I.iv.43 (180,4) questionable shape] [By questionable is meant provoking question.  HANMER.] So in Macbeth,

  Live you, or are you aught
  That man may question?

I.iv.46 (180,5) tell,/Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death,/ Have burst their cearments?] [W:  in earth] It were too long to examine this note period by period, though almost every period seems to me to contain something reprehensible.  The critic, in his zeal for change, writes with so little consideration, as to say, that Hamlet cannot call his father canonized, because we are told he was murdered with all his sins fresh upon him.  He was not then told it, and had so little the power of knowing it, that he was to be told it by an apparition.  The long succession of reasons upon reasons prove nothing, but what every reader discovers, that the king had been buried, which is implied by so many adjuncts of burial, that the direct mention of earth is not necessary.  Hamlet, amazed at an apparition, which, though in all ages credited, has in all ages been considered as the most wonderful and most dreadful operation of supernatural agency, enquires of the spectre, in the most emphatic terms, why he breaks the order of nature, by returning from the dead; this he asks in a very confused circumlocution, confounding in his fright the soul and body.  Why, says he, have thy bones, which with due ceremonies have been intombed in death, in the common state of departed mortals, burst the folds in which they were embalmed?  Why has the tomb, in which we saw thee quietly laid, opened his mouth, that mouth which, by its weight and stability, seemed closed for ever?  The whole sentence is this:  Why dost thou appear, whom we know to be dead?

Had the change of the word removed any obscurity, or added any beauty, it might have been worth a struggle; but either reading leaves the sense the same.

If there be any asperity in this controversial note, it must be imputed to the contagion of peevishneas, or some resentment of the incivility shewn to the Oxford editor, who is represented as supposing the ground canonized by a funeral, when he only meant to say, that the body has deposited in holy ground, in ground consecrated according to the canon.

I.iv.65 (183,9) I do not set my life at a pin’s fee] The value of a pin. (1773)

I.iv.73 (183,1) deprive your sovereignty] I believe deprive in this place signifies simply to take away.

I.iv.77 (184,4) confin’d to fast in fires] I am rather inclined to read, confin’d to lasting fires, to fires unremitted and unconsumed.  The change is slight.

I.v.30 (186,7) As meditation or the thoughts of love] The comment [Warburton’s] on the word meditation is so ingenious, that I hope it is just.