Then God have mercy on thee.
FIRST SOLDIER
And on you.
PHILIP
But, Queen, cannot you make this vision end?
I would awake from this and see my home.
GUENHERA
Be brave, and thereby something of a prince.
FIRST SOLDIER
You will awake right soon, they say, now come.
Stabs Philip
PHILIP
But no, but no, this cannot be my end!
Dies
GUENHERA
O, God be merciful and take me in!
[First Soldier] stabs Guenhera, she dies
FIRST SOLDIER
[To Second Soldier] You stand as well as any man I know.
But be now better used and give your hands.
SECOND SOLD.
The king gave you the baseness, I the watch.
FIRST SOLDIER
Well-watched, bold guard, now lift and to the bog.
Exeunt [with bodies]
[ACT V, SCENE V]
[Location: Humberside battlefield]
Alarum. Excursions. Enter Pictish and English soldiers fighting. Enter Mordred
MORDRED
King Arthur’s dead! Fly, English! Arthur’s slain!
ENG. SOLDIER
The king is dead! The day is lost! Give back!
Exit Mordred
No king, no heir, no queen, but fly and live!
Alarums. Enter Arthur
ARTHUR
But see! From my uncovered face take heart
And we will push them to the drowning wash!
ENG. SOLDIER
King Arthur lives! He lives! Fight on! Fight on!
Exeunt
Alarum. Enter Gloucester and Mordred. They fight
GLOUCESTER
I would spend all my breath in slaying thee,
Thou hag-born demon of the darkest pit.
Thou never wilt be Britain’s king a day.
MORDRED
Old Gloucester, God doth wield my sword for me
To lead me to that throne and do His will,
And first of His designs must be your doom.
GLOUCESTER
No king art thou, bereft of Arthur’s strain.1
MORDRED
Thou diest, poltroon!2 Now out upon it, die!
Gloucester is slain
The lord protector leads the way to hell.
The brat he taught will follow him apace,
Though I dare not dispatch him without aid.
To me! To me!
Enter Pictish soldiers
FIRST SOLDIER
My lord?
MORDRED
Thy work is done?
FIRST SOLDIER
My king, to its perfection.
MORDRED
Honored friend!
Then to my side until th’usurper falls.
The coward vowed to strike me from behind.
Exeunt
Alarums. Excursions. Enter Arthur
ARTHUR
Nay, Gloucester, nay! Still offer wisdom’s words;
Thou wert my father, too, and I thy son.
Your worthless boy must lean on you today.
Enter Cumbria
CUMBRIA
O King! The frenzied Pict doth waste the field
And hazards with his soul to win a crown:
He murdered Philip and your Guenhera.
ARTHUR
Say no, say no! Can death so envy me?
Englutting3 all my loves before my eyes
Yet scorning my own life, that I must stay
To roam such hell as this, to flay my heart?
O, Father! Doth this end now prove my birth?
O, bloody ghost, I am become thee.
For this I hid those years in Gloucester’s woods?
For this I lived my seasons all at war?
I rescued York and Lincoln in my youth4
And asked for my own pleasure not a whit
Save for a queen I loved beyond all else.
E’en this is more than any king deserve.
CUMBRIA
There is no flight, my king, but only on.
Red Humber washes off the country’s sons,
And limbs like branches float upon its waves.
But crush the scattered foe! Now rise, my king!
Enter Cornwall
CORNWALL
Dear brother, friend, and Britain’s hero, stand!
The day can yet be ours for all our grief!
Alarums. Exeunt [Cornwall and Cumbria]
ARTHUR
To be some other man than what I am!
O, God, but free me from this rising mud
And give me sign how this unworthy king
Can do your will.
Enter Mordred and Soldier
I thank thee, God. Come, knave!
MORDRED
O, weeping king! Poor bastard boy, death’s fool,
Lift up thy knitting-stick, thou sobbing dame,
And strike at me! [To Soldier] You cut him from behind!
They fight. Arthur is wounded then kills Mordred [and Soldier]
ARTHUR
May all my blood make rich this British soil
To strengthen it ’gainst pox of rival kings.
Alarum. Enter Constantine [Cornwall] and British nobility
CORNWALL
O King!
ARTHUR
Good Constantine, here cradle up
This frail and draining shape and from my head
Lift this oppressive weight to rest on thee.
[Cornwall takes crown]
On rightful brow it shines and will but float.
CORNWALL
Farewell, sweet king, sweet friend, my brother lost.
Arthur dies
Sound drum and trumpet up to heaven’s ear
In intermingled notes of thanks and sorrow.
Full thirty thousand men did die today
To win our victory at Humberside,
With loving king who joined with them in death
To pledge with blood his kingdom’s lasting peace.
Inter their mortal shapes as each deserves.
May Britain now and ever more be blessed,
And ne’er be torn asunder by such strife
As plagued this realm and stole from Arthur life.
May heaven grant this prayer and yield this gift:
That peace may buckle fast this island’s rifts.
Raise sepulchres for both great queen and king
And for their souls, and ours, raise voice and sing.
Exeunt
Act I, Scene I
1. bolts crossbow arrows.
2. plate armor. Dogs were commonly armored for boar hunts, men less often, but it did occur. [Roland Verre]
3. prate to chatter pointlessly.
4. cates delicacies.
5. savor (passim) One of the ironies of this project is that the first modern edition of Shakespeare’s lost play is published with American spellings! [RV]
6. young liege a double-stressed (spondee) opening. Gloucester is trying to get the prince to pay attention. It is by such subtle clues of meter that Shakespeare communicated to his actors (and to actors to this day), directing them without overt stage directions. [RV]
7. stream of gold the crown.
8. strain a melody or song.
9. murder sleep cf Macbeth, II ii.43. [RV]
10. courser warhorse.
11. fardle bundle.
12. swathed swaddled.
13. clouts swaddling clothes.
14. Orient red the color of dawn (which occurs in the east, or Orient).
15. shrift the hearing of confession.
16. Sexual double-entendre, spear as phallus, and mutton as slang for vagina. [RV]
17. Again, a sexual pun: conscience of a nothing an erection for a vagina. [RV]
18. stone testicle.
19. chaps jaws. [And, w
ith truffling, a double entendre: the boar can find truffles, but truffles were also thought to promote chastity and cool off sexual ardor, which would surely be the result if its tusks or chaps were to cost the prince a stone. —RV]
20. droops nods with tiredness.
21. swain a shepherd or rustic lover.
22. Mab the fairy queen who causes wishful dreams.
23. ear reap.
24. to her! a hunting cry. Shakespeare makes it clear that Arthur exchanges one prey for another. [RV]
25. When time was “Who was in his day known as …”
26. Mentor When Odysseus went to the Trojan War, he left Mentor as guardian and teacher of his son.
27. sword of lath wooden sword.
28. made to die when touched to pretend to die when hit.
29. pick-a-back piggy back.
30. Smacks tastes.
31. gallant-springing growing up beautifully.
32. cockered indulged.
33. Albion Great Britain.
34. Saxon Historically, the Saxons migrated into Britain, either peacefully or as invaders, from about A. D. 400 to 600.
35. breed-bate trouble-maker.
36. an if.
37. meet suitable.
38. heavy cheer serious news.
39. perfidy deceitfulness, treachery.
40. litter a coach or wagon.
41. See Henry VI, Part One, III.ii.95, from which my father stole this line.
42. Or in which Shakespeare quotes the same source material, or in which Shakespeare’s likely collaborator on Henry VI, Part One—Nashe, Peele, or Greene—quoted Shakespeare’s preexisting Arthur play. The explanations are both numerous and unconfirmable, but they do not with any likelihood point to the fraud Mr. Phillips endorses in his Introduction. [RV]
43. terms of manage military commands.
44. Pictish Pictland, which in this play is the dominant northern power, seems to have covered eastern Scotland from Roman times until the tenth century.
45. borderer enemies along the border.
46. farland foreign.
47. bide a trice put up with a brief delay.
48. slips leashes.
49. friends across the Wye troops from Wales. [RV]
Act I, Scene II
1. for Swain Arthur is somehow disguised as a peasant or shepherd. [RV]
2. booth to shelter.
3. white face It is possible she already sees through Arthur’s disguise, since his skin is pale, not like someone who spends his days outdoors. [RV]
4. Ecce signum “Behold the sign.” (Latin, and thank God for online translators.)
5. Or professional editors: Shakespeare used the phrase again in Henry IV, Part One. [RV]
6. cowslip a wildflower. I can only imagine my father straining to find one in a prison book of English flora.
7. Again, Mr. Phillips is jumping at shadows. The cowslip—Primula veris—appears in three other Shakespeare works. [RV]
8. Itching, are you Joan hears “ecce” as “itching,” or desiring sex. She immediately shifts from the friendly, informal “thou” to the more distant (and chaste) “you.” It is in details like this that one senses the work of the master playwright of the sixteenth century, not a convict of the twentieth. [RV]
9. stretch ’em no credit you won’t let them kiss you on a promise. [RV]
10. stag … horns Joan is teasing with double meanings. If Arthur is young and pretty, that will change, just like the shape of a cloud, and someday he will become a cuckold; cuckolds were said to grow horns when their wives betrayed them. [RV]
11. banns public notice of an engagement.
12. sedge grassy plants growing in wet places. [A sexual-anatomical innuendo is not impossible. — RV]
13. plight a troth to make a promise of marriage.
14. tilly-vally nonsense. [Used twice more by Shakespeare in his plays.—RV]
15. turnmelon See “Step On” by the band Happy Mondays: “You talk so hip, you’re twisting my melon, man.”
16. Meaning obscure. A face so ugly it rots produce? A duplicitous person? Possibly an error of type-setting, but no alternatives have yet been suggested by early readers. [RV]
17. bell-wether the leading sheep of the flock. It wears a bell around its neck.
18. Afeard frightened.
19. main open sea.
20. turtle a turtledove. A symbol of faithfulness. [RV]
21. conceit idea, imagination.
22. Joan hears sexual insinuation in his words. [RV]
23. bid to weigh some caitiff’s asked to judge some wretch’s.
24. closets private chambers.
25. nigh near.
26. mien appearance.
27. belike probably, perhaps.
28. chamberlain Arthur is referring to her dog.
29. Patch clown.
30. Jackdaw a proverbially stupid bird. [RV]
31. stand affected be willing, be moved to do something.
32. folding returning the sheep to their fold.
Act I, Scene III
1. Heirs to the throne of Scotland were from 1398 until 1603 known as Dukes of Rothesay, much as the English heirs were the Princes of Wales. In this case, however, Shakespeare was committing both an anachronism (if Holinshed is to be believed, these events occurred in the 500s) and an error of place (wherever this ancient kingdom of Pictland was, it probably covered only what is today eastern Scotland. Rothesay is in the west). [RV]
2. Alda This seems to be an error of my father’s, as she never speaks.
3. Alda Likely not. Queen Alda’s silent presence in this scene is specifically requested by Shakespeare and is worth noting. Arthur is—as other commentators have noted elsewhere, and will no doubt be discussed in some coming work of scholarship on Shakespeare and feminism—a very feminine play, despite its clash of kings and battle scenes. Guenhera’s birth labors and marital sorrows, the abandoned mothers, and Alda’s enforced presence here—where her right to speak is openly scorned—reveal a sensitivity to women’s issues unsurpassed, in my opinion, anywhere else in Shakespeare’s works. One might even add—with only a trace of irony—the boar in I.i, which is described in terms both sexual and violent, and which is compared explicitly (“To her!”) to the shepherdess Arthur seduces and abandons. [RV]
4. too hot We are in the midst of conversation. Loth is replying to Mordred’s heated words. [RV]
5. blast blow violently.
6. crabbed cross, grouchy.
7. bangstry violence. [Perhaps especially a Scottish term, as it appears in Scottish law codes under James VI. —RV]
8. Grampian mount one of Scotland’s three mountain ranges.
9. gall the gall bladder, supposedly the seat of bile and anger.
10. deathsman executioner.
11. Hold on Continue.
12. forward prematurely.
13. seigniory realm.
14. chafe to warm.
15. below downstairs.
16. Roman tower The Tower of London (in fact begun in 1078) was popularly believed to have been left behind by the Romans. [RV]
17. make … head to raise an army.
18. butt a pun: Arthur will use his “head” to butt the crown. [RV]
19. sway force, authority.
20. Mouldwarp Mole.
21. liberal licentious, promiscuous. [And here pronounced in two syllables. —RV]
22. whinyards short swords.
23. buttoned belts armored belts. [RV]
24. bluntly stupidly.
25. bonny beautiful (ironic), and specifically Scottish. [RV]
26. Distract driven to distraction.
27. parallel remain equal to.
28. overcharged overburdened.
29. ell about a yard. [45 inches to the English, 37.2 for the Scotch! —RV]