Volume 2 / Part 1 — WIT WITHOUT MONEY.
Reading edition
Act I. Valentine's speech:—
One without substance, &c.
The present text, and that proposed by Seward, are equally vile. I have endeavoured to make the lines sense, though the whole is, I suspect, incurable except by bold conjectural reformation. I would read thus:—
One without substance of herself, that's woman; Without the pleasure of her life, that's wanton; Tho' she be young, forgetting it; tho' fair, Making her glass the eyes of honest men, Not her own admiration.
'That's wanton,' or, 'that is to say, wantonness.'
Act ii. Valentine's speech:—
Of half-a-crown a week for pins and puppets— As there is a syllable wanting in the measure here. (Seward.)
A syllable wanting! Had this Seward neither ears nor fingers? The line is a more than usually regular iambic hendecasyllable.
Ib.
With one man satisfied, with one rein guided; With one faith, one content, one bed; Aged, she makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue; A widow is, &c.
Is 'apaid'—contented—too obsolete for B. and F.? If not, we might read it thus:—
Content with one faith, with one bed apaid, She makes the wife, preserves the fame and issue;—
Or it may be—
—with one breed apaid—
that is, satisfied with one set of children, in opposition to—
A widow is a Christmas-box, &c.
Colman's note on Seward's attempt to put this play into metre.
The editors, and their contemporaries in general, were ignorant of any but the regular iambic verse. A study of the Aristophanic and Plautine metres would have enabled them to reduce B. and F. throughout into metre, except where prose is really intended.