SOURCE: "Why the Sweets Melted: A Study in Shakespeare's Imagery," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Autumn, 1965, pp. 3-12.

[In this essay, Hobday examines Shakespeore's use of flattery-images and concludes that Shakespeare is part-author of both Edward III and The Two Noble Kinsmen.]

The association of ideas in the most famous of all Shakespeare's image-clusters—that which links flattery with fawning dogs and melting sweets—presents a problem. It is natural enough that he should think of flattery as sweet and of flatteres as fawning dogs, but why should the sweets melt? Dr. Caroline Spurgeon wrote: "The explanation of this curious and repeated sequence of ideas is, I think, very simple. It was the habit in Elizabethen times to have dogs, which were chiefly of the spaniel and greyhound type, at table, licking the hands of the guests, fawning and begging for sweetmeats with which they were fed, and of which, if they were like dogs today, they ate too many, dropping them in a semi-melting condition all over the place" (Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 197). Middleton Murry, who accepted this theory, fancied that Shakespeare might have seen such a sight in Sir Thomas Lucy's hall (Shakespeare, p. 37). More prosaically, Edward A. Armstrong suggested that "originally the metaphor seems to have been suggested by melting wax or ice" (Shakespeare's Imagination, p. 154). This, as will be shown, comes nearer the truth than Dr. Spurgeon's theory, but Armstrong produces no evidence to explain how such an association of ideas originated.

If we analyze Shakespeare's numerous references to flattery, we find that it was linked in his mind not with one but with four groups of images, which for the sake of convenience will be referred to as Groups A, B, C, and D. In Group A flattery is associated with dream, sleep, sweet, and king or queen; the key-word dream is also associated with tears and weep. Group B comprises glass, face, hair, eyes, and knee. Group C, the largest and most complex, consists of sweet or candy (used as a verb); poison or venom; winter, ice, or hail; cold; melt or thaw; sun; brook or stream; drop; tears; and stone. The antithesis between sweet and poison is found several times apart from the other items in this cluster, and might almost be said to form a sub-group of its own. Group D is the familar combination of dog (especially spaniel or cur), fawning, sweet or candy, melt, and knee or kneel. Although these clusters are sufficiently distinct to be easily recognizable, it will be seen that certain elements in them, such as sweet, candy, melt, and knee, appear in two or even three of them. Shakespears's image-clusters were not static; they were formed by the gradual association of originally unrelated ideas, and sometimes disintegrated, their component parts linking up with other ideas to form new clusters.

In addition to those included in these groups, Shakespeare associated flattery with a large number of other words. In many of these the connection is so obvious as to need no explanation. They include tongue and mouth; bend and bow; court, courtier, courtesy, and courteous; cap, hat, or bonnet; smile; smooth; insinuate; parasite; silk; heels; gold; and plain. From this list and the four image-clusters we can reconstruct Shakespeare's mental picture of the typical flatterer—the opposite of whom, of course, was the plain man. He was a parasitic hanger-on of the court or some great nobleman, dressed in silk. He was ostentatiously courteous, always ready to remove his hat, bow, or go down on one knee. He fawned on his patron, and trotted at his heels like a page or a little dog. He was smiling and smooth-tongued, but always prepared to insinuate evil of a rival for his patron's favor. His words were as sweet as honey or sugar, and as noxious as poison—in Falconbridge's phrase, "sweet, sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth" (King John I. i. 213). It was a type which Shakespeare evidently knew well, perhaps from his personal experience of Southampton's circle, and which he wholeheartedly loathed.

The typical flatterer is once or twice depicted at full length in the plays; by Richard III, for example, speaking in the character of a "plain man":

Because I cannot flatter and speak fair,
Smile in man's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog,
Duck with French nods and apish courtesy,
I must be held a rancorous enemy.
Cannot a plain man live and think no harm,
But thus his simple truth must be abused
By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?

(I.iii.47-53)

This passage repays comparison with Timon's curse on his false friends in the banquet scene (III. vi.):

Uncover, dogs, and lap
You knot of mouth-friends! Smoke and lukewarm water
Is your perfection. This is Timon's last;
Who stuck and spangled you with flatteries
Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces
Your reeking villainy. Live loathed and long,
Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,
Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,
You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time's flies,
Cap and knee slaves, vapours and minute-jacks!

The two passages have several terms in common, but their effect is totally different. Richard's speech is fundamentally comic, partly because his pose as a simple honest man is so incongruous; as a picture of a social type the lines are akin in spirit to Hotspur's description of the courtier in I Henry IV, I.iii. "Duck with French nods and apish courtesy" is a line that Hotspur might easily have spoken. Timon's speech, which piles image upon image in a white heat of fury, is profoundly tragic, calling up a picture of a society in which men prey on one another like wild beasts.

There are other words which Shakespeare associated with flattery for less obvious reasons; for example, most of those in Group C. In this case, and doubtless in others, the connection of ideas was purely accidental; having mentioned ice, cold, brooks and stones in a speech which contained a reference to flattery, hence-forward he unconsciously linked them in his mind. Other words which appear more or less often in company with flattery are heart, honor, degree, pomp, fortune, fool, sick, and hope. The last of these needs no explanation; the conception of hope as a flatterer is common enough. Honor, fortune, degree, and pomp are associated with social rank or with court life, and hence indirectly with flattery; in the case of honor there is the additional link that Shakespeare regarded flattery as dishonorable. Fool comes into the list partly because of its proverbial association with fortune (Fortune favors fools and fools those she favors), partly because flatterers make fools of their victims. Heart, which Shakespeare associates with flattery more often than other words, is more difficult to explain, although sometimes a contrast is suggested between the flatterer's words and his thoughts, as in Menenius'

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for his power to thunder. His heart's his mouth.

(Coriolanus III.i.225-226)

The greatest puzzle is the connection between flattery and sick, which we must regard as purely accidental, unless we care to adopt the theory that Shakespeare found flattery literally nauseating.

The distinction between natural and accidental associations of ideas becomes important when image-clusters are used as evidence in discussing questions of diputed authorship. If flattery is accompanied by fawning, kneel, bow, bend, tongue, or courtesy, the association of ideas is too obvious to have much value as evidence. The fact that in a scene of Pericles of which Shakespeare's authorship is doubtful tongue and knees appear in a speech containing four references to flattery (I. ii. 37-47) proves nothing. If, however, we find flattery mentioned together with a group of images with which it has no logical connection, but with which it is associated elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, such as those in Group C, this is prima facie evidence for suspecting his hand. Again, any writer might compare flatterers to fawning dogs, but it would be an extraordinary coincidence if any other writer than Shakespeare were to combine this with a reference to melting sweets.

Group A was the first of the four image-clusters to crystallize. Probably the earliest example of its use is found at the beginning of the induction to The Taming of the Shrew. On finding Sly asleep on the ground one of the huntsmen remarks: "This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly", and the lord orders him to be put to bed and "wrapped in sweet clothes". He suggests that on waking Sly will think it " a flattering dream", and adds an order to "burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet". In Richard III Queen Margaret calls Queen Elizabeth "a dream of what thou wast", and asks:

Who sues, and kneels, and says, "God save the Queen"?
Where be the bending peers thai flattered thee?

(IV.iv.88-95)

The contrast between these two passages, one comic, the other tragic, runs through Shakespeare's use of this image-cluster. Sometimes he refers to the sweet and flattering dream of finding oneself a king, elsewhere to the sorrow of a deposed king or queen whose former happiness is now a dream.

For an example of the former we may turn to the conclusion of Sonnet 87:

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but wakiag no such matter.

Incidentally, we may note that flatter in Sonnet 33 is associated with sovereign, and flattery in Sonnet 114 with crowned, monarch, and kingly, as well as sweet and poisoned. Romeo fears that Juliet's love for him

is but a dream,Too flattering-sweet to be substantial.

(II. ii. 140-141)

Banished to Mantua, he declares that

If I may trust the flattering truth of sleep,
My dreams presage some joyful news at hand;
My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne. . . .
I dreamt my lady came and found me dead
(Strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think)
And breathed such life with kisses in my lips
That I revived and was an emperor.
Ah me, how sweet is love itself possessed. . . .

(V. i. 1-10)

For an example of the use of Group A in a tragic context we have the parting between Richard II and his queen. In this scene he advises her "To think our former state a happy dream", and elsewhere there are references to King, queen, and sweet, and also to tears and weeping (V. i. 6-45), though not to flattery.

Group A appears for the last time in complete form in Henry V, IV. i, in the king's soliloquy before Agincourt:

What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poisoned flattery? . . .
Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose,

and sleep follows within ten lines. In the same speech we find fool, heart, degree, poisoned (again in antithesis with sweet), sick, bending, knee, gold, and pomp. Group A now disintegrates; dream, king, and queen in the later plays no longer keep company with flattery and sweet, but, as in Richard II, with tears and weeping. So in The Winter's Tale Perdita says:

 This dream of mine
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes and weep.

(IV. iv. 453-455)

In Henry VIII Queen Katharine tells Wolsey:

I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are a queen (or long have dreamed so), certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

(II. iv. 70-73)

In these two passages, written near the end of Shakespeare's career, we find the same contrast between the two contexts in which the dream image is used as is found in The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III

Perhaps the earliest example of Group B is that in Two Gentlemen of Verona IV. iv:

If I had such a tire, this face of mine
Were full as lovely as is this of hers:
And yet the painter flattered her a little,
Unless I flatter with myself too much.
Her hair is auburn, mine is perfect yellow. . . .
Her eyes are grey as glass, and so are mine.

This image-cluster appears again in the non-canonical Edward III, which of all the plays written before Richard II contains the largest number of typically Shakespearian images associated with flattery. These are confined to the scenes concerned with the Countess of Salisbury, which have often been attributed to Shakespeare; there is no trace of them in the war scenes, which are certainly not his. In the first scene between Edward and the Countess we find kneel, knees, bow, heart (twice), king, honor, dreamed, poison, sun (twice), tongue, flatter, plain, and golden within forty-three lines (I. ii. 107-149). The stream of associations continues in the dialogue between the King and Lodowick in the following scene, in which there are references to tears, drops, sweet, flattery, and heart-sick (II. i. 69-94).

All this might be coincidence, but this explanation begins to wear a little thin when we reach these lines:

Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist,
Like to a flattering glass, doth make more fair
The yellow amber: "like a flattering glass"
Comes in too soon, for, writing of her eyes,
I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun.

(II. i. 114-118)

Silk, as we have seen, Shakespeare associated with flattery, and in As You Like It a reference to "silk hair" is followed by eyeballs, glass, and flatters.

During the remainder of the dialogue between the King and Lodowick we find heart, gold, sweet, drops, drop, golden, sweets, thaw cold winter like the sun, sick, sweetness, frozen, and tongues (II. i. 120-182). In the scene between Edward and the Countess which follows, the images associated with flattery disappear. When she has left the stage, however, the King calls her words "sweet chaplains to her beauty", and continues:

O that I were a honey-gathering bee,
To bear the comb of virtue from this flower,
And not a poison-sucking envious spider,
To turn the juice I take to deadly venom.

(II. i. 278-285)

The antithesis between sweet and honey on the one hand, and poison and venom on the other, would suggest that if Shakespeare were the author of the scene he had the idea of flattery in mind. Sure enough, sixteen lines later the King addresses the Earl of Warwick as follows:

But O thou world, great nurse of flattery,
Why dost thou tip men's tongues with golden words
And peise their deeds with weight of heavy lead,
That fair performance cannot follow promise?
O that a man might hold the heart's close book
And choke the lavish tongue when it doth utter
The breath of falsehood not charactered there!

Here we have another characteristically Shakespearian antithesis, between the false heart and the flattering tongue. Warwick replies:

Far be it from the honour of my age
That I should owe bright gold and render lead;
Age is a cynic, not a flatterer.

(II. i. 301-310)

There are no further references to flattery in the scene, but the sweet-poison antithesis recurs in the dialogue between Warwick and the Countess with which it concludes. He says:

What can one drop of poison harm the sea? . . .
The King's great name will temper thy misdeeds,
And give the bitter potion of reproach
A sugared, sweet, and most delicious taste

(II. i. 401-406),

to which she retorts:

No marvel though the branches be infected
When poison hath encompassed the root:
No marvel though the leprous infant die
When the stern dame envenometh the dug.

(II. i. 418-421)

In his final speech Warwick reminds her that "poison shows worst in a golden cup" (II. i. 449).

Three of the four image-clusters appear in these scenes. Group A is represented in I. ii. by king, dreamed and flatter, and Group B in II. i. by hair, flattering glass, and eyes. The five references to flattery in the same scene are associated with sweet (four times) and sweetness; poison (four times) and venom (twice); winter and frozen (for ice); cold; thaw; sun (frequently mentioned); drop (three times); and tears—nine of the eleven terms of Group C, which here makes its first appearance. Honey, sugared, and thaw, all found in II. i, reappear in later plays when Shakespeare is using Group D, together with or in place of sweet and melt.

Even those critics who deny Shakespeare's authorship of the Countess scenes and attribute the whole of Edward III to a single writer, admit that he must have been thoroughly familiar with Shakespeare's work. Dr. Tillyard, for example, imagined him to have been "an intellectual, probably young, a university man, in the Southampton circle, intimate with Shakespeare and deeply under his influence, writing in his idiom" (Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 122). If this is so, we must be prepared to believe, not only that the hypothetical author borrowed wholesale from Shakespeare, but that Shakespeare in turn was so thoroughly steeped in one section of his imitator's work that for years to come he continued to reproduce his mental processes. This is a case for the use of Ockham's razor. So complex a process of reciprocal influences is less easy to credit than the simple and obvious theory that Shakespeare wrote the Countess scenes.

The development of Groups B and C continues in Richard II To Shakespeare and his contemporaries Richard was the classical example of a king ruined by flatterers, and in the play there are sixteen references to flattery. Seven of these occur in Gaunt's death-scene, in which we find flattery associated with tongues, sun, sweets, sweetest, and venom (II. i. 5-19), and later with sick (twice) and sicker (II. i. 84-96). The most significant collection of images, however, is found in the deposition scene. On entering Richard says that he has not yet learned "To insinuate, flatter, bow, and bend my knee" (IV. i. 165)—a small anthology of terms associated by Shakespeare with flattery—and in the following ninety lines there are references to tears (three times), tongue, pomp, sunshine, and pompous.

When writing the passage which follows, it would seem that Shakespeare had in mind, consciously or unconsciously, both Edward III and Marlowe's Faustus. Richard says:

 Alack the heavy day,
That I have worn so many winters out,
And know not now what name to call myself!
O that I were a mockery king of snow,
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,
To melt myself away in waterdrops!

(IV. i. 257-262)

We can tentatively reconstruct the working of Shakespeare's mind while he wrote these lines. While depicting the fate of flattery's victim his mind returns to Edward III, II. i, the scene which contains more references to flattery than any other which he has written before beginning the present play. Richard's reference to winter reminds him of Edward Ill's statement that the Countess "doth thaw cold winter like the sun", and he sees Richard's glory melting away like snow. The line recalls the three references to drops in the same scene of Edward III, which in turn recalls Faustus' despairing cry: "O soul, be changed into little waterdrops!" Henceforward the association of flattery with melting and drops is firmly rooted in his mind.

As he writes on, memories of Edward III and Faustus continue to echo through his mind As if he were Faustus addressing Mephistophilis, Richard says to Northumberland: "Fiend, thou torment'st me ere I come to hell" (IV. i. 270). He calls for a mirror, and when it is brought calls it a "flattering glass"—a phrase borrowed from Edward III A third and even more obvious echo of Faustus follows:

 Was this face the face
That every day under his household roof
Did keep ten thousand men?

(IV. i. 281-283)

Two more references to flatterers follow in the next twenty-five lines before Richard leaves the stage. The association of flattery with face and glass, already found in Two Gentlemen of Verona, is greatly strengthened by the fact that within twenty-eight lines of this scene face appears ten times, glass four times, and faced, outfaced, and flattering once each.

Group D first appears in I Henry IV, in Hotspur's lines:

 Where I first bowed my knee
Unto this king of smiles, this Bolingbroke. . . .
Why, what a candy deal of courtesy
This fawning greyhound then did proffer me!

(I. iii. 246-252)

It reappears in Julius Caesar, in Cassius' words to Antony:

But for your words, they rob the Hybla bees
And leave them honeyless,

and in Antony's scornful reply:

You showed your teeth like apes, and fawned like hounds,
And bowed like boundmen, kissing Caesar's feet,
While damned Casca, like a cur, behind,
Struck Caesar on the neck. O you flatterers!

(V.i.34-44)

In both these passages we have the combination of sweets and fawning dogs, but no mention of melting. This idea, however, has already entered into the image-cluster earlier in Julius Caesar, in Caesar's words to the conspirators immediately before his murder. The passage repays careful analysis.

The conspirators are kneeling before Caesar and flattering him. Shakespeare is reminded of another murdered ruler, Richard II, who was also ruined by listening to flatterers, and of his wish that he were "a mockery king of snow . . . to melt myself away." This memory in turn recalls the phrase in Edward III which inspired the lines in Richard II, "thaw cold winter". Shakespeare writes:

 Be not fond
To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood
That will be thawed from the true quality
With that which melteth fools; I mean sweet words.

(III.i.39-42)

The use of thawed makes it clear that he is thinking of melting snow, not of melting sweets. Sweet has a longestablished association with flattery, but it may appear here because sweets and thaw are found in successive lines in Edward III (II.i.158-159). The reference to "rebel blood" is possibly another reminiscence of Richard II The memory of Richard recalls Bolingbroke, all the more because the conspirators are petitioning on behalf of a banished man. Bolingbroke returning from banishment—sweet—false friends—kneeling; the chain of ideas suggests Hotspur's lines. Shakespeare writes on:

Low crooked courtesies, and base spaniel fawning.
Thy brother by decree is banished.
If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn for him,
I spurn thee like a cur out of my way.

(III.i.43-46)

Courtesies and fawning echo courtesy and fawning in Hotspur's speech. The spaniel, which replaces Hotspur's greyhound, has already appeared as a fawning animal in Two Gentlemen of Verona:

Yet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love,
The more it grows and fawneth on her still.

(IV.ii.14-15)

Spurn in Caesar's speech may be another reminiscence of the same passage. A little later in Julius Caesar III. i we find flattery (52) and kneel (75). It is evident that the association between flattery, fawning dogs, sweets, melting, and kneeling, which here all appear together for the first and last time, has come into being through the accidental coalescence of images from Edward III, Richard II, and I Henry IV.

Another example of Group D is found in Hamlet's

 Why should the poor be flattered?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And cook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning.

(III.ii.64-67)

It will be noted that there is no mention here of dogs or melting. The passage is of interest as an illustration of Shakespeare's habit, when using a particular group of images, of unconsciously repeating a word which he had used together with that group on a previous occasion; so here crook echoes crooked in Julius Caesar IV. i. 43.

The first and only complete example of Group B occurs in As You Like It:

'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair,
Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream,
That can entame my spirits to your worship. . . .
'Tis not her glass but you that flatters her,
And out of you she sees herself more proper
Than any of her lineaments can show her:
But mistress, know yourself, down on your knees.

(III.v.46-58)

For some years Shakespeare had associated knee with flattery; now the association is drawn for the first time within the orbit of Group B. Elsewhere in the same play Group C—most of the elements of which are found in Edward III and Richard II, although widely scattered in a much more compact form. The Duke's opening speech in II. i contains sweet (twice), icy, winter, cold, flattery, venomous, brooks, and stones, as well as pomp, court, and tongues (2-17), and references to brook (32, 42), tears (38, 43), and stream (46) follow. Melt, sun, and drop, which appear in the two earlier plays, are missing here, but brook, stream, and stones now acquire a purely accidental association with flattery. Macbeth's lines

 Unsafe the while, that we
Must lave our honours in these flattering streams
And make our faces vizards to our hearts

(III.ii.35-37)

indicate that one at least of these associations has established itself in Shakespeare's mind.

For the purposes of this study, Timon of Athens is the most interesting of all the plays. Even more than Richard II, it is the tragedy of a man ruined by flatterers. It contains not only more references to flattery than any other play—nineteen in all—but also a richer variety of the words and images which Shakespeare associated with flattery. Three of the four image-clusters are represented, beginning with a neat example of Group B in the opening dialogue between the poet and the painter:

All sorts of hearts; yea, from the glass-faced flatterer
To Apemantus, that few things loves better
Than to abhor himself: even he drops down
The knee before him.

(I.i.58-61)

For examples of Groups C and D we must turn to the dialogue between Timon and Apemantus in IV. iii, in which terms from the two groups jostle one another.

In the first twenty-seven lines of this dialogue we have dog, flatterers, silk, flatterer, knee, cap, fool, and heels. Apemantus' lines:

Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive
By that which has undone thee: hinge thy knee

(210-211)

recall Hamlet's

 crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning

—another example of Shakespeare's habit of echoing an earlier passage on a similar theme. Apemantus asks:

Will the cold brook,Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste?

(225-226)

The image-clusters in this play are becoming more compact than ever before; in the phrase glass-faced flatterer two images are compressed into one word, and here cold, brook, and ice, which in As You Like It were scattered over eleven lines, are combined in a single phrase. Even more striking is the use of candied. Group D was formed when in Julius Caesar the idea of melting snow was added to the combination of candy and fawning dogs. Here the reverse process occurs; "candy", used as a verb in the sense of "freeze", associates itself with ice and moves into Group C.

In the next seventeen lines we find flatter, fool, flatterest, flatter, fool, cold, courtier, and pomp. Timon then opens fire and bombards Apemantus with images from Group D:

Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm
With favour never clasped, but bred a dog.
Hadst thou like us from our first swath proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drugs of it
Freely command, thou wouldst have plunged thyself
In general riot, melted down thy youth
In different beds of lust, and never learned
The icy precepts of respect, but followed
The sugared game before thee. But myself,
Who had the world as my confectionary. . . .

(250-262)

A curious feature of this scene is the interpenetration of Groups C and D. In lines 200-226 dog, knee, and candied are found together with cold, brook, and ice. Timon's speech draws its images—dog, sweet, melted, sugared, and confectionary—mainly from Group D, but melted, which is associated with winter in Shakespeare's mind, suggests icy, a Group C image.

The passages so far quoted from Timon have all been drawn from those scenes which are unquestionably Shakespeare's, but in the doubtful scenes we also find typically Shakespearian associations of ideas, often in passages of extremely bad verse. In I. ii, for example, Apemantus says:

Like madness is the glory of this life,
As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.
We make ourselves fools to disport ourselves,
And spend our flatteries to drink those men
Upon whose age we void it up again
With poisonous spite and envy.

Again, in the concluding lines of the same scene there are references to honor, fortunes, hearts, fools, courtesies, pomps, and flattery. If it is difficult to believe that Shakespeare wrote such halting verse as Apemantus' lines, it is even more difficult to believe that a second writer shared his mental association of flattery with pomp, fool, and poison. This evidence, therefore, would seem to support the view that Timon is the rough draft of an unfinished play by Shakespeare, rather than the work of two hands.

In Antony and Cleopatra Groups C and D appear again, but this time they keep their distance. To Antony's question:

To flatter Caesar, would you mingle eyes
With one that ties his points?

and his accusation that she is cold-hearted towards him, Cleopatra replies:

 Ah dear, if I be so
From my cold heart let heaven engender hail
And poison it in the source, and the first stone
Drop in my neck; as it determines, so
Dissolve my life! The next Caesarion smite!
Till by degrees the memory of my womb,
Together with my brave Egyptians all,
By the discandying of this pelleted storm
Lie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile
Have buried them for prey.

(III.xiii. 156-167)

It is rewarding to compare this passage with the Duke's speech in As You Like It II. i. The two have only cold and stone in common, but hail corresponds to icy, poison to venomous, and Nile to brooks. Drop and dissolve come from Richard II's "melt myself away in water-drops", and discandying is an echo of candied in Timon. In Cleopatra's speech a number of ideas associated by Shakespeare with flattery but with no logical connection with one another are integrated into the single image of the hailstorm; the stones of As You Like It become a hailstone, Richard II's waterdrops a verb, and the ideas of candy and melt are fused into discandying. We do not normally associate Egypt with hailstorms; when writing this passage Shakespeare, who made considerable use of Biblical imagery in Antony and Cleopatra, evidently had in mind the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the plagues of hail, flies, and gnats, and the death of the first-born in the story of the plagues of Egypt.

The verb "to discandy" is used again in the next act, in Antony's

 The hearts
That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave
Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets
On blossoming Caesar.

(IV.xii.20-23)

As this is the last appearance of Group D, we may pause at this point to examine Shakespeare's use of this particular image-cluster. Dr. Spurgeon writes: "So strong is the association of these ideas in Shakespeare's mind that it does not matter which of these items he starts with—dogs or sugar or melting—it almost invariably, when used in this particular application, gives rise to the whole series" (p. 195). "Almost invariably" is an exaggeration. Shakespeare uses this image cluster six times, but only on three occasions—in Julius Caesar II. i, Timen, and Antony and Cleopatra—do dogs, sugar, and melting appear together. Sweets, candy, or honey is the only idea which invariably occurs; dogs are mentioned five times, flattery, fawning, and kneeling four times each, and melting three times. Only in one passage, that just quoted, is there reference to melting sweets, a fact which finally disposes of Dr. Spurgeon's theory on how this association of ideas originated. On the other hand, Shakespeare several times mentions dogs or sweets in connection with flattery without referring to any of the other items in the series.

For an example we may turn to Coriolanus. Almost the first words spoken by the hero are:

He that will give good words to thee will flatter
Beneath abhorring. What would you have, you curs?

Here flatter suggests cur, which has twice been used as a term of contempt for flatterers in Julius Caesar. We would expect a reference to sweets to follow, but instead we have a series of Group C images:

 You are no surer, no,
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun.

(I.i.171-178)

The idea of melting is implied, and if "the coal of fire upon the ice", as has been suggested, refers to the exceptionally severe winter of 1607-8, when the Thames was frozen so hard that lighted braziers could be placed upon it, "river" is also present by implication.

Coriolanus contains twelve references to flattery—more than any other play except Timon and Richard II—mostly in connection with the idea of flattering the people. No other image-clusters appear in the play, but we meet a host of familiar associations—honor and heart repeatedly, and also false-faced, parasite, silk, degrees, courteous, bonnet, tongue, hat, insinuating, poison, mouth, knee, smiles, bow, and bend. Even when the idea of flattery is implied but not mentioned the appropriate images occur, as in

 at once pluck out
The multitudinous tongue, let them not lick
The sweet which is their poison.

(III.i.155-157)

Here tongue, lick, and sweet recall Hamlet's "let the candied tongue lick . . .", and sweet in turn suggests the customary antithesis with poison.

The flattery-sweet-poison group reappears in Cymbeline. Cornelius asks the Queen why she has ordered him to supply her with "most poisonous compounds", and in her reply she refers to her preparation of "confections". Pisanio then enters, and she comments, "Here comes a flattering rascal" (I.vi.8-27). The adjective has obviously been suggested by the previous references to poison and sweets.

In the last of the canonical plays, Henry VIII, the references to flattery are confined to the scenes sometimes attributed to Fletcher. In a scene between Queen Katharine and Wolsey we have honor, flatteries, faces, hearts, and fortunes (III.i.137-148), and in a later scene the King says to Gardiner:

 I come not
To hear such flattery now . . .
 you play the spaniel,
And think with wagging of your tongue to win me.

(V.ii.158-161)

These references, and especially the use of the spaniel as a type of flattery, might be cited in support of Shakespeare's authorship of these scenes, but the evidence seems hardly strong enough to prove very much.

Armstrong said of the non-canonical Two Noble Kinsmen, "examination of a few clusters is so far from giving any conclusive support (i.e. to Shakespeare's authorship) that it seems more probable that Shakespeare's influence rather than his hand is perceptible in it" (p. 188). This opinion has been challenged by Kenneth Muir, who in Shakespeare as Collaborator showed that the play contains several Shakespearian image-clusters. The evidence, however, is even stronger than Muir suggests, for the first scene contains two of the four clusters and a large number of individual words associated by Shakespeare with flattery. This may seem surprising, as flattery is nowhere mentioned in the scene, but the explanation lies in the numerous references to kneeling. At the opening of the play the three queens kneel before Theseus, and they remain in this position for the greater part of the scene. Flattery and kneeling were so intimately connected in Shakespeare's mind that repeated references to the one were sufficient to call up the images associated with the other.

In the earlier part of the scene we have knees (I. i. 35, 56, 74), kneel (54), tresses (63), Fortune (65), cheek (66), smiles (66), eyes (67), thawed (69), honor (82), glass (90), cool (92), knee (96), sun (100), and heart-deep (105). So far the images are rather scattered, apart from the little cluster in 63-69, but in the dialogue between the Third Queen and Emilia there is a sudden concentration of them:

Third Queen. O, my petition was
Set down in ice, which, by hot grief uncandied,
Melts into drops; so sorrow, wanting form,
Is pressed with deeper matter.
Emilia. Pray, stand up:
Your grief is written in your cheek.
Third Queen. O woe!
You cannot read it there; there through my tears,
Like wrinkled pebbles in a glassy stream,
You may behold 'em.

(106-113)

Here unmistakably we have Groups B and C. The former is represented in 63-90 by tresses, cheek, eyes, knees, and glass, and the repetition of cheek in 110 suggests glassy two lines later. The Group C images are even more striking—thawed, cool (for cold), sun, ice, uncandied, melts, drops, tears, pebbles, and stream, all but the first three of which occur within six lines. Apart from flattery, the only item in this group which is missing is poison.

In the Third Queen's lines the metaphor of melting ice suggests that of melted wax pressed by a seal. A similar transition from one image to the other is found twice in Two Gentlemen of Verona, in Proteus'

 now my love is thawed,
Which like a waxen image 'gainst a fire
Bears no impression of the thing it was

(II. iv. 200-202),

and again in the Duke's

This weak impress of love is as a figure
Trenched in ice, which with an hour's heat
Dissolves to water and doth lose his form.
A little time will melt her frozen thoughts.

(III. ii. 6-9)

Here we have a triple parallel, between hot, fire, and heat, between melts, thawed, and melt, and between pressed, impression, and impress. The Third Queen's speech and the second passage from Two Gentlemen of Verona also have ice and form in common. It is surprising that Armstrong, who quotes the two passages from Two Gentlemen of Verona in support of his theory that Group D was suggested by melting wax or ice, failed to notice the parallel in Two Noble Kinsmen.

Yet more evidence of Shakespeare's hand in Two Noble Kinsmen is found if we compare the dialogue (quoted above) between Emilia and the Third Queen with the following lines from the deposition scene in Richard II:

Northumberland. My lord, despatch; read o'er these articles
Richard. Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see. . . .

 I'll read enough
When I do see the very book indeed
Where all my sins are writ, and that's myself.
Give me that glass, and therein will I read.
No deeper wrinkles yet? Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine
And made no deeper wounds?

(IV.i. 243-244, 273-279)

In this passage we have read, tears, cannot, see, writ, glass, deeper, wrinkles, sorrow, and face; in six lines of Two Noble Kinsmen we find read, tears, cannot, behold, written, glassy, deeper, wrinkled, sorrow, and cheek. Here are two passages on the same theme—the marks left by sorrow on the face—one of which clearly borrows from the other. Equally clearly, the borrowing was unconscious; wrinkles on the face become marks on pebbles, and "glass" is transformed into an adjective describing a stream. It is not uncommon for one author unconsciously to draw on another, as I have suggested that Shakespeare drew on Marlowe when writing this scene of Richard II Nevertheless, it seems more probable that Shakespeare echoed an earlier passage of his own in Two Noble Kinsmen than that another author was sufficiently intimate with Richard II to imitate it in this particular way.

In Richard II the lines just quoted are immediately followed by the phrase "O flattering glass!" "Flattering glass" is also found in Edward III, where it is followed by the lines:

I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun,
And thence the hot reflection doth rebound
Against my breast, and burns my heart within.

(II. i. 118-120)

Replying to the Third Queen, Emilia uses the same image of a burning-glass:

Your sorrow beats so ardently upon me
That it shall make a counter-reflect 'gainst
My brother's heart, and warm it to some pity.

(I. i. 126-128)

Glass, catch, sun, hot, reflection, and heart in the lines from Edward III are echoed in this passage of Two Noble Kinsmen by glassy (112), catch (117), sun (100), hot (107), counter-reflect (127), and heart (128).

This curious series of coincidences, I suggest, can be explained only by one hypothesis. Edward III, II. i., Richard II, IV. i, and Two Noble Kinsmen I. i were linked together in Shakespeare's mind by the use of Groups B and C in each; it has already been suggested that when writing the deposition scene in Richard II he was influenced by memories of Edward III. As he wrote the dialogue between the Third Queen and Emilia his mind reverted, first to Richard's lines in the deposition scene, and then to the following words "O flattering glass!" From there it was a short step to the use of the same phrase in Edward III, and so to the image which followed it, which he proceeded to place in the mouth of Emilia. If all three scenes are by Shakespeare, this mental process becomes easily credible. If, on the other hand, we attribute them to three different authors, we are forced to assume that the author of Edward III had an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare's early work, and borrowed from it freely; that Shakespeare returned the compliment; and that the anonymous part-author of Two Noble Kinsmen borrowed from both. Rather than pile hypothesis upon hypothesis so recklessly, it is surely more reasonable to accept the mass of evidence in favor of Shakespeare's part-authorship of both Edward III and Two Noble Kinsmen.