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Line 317 - Commentary Note (CN)

Commentary notes (CN):

1. SMALL CAPS Indicate editions. Notes for each commentator are divided into three parts:

In the 1st two lines of a record, when the name of the source text (the siglum) is printed in SMALL CAPS, the comment comes from an EDITION; when it is in normal font, it is derived from a book, article, ms. record or other source. We occasionally use small caps for ms. sources and for works related to editions. See bibliographies for complete information (in process).

2. How comments are related to predecessors' comments. In the second line of a record, a label "without attribution" indicates that a prior writer made the same or a similar point; such similarities do not usually indicate plagiarism because many writers do not, as a practice, indicate the sources of their glosses. We provide the designation ("standard") to indicate a gloss in common use. We use ≈ for "equivalent to" and = for "exactly alike."

3. Original comment. When the second line is blank after the writer's siglum, we are signaling that we have not seen that writer's gloss prior to that date. We welcome correction on this point.

4. Words from the play under discussion (lemmata). In the third line or lines of a record, the lemmata after the TLN (Through Line Number] are from Q2. When the difference between Q2 and the authors' lemma(ta) is significant, we include the writer's lemma(ta). When the gloss is for a whole line or lines, only the line number(s) appear. Through Line Numbers are numbers straight through a play and include stage directions. Most modern editions still use the system of starting line numbers afresh for every scene and do not assign line numbers to stage directions.

5. Bibliographic information. In the third line of the record, where we record the gloss, we provide concise bibliographic information, expanded in the bibliographies, several of which are in process.

6. References to other lines or other works. For a writer's reference to a passage elsewhere in Ham. we provide, in brackets, Through Line Numbers (TLN) from the Norton F1 (used by permission); we call these xref, i.e., cross references. We call references to Shakespearean plays other than Ham. “parallels” (//) and indicate Riverside act, scene and line number as well as TLN. We call references to non-Shakespearean works “analogues.”

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Notes for lines 0-1017 ed. Bernice W. Kliman

For explanation of sigla, such as jen, see the editions bib.

317 How {wary} <weary>, stale, flat, and vnprofitable	1.2.133

1786 Mackenzie

Mackenzie

317 Mackenzie (1786, p. 362): “Had Hamlet possessed less sensibility, had he not been so easily hurt by the calamities of life, by the crimes of the persons with whom he was connected, he would have preserved more equanimity; he would not have been the prey of dark desponding melancholy; the world and all its uses would not have appeared to him ‘stale, flat, and unprofitable; an unweeded garden that grows to seed, possessed merely by things rank and gross in nature.’ ”

1805 Gifford

Gifford

317 stale] Gifford (1805: 1:203 n. 6) glosses the verb stale in Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat 4.2.29: “i.e. render it flat, deprive it of zest by previous intimation. This is one of a thousand instances which might be brought to prove that the true reading in [Cor. 1.1.92 (95)] is, . . .‘stale’t . . .” [not scale’t as various editors have emended].

Ed. note: Gifford’s note on stale as a verb is probably not relevant here to Ham. He objects to wrongly retaining readings of old copies: He deplores Steevens’s “feeble attempt to justify a palpable error of the press, at the cost of taste and sense” (1:204 n. 6).

1884 Feis

Feis

317-21 How . . . meerely] Feis (1884, rpt. 1970, p. 68) says that this passage, not found in Q1, serves Sh.’s goal of introducing Montaigne’s mistaken “aversion to Nature as the begetter of sin.”

1929 trav

trav

317 wary] Travers (ed. 1929): “Weary, causing weariness.”

trav

317 stale] Travers (ed. 1929): “having stood exposed too long and this become vapid, flat.”

1934 Craig

Craig

317-21 How . . . meerely] Craig (1934, p. 26): “Both [Hamlet and Cardan in Comforte] are skeptical, ranging freely from a Christian to a pagan position, and both are intensely conscious of immediate personal aspects. In common, they commend death and regard suicide as reasonable but forbidden, and consider the fear of death unworthy. Both insist, in the presence of poignant ills of life that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ and they believe that perfect virtue will save them and all men as well.”

1982 ard2

ard2:

317 lemma] Jenkins (ed. 1982): “Cf. La Primaudaye, The French Academy, pt. 2, 1594, p. 254: ’When grief is in great measure, it bringeth withal a kind of loathing and tediousness, which causeth a man to hate and to be weary of all things. . . . Some grow so far as to hate themselves, and so fall to despair, yea many kill and destroy themselves.’ ”

1985 cam4

cam4

317 flat] Edwards (ed. 1985): "lifeless, spiritless. Compare [3040]."

1987 oxf4

oxf4

317 wary] Hibbard (ed. 1987): "wearisome, tedious."

1994 OED

OED

317 wary] OED under weary has nothing like wary; under the latter, however, there are weary forms. This is interesting: as a substantive, it is an obsolete form that means a felon, outlaw, villain, up to 13thc. In 16thc it lists the 1st uses of wary as an adjective, which also occurs as a verb, and means to invoke a curse upon, to utter a curse or curses. So instead of a melancholy ennui, the word wary could express a more strenuous idea: cursed. Weary , however, chimes with stale, flat and unprofitable.

1997 Charnes

Charnes

317-18 Charnes (1997, p. 5): “His ontological despair, already legible in his affective withdrawal from the ’stale, flat and unprofitable. . . uses of this world,’ signals his inability to integrate himself into the symbolic order, into the ’intersubjective, "public". . . space’ that gives the subject his ’ideal’ ego, the place from which he can see himself as someone ’who belongs.’ ”

1999 SQ

de Grazia

317 de Grazia (1999, p. 256): “The magnitude of Hamlet’s self-opposition is both his glory and his doom, and both are inscribed in his character. The doom manifests itself from the start in his world-weariness [quotes 317]. His infinite spirit is mired in materiality. . . . ”