Page 49 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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memorable passages from some sermon that took his
fancy, witty remarks overheard in conversation, 'taffeta
phrases, silken terms precise, three-piled hyperboles'
that came his way and if captured might be used again
by himself as opportunity offered. I call to mind an
undergraduate of my acquaintance at Cambridge thirty
years ago who filled note-books with epigrams from
Oscar Wilde's plays and essays, with which he afterwards
larded his own talk; and the young men of Shakespeare's
day took the same path. The Osrics made a 'yeasty
collection,' and the Benedicks 'guarded' 'the body of
their discourse' 'with fragments' compiled in similar
fashion. In Have with you to Saffron Walden Nashe
gives us an imaginary picture of his enemy Gabriel
Harvey pleading in the law-courts, and filling his speech
with such strange ink-horn terms that 'we should haue
the Proctors and Registers as busie with their Table-
1
books as might bee, to gather phrases .' Above all, the
tables came into play at the theatre; and where else in
the whole history of the world has there been a richer
harvest for such gleaning? I am one that hath seen this
'
play often,' says a character in the Induction to Marston's
Malcontent, which Shakespeare's company was playing
within a year or so of Hamlet', I have most of the jests
'
2
here in my table-book '; and the unkindest cut in the
attack upon an unnamed clown which appears in the
First Quarto of Hamlet, but not in the Second Quarto
or the Folio, is that he 'keeps one suit of jests, as a man
is known by one suit of apparel' so that 'gentlemen quote
his jests down in their tables before they come to the
play.' * The subtilty of Shakespeare's jesting, the double
and triple meanings of his quibbles, need not then
disturb our sense of probability. The judicious, and no
doubt often the injudicious also, the Master Slenders or
Master Froths, brought their tables with them, took
1
McKerrow, op. cit. iii. 46.
2
Bullen, Marston, i. 200.