Sound on into the drowzie race of night:

42. Sound on into] Sound one unto Theob. Han. Warb. Johns. Cap. Mal. Steev. Var. '03, '13, Dono. Neils. Sound on unto Var. '73, '78, '85, Rann. Sounden unto Rann conj. Sound one into Var. '21, Dyce, Sta. Huds. ii, Words. Craig. Sound: On! unto Del. conj. Sound not into Wetherell (N. &

42

Q., 18 Aug., 1866). Sound on to mark Moberly conj. sound dong into. Bulloch. Sound only to Vaughan.

42. race] ear Dyce, Sta. Wh. Hunter, Clarke, John, M. Smith, Huds. ii, Cam. ii, Words. Dono. Neils. maze M. Wheeler (Ath., 25 Oct., 1873). face Bulloch. vast Page conj.

42. Sound on into ... race of night] THEOBALD: I do not think that 'sound on' gives here that idea of solemnity and horror which, 'tis plain, our Poet intended to impress by this fine description; and which my emendation ['Sound one unto'] conveys, i. e., If it were the still part of the night, or One of the clock in the morning, when the sound of the bell strikes upon the ear with the most awe and terror. And it is very usual with our Shakespeare in other passages to express the horror of the midnight bell. So in Othello: 'Silence that dreadful bell, it frights the isle.' -II, iii, 175; Macbeth: '-what's the business, That such an hideous trumpet calls to parley The sleepers of the house.'-II, iii, 86. And sometimes, for the solemnity, he is used to add the circumstance of the particular hour: 'The iron tongue of midnight hath toll'd twelue.'-V, i, 370; 'The bell then beating one.'— Hamlet, I, i, 39.-CAPELL (I, pt ii, p. 130): The readings 'on' and 'into' are mistakes certainly either of a printer or copyist, for in that reading is neither English nor sense: 'on' was never us'd for repeatedly, nor 'into' for unto; which is the sense they must have if the place's sense be contended for; nor, admitting that they might be so taken, does the sense they present express the speaker's intention, which confessedly is-to paint the dead time of night; but 'on' or repeatedly may as well be seven as twelve, implying no certain number. But besides expressing the night's deadest season, Shakespeare had a further intention; namely, to affect the ear by some word that should give it sensation of awe and solemnity: now one (the excellent emendation of the third modern) acts upon it remarkably in the way he intended; and so the sound of it does in the clock's striking, greatly beyond a sound that's repeated; every stroke beyond one lessening more and more the effect of it, till at twelve we feel nothing. Of 'unto' no defending is requisite.-MALONE: The instances that are found in the original editions of our Author's plays in which 'on' is printed instead of one are so numerous that there cannot, in my apprehension, be the smallest doubt that one is the true reading in this line.— [Malone, in corroboration of this note, quotes six passages as printed in the Folio wherein one is printed 'on'; the most striking of these is that from the Two Gentlemen, to which he refers, but does not quote in full: 'Sir, your glove. . . . Not mine; my gloves are on. . . . Why, then, this may be yours, for this is but one.'-II, i, 1, 2.-In reference to Theobald's second change, unto for 'into,' Malone considers it to have been too hastily adopted, and produces two other examples in Shakespeare wherein these words are apparently used in the same sense: 'Which to reduce into our former favour.'—Henry V: V, ii, 63; ‘—gleaning all the land's wealth into one.'—Henry VIII: III, ii, 284. 'Here,' says Malone, 'we should now certainly write “unto one." Independently of what has now been stated, "into" ought to be restored. So Marlowe, Edward II, 1598, “I'll thunder such a peal into his ears," [ed. Dyce, ii, p. 206]. So also Bishop Hall, in his Heaven upon Earth: "These courses are not incident into an almighty power," etc.'

[42. Sound on into the drowzie race of night]

STEEVENS: I should suppose the meaning of 'Sound on' to be this: 'If the midnight bell, by repeated strokes, was to hasten away the race of beings who are busy at that hour, or quicken night itself in its progress'; the morning bell (that is, the bell that strikes one) could not, with strict propriety, be made the agent; for the bell has ceased to be in the service of night when it proclaims the arrival of day. 'Sound on' may also have a peculiar propriety, because, by the repetition of the strokes at twelve, it gives a much more forcible warning than when it only strikes one. Such was once my opinion concerning the old reading; but, on reconsideration, its propriety cannot appear more doubtful to anyone than to myself. It is too late to talk of hastening the night when the arrival of the morning is announced; and I am afraid that the repeated strokes have less of solemnity than the single notice, as they take from the horror and awful silence here described as so propitious to the dreadful purposes of the king. Though the hour of one be not the natural midnight, it is yet the most solemn moment of the poetical one; and Shakespeare himself has chosen to introduce his Ghost in Hamlet: "The bell then beating one.' Shakespeare may be restored into obscurity. I retain Theobald's correction; for though 'thundering a peal into a man's ears' is good English, I do not perceive that such an expression as 'sounding one into a drowsy race' is countenanced by any example hitherto produced.-KNIGHT: Shakespeare, it appears to us, has made the idea of time precise enough by the 'midnight bell'; and the addition of 'one' is a contradiction or a pleonasm, to which form of words he was not given. "The midnight bell' sounding on, into (or unto) the drowsy march, race, of night, seems to us far more poetical than precisely determining the hour, which was already determined by the word 'midnight.' But was the 'midnight bell' the bell of a clock? Was it not rather the bell which called the monks to their 'morning lauds,' and which, according to the regulations of Dunstan, was to be rung before every office. In Dunstan's Concord of Rules, quoted by Fosbrooke, the hours for the first services of the day are thus stated: 'Mattins and Lauds, midnight. Prime, 6 A. M.' It is added, 'if the office of Lauds be finished by daybreak, as is fit, let them begin Prime without ringing; if not, let them wait for day-light, and, ringing the bell, assemble for Prime.'-[Knight also calls attention to the fact that in Hamlet, in the line already quoted by Theobald, the spelling is 'one (not on) both in the early Quartos and in the Folio of 1623.'-ED.]-COLLIER: We prefer the old reading on all accounts. Many of the commentators would read one instead of ‘on,' which is contradicted by the 'midnight bell' in a line just preceding. There is more plausibility for reading ear instead of 'race,' recollecting that of old ear was spelt eare, and the words might possibly be mistaken by the printer; but still 'race,' in the sense of course or passage, conveys a finer meaning: the midnight bell, with its twelve times repeated strokes, may be very poetically said to 'sound on into the drowsy race of night'; one sound produced by the 'iron tongue' driving the other 'on,' or forward, until the whole number was complete, and the prolonged vibration of the last blow on the bell only left to fill the empty space of darkness.-[Collier's MS. Corrector changes 'race' to eare, on which DYCE (Notes, etc., p. 87) says: 'Whether the emendation ear originated with the MS. Corrector, or whether he derived it from some prompter's copy, I feel assured that it is the Poet's word. The same correction occurred, long ago, to myself; it occurred also to Mr Collier, while he was editing the play; and (as appears from his note) he would have inserted it in the text had not his better

[42. Sound on into the drowzie race of night]

judgment been overpowered by a superstitious reverence for the Folio. But, if the MS. Corrector considered "on" to be an adverb (and we are uncertain how he understood it-"on" and one being so often spelt alike), my conviction would still remain unshaken, that the recent editors, by printing "on" have greatly impaired the grandeur and poetry of the passage. As to the "contradiction" which the recent editors object to in "the midnight bell sounding one," I can only say that... even prose writers occasionally employ very inaccurate language in speaking of the hours of darkness; e. g., "It happened that betweene twelve and one a clocke at midnight, there blew a mighty storme of winde against the house,” &c.—The Famous History of Doctor Faustus, sig. R 3, ed. 1648. "We marched slowly on because of the carriages we had with us, and came to Freynstat about one a clocke in the night perfectly undiscover'd."-Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, First ed. p. 119.'-COLLIER refused to accept such testimony in favour of one as synonymous with midnight, and concludes his note on this line in his ed. ii. with this answer to Dyce: 'When Defoe speaks of “one o'clock in the night" he is not so simple as to call it midnight, but merely "night," as in truth it was.'-DYCE, in his ed. ii, replies in a note unworthy of any editor, accusing Collier of again being at his 'old trick of misrepresentation and concealment' in that he had given but one of the quotations, and that one not that germane to the subject; therewith repeating the passage from Doctor Faustus. Another melancholy example of two eminent editors descending to petty recriminations, the details of which the reader may with ease be spared.-ED.]-JOSEPH HUNTER (ii, 11) [with the reading, 'Sound one into the drowsy race of night']: We have the incongruity (1) of the midnight bell striking the hour of one in the morning; (2) of the hammer of a clock striking on the outside of a bell, being presented to the mind by the 'iron tongue and brazen mouth,' in which on a little reflection we cannot but perceive that it was the pendulous clapper, not the hammer striking on the outside of the bell, that must have been in the Poet's mind; and (3) of men steeped in sleep being described by such a poet as Shakespeare by the phrase 'the drowsy race of night.' Any of these, if due attention were given to the passage, would have been sufficient to show that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark.... Now the Poet certainly had not in his thoughts the striking of a clock at all; and the intervention of this idea has the effect of marring in a very extraordinary degree the beauty and grandeur of the conception.... 'This is not a fit scene,' says King John, 'for audience of the thing I was about to say: "the sun is in the heavens." Transfer yourself to a scene of the night and darkness, a place where you hear the great bell of a church tolling in the depth of midnight, and imagine that you are pacing the churchyard in the dark midnight amidst the graves of the many dead, and where spirits are sometimes said to wander. Think of yourself as a man much injured by the world, and as given up to an habitual melancholy.' The mere striking of the church clock, whether once, or with twelve times repeated strokes, is a weak, puerile, incongruous conception; but the continuous tolling of the bell at midnight, which was what Shakespeare meant, adds greatly to the impressiveness of a night scene; and this especially when we recollect on what occasions it was that the church-bell would be heard 'sounding on' in the darkness of midnight. It might be as a passing-bell, a soul just then taking its flight; but it is more probable that the Poet had in his mind the tolling at a midnight funeral and that the full conception of the passage is this: That Hubert is to be transported in thought

[42. Sound on into the drowzie race of night]

to the grave-ground at the foot of some lonely tower, from which is heard the heavy tones of the bell tolling through the darkness of night. . . . In such a scene there was everything to feed melancholy, and put the mind of Hubert into a frame favourable to the King's purposes; everything to stir up in his mind thoughts which the sun should not look upon. This then, I conceive, to be the true explanation of the passage. 'Sound on' is the common phrase in Shakespeare for continuous or repeated blasts of a trumpet, just as here it is for the continuous or repeated strokes of the bell-clapper. 'Into the drowsy race of night,' if it required any justification, as meaning the step or course of night, would receive it by comparison with the two following passages: 'And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night, Who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp So tediously away.'-Henry V: IV, Chorus, l. 20; 'This palpable gross play hath well beguiled The heavy gait of night.' -Mid. N. Dream, V, i, 374. Shakespeare also, it may be observed, has shown elsewhere that he was sensible to the use which might be made of the deep tones of the funeral bell. Thus, in 2 Henry IV: 'And his tongue Sounds ever after as a sullen bell Remembered tolling a departed friend,' [I, i, 102]; and in Sonnet lxxi: 'No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world.'-STAUNTON: What is meant by 'the drowsy race'? I at one time conjectured that 'race' was a misprint, by transposition of the letters, for carr, or carre, and that the 'Sound on' might be applicable to 'Night's black chariot': 'All drowsy night who in a car of jet By steeds of iron grey . . . drawn through the sky.'-Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, Bk ii, song 1. I am now, however, firmly assured that it is a corruption of eare, a word which occurred to me many years ago, as it did to Dyce, Collier, and no doubt to a hundred people besides.-R. G. WHITE (Sh. Scholar, p. 301): As this line has been frittered away by the editors into 'Sound one unto the drowsy race of night,' it seems plausible to read with Collier's MS. Corrector 'ear of night.' But all the changes are alike uncalled for. Let anyone who has listened to a church clock striking twelve at midnight, and seeming as if it would never complete its solemn task, say whether 'Sound on into the drowsy race of night' does not bring up his sensations more vividly than 'Sound one into the drowsy race of night' or 'Sound one unto the drowsy race of night.' The line as it stands in the original is one of the most suggestive in all Shakespeare's works.-[White, in his edition which appeared five years later, in his note on this line says, however, "As "race," even in its sense of course or passage, has but the remotest possible connection with the context, and as "the iron tongue and brazen mouth" suggest, if they do not require "the ear of night" to receive their sounds, it seems that this reading which occurred independently to Collier and Dyce, and was found in the former's corrected Folio, should be received. "On" of the Folio may be either on the adverb, or one. . . . I think the former much to be preferred.'-ED.]-WALKER (Crit., ii, 6): 'Race' is undoubtedly wrong. I believe that Shakespeare wrote, 'Sound one into the drowsy eare of night'; but that eare in his MS. was by a slip of the pen written care, or— which is more probable-was so read by the printer, who, seeing this was nonsense, corrected it to race which seemed to offer something like a meaning. (The words 'strike one' [Qu. sound one?], by the way, remind me of 1 Henry VI: I, ii, 41: 'I think... Their arms are set like clocks, still to strike on'; read one. I am not sure whether this is my own emendation, or a 'periwig'; I do not, however, find any note on this point in the Variorum [of 1821]-[To the lovers of Elia

[42. Sound on into the drowzie race of night]

and who does not belong to that happy band-Walker's playful allusion to a 'periwig' needs no explanation.-ED.]—Keightley (Exp., p 223): As Shakespeare had read in the Faerie Queene, of Night: 'To run her timely race' (I, v, 45), the attempted corrections of 'race' are all superfluous. So also is Warburton's [Theobald's?] reading of one for 'on'; 'Sound on' is keep sounding.-W. L. R. CATES (Athenæum, 12 July, 1873): Among the meanings of the word 'race' I find 'swift current,' 'rapid tideway,' examples of which we have in the local designations, 'Pentland Race' and 'Race of Alderney.' I have found no hint in any edition of Shakespeare, nor in any glossary to his plays of this meaning.... The question then is, Has Shakespeare in this single instance made use of the word in this sense? The passage in which the phrase 'race of night' occurs is one of the most powerful delineations which Shakespeare has given us of the workings of conscience in a guilty man. John, full of his dark desire and intent, sees about him 'the proud day attended with the pleasures of the world, and feels that this is no fitting environment or audience for such word as he has to say. Awed and silent for very shame in the presence of the sun, he fancies he should be brave in the dark. In instantaneous contrast to daylight and the populous world, imagination depicts the night, the vast environing dark, still and dread, but also full of life and movement; not enfolding the earth like a cloak, but sweeping on and around it like a mighty current. The sense of solitude and security from unwelcome listeners is immeasurably intensified by the one tone of the midnight bell, which goes pealing forth, far-penetrating, into the dull inattentive night-stream flowing over him. Such significance I find in this famous line. So magnificent the imaginative conception which it seems to me Shakespeare, with his omnipotence of wit, his unique mastery of phrase, has condensed for us into so tiny a point, so brief an expression, 'the drowsy race of night.' . . . In illustration of the epithet 'drowsy', as applied to the celestial movement, it is, perhaps, worth while to cite a couplet from the Earl of Stirling, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who in his Domesday writes: 'The heavenly as growne now less strong Doe seeme more slacke as weary of their race.'-[There is here, I think, a slight slip; Cates meant this couplet as an illustration of the word 'race' as applied to 'the celestial movement.' The word 'drowsy' only appears by implication. Fine as is this interpretation with its image of the onward sweep of night and darkness, there is, to me at least, an insuperable objection, inasmuch as the adjective 'drowsy' conveys but one idea, that of slow or sluggish movement, while 'race,' as Cates takes it, can but mean a swift onward rush. The adjective and noun neutralise each other.-ED.]-C. & M. COWDEN CLARKE: The old spelling of eare may very easily have been mistaken by the Folio printer for 'race.' There is something so contradictory in the words 'drowsy race' that we cannot believe them to be right; whereas Shakespeare further on has the very expression-vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man,' [III, iii, 114); in which passage, moreover, the Folio prints 'ear' with a final e.-BAILEY (ii, 245) may also be placed in the number of those commentators who propose to read ear for 'race'; he admits that when writing his note he was unaware that he had been anticipated by Dyce; he also rejects the change one for 'on,' since 'To sound on into the drowsy ear of night' implies continuous action, which is needed if the mind is to be brought into the proper tone desired by King John; while 'for a clock to strike one seems utterly insufficient to produce the required mood.'-Rev. JOHN HUNTER: One is the poetical midnight hour. "The bell then beating one' are the words in which