" is defined as "Full of strife or contention … contentious … [referring to] A peece of land insuite or controuersie." Another possibility is "ensuant coming", appropriately based on a French etymology (ensuivre, to follow after), referring to Diana's subsequent approach to Bertram, after teasing him with her cool restraint, bargaining for a better financial arrangement. Another possibility not yet argued for is that 'insuite' actually means 'in-suit', from 'in-suitor,' a term in Scottish law, now obsolete, referring to a person bringing a suit in a baronial court and living within the barony. In this context, Diana's 'in-suit coming' sues for Bertram's love (the 'court' here is the court of love, not law) and wins, to the extent that he gave her his ring in return for a sexual encounter. Showing some awareness of Scottish law might have seemed appropriate at the start of James's reign. "Inf'nite conning" – for infinite trickery – might also work, though the OED curiously has no entry for the verb "con" (as in, "I was conned by a hustler in Chicago"), and it recognizes "con" as a short form of "confidence game" no earlier than 1875. If "inf'nite conning" works, it might appeal to the sense of "con" as "to steer a ship," which makes some sense in context if we imagine that Bertram is figuring Diana as the helmsman who bossily steered the ship of their affair, forcing him along for the ride, though the OED records its first usage of "con" in this sense in 1626. Any of these latter suggestions might be better than accepting a rewriting as "inf'nite cunning" despite this reading's surface logic. Because "inf'nite cunning" is not recorded in F1, and because other readings are more or less plausible, we have decided to include a variety here.