89 Stow (1605, p. 1436), discussing a visit from English ambassadors to the Danish court in summer 1603, describes the preparations of armaments in Denmark then and the ambassador’s admiration for them.

89 with] Jennens (ed. 1773): “Qu’s with. Which reading will bear, otherwise pointing.”

89 cost] Jennens (ed. 1773): “They might not have the art of casting cannon; if so, they consequently must buy it.”

89 cost] tooke (ms. notes in Malone, ed. 1790): “casting of cannon.”

89 cost] Clark & Wright (ed. 1872): “casting. See line [72], and compare ‘impress.’ line [91], and ‘know’ for ‘knowing,’ the reading of the folios in [3546].”

89 with] Tanger (1880, p. 121): Q2 “probably owing to the negligence, inattention, or criticism of the compositor”; the Q1 reading “confirms, or at least countenances, [the F1] reading.”

89 Deighton (ed. 1891): “and why, day after day, the casting of cannon proceeds without interruption.”

89 cost] Crawford (ed. 1917), for cast has founding.

89 cost] Craig (ed. 1931): “cast, casting, founding.”

89 cost] Wilson (1934, p. 150) explains the Q2 variant as one of a group of 14 “which may be labelled misreading or miscorrections with equal probability. F1 has a similar list of 18 variants. In every instance there is a close graphical resemblance between the variants.

Ed. note: The other Q2 “miscorrections” include interr’d (634), fearefull (705), and roots (710), all of which are possible choices rather than, as Wilson thinks, mistakes.

89 with, cost] Parrott & Craig (ed. 1938) consider with to be a printer’s error for why, which is found in both Q1 and F1, and due to the confusion of final h and final y in Elizabethan script (Kellner 199, 216). But they can rationalize the fact that Q1 and Q2 both have cost by surmising that Q2’s compositor consulted Q1 here or that both independently made the same error.

“Cast in the sense of casting is quite unusual and a misunderstanding may have caused this agreement in error between [Q1 and Q2].”

89 cost] Rylands (ed. 1947): “cast: casting.”

89 cost] Hibbard (ed. 1987): the only use of cast in Sh., a noun made from a verb. Thus Q1 and Q2 unsurprisingly, change it to the more familiar cost.

89 cost of brazen Cannon] Edelman (2000): “The very first heavy guns were cast from Brass, an alloy of copper and either zinc or tin; it was not until the eighteenth century that the latter metal was called ‘bronze.’ [ . . .] While durable, brass had the disadvantage of being both more expensive and softer than iron.”

Iron cannons had a tendency to blow apart while brazen ones gave signs (bulges) of wearing out and so were safer.

A “radically new design developed in the 1490s, when French gun-founders changed the face of European warfare by finding a way to cast brass guns of proportions calculated to disperse the shock of a large explosion over the entire assembly. Marcellus’s brazen cannon could be much smaller and lighter than anything seen up to that time, with a barrel of eight feet or less in length [ . . .].”

89 with] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “Most editors (including Jenkins, who usually favours Q2) adopt Q1/F ’why’, assuming ellipsis of ’there is’, but with makes acceptable sense.”

89 cost] Thompson & Taylor (ed. 2006): “The word makes good sense in parallel with foreign mart in [90]: as Jennens explains, ’They might not have the art of casting cannon; if so, they consequently must buy it.’ But many editors (again including Jenkins) prefer F’s ’Cast’, meaning casting or manufacturing (a unique usage, according to OED).”