 | The Self-Tormentor |  |
SCENE VI.
Enter CHREMES, SOSTRATA.Sostra.
Nay indeed, husband, if you don't take care,
You'll bring some kind of mischief on your son:
I can't imagine how a thought so idle
Could come into your head.
Chremes.
Still, woman, still
D'ye contradict me? Did I ever wish
For any thing in all my life, but you
In that same thing oppos'd me, Sostrata?
Yet now if I should ask, wherein I'm wrong,
Or wherefore I act thus, you do not know.
Why then d'ye contradict me, Simpleton?
Sostra.
Not know?
Chremes.
Well, well, you know: I grant it, rather
Than hear your idle story o'er again.
Sostra.
Ah, 'tis unjust in you to ask my silence
In such a thing as this.
Chremes.
I do not ask it.
Speak if you will: I'll do it ne'ertheless.
Sostra.
Will you?
I will.
Sostra.
You don't perceive what harm
May come of this. He thinks himself a foundling.
Chremes.
A foundling, say you?
Sostra.
Yes indeed, he does.
Chremes.
Confess it to be true.
Sostra.
Ah, heav'n forbid!
Let our most bitter enemies do that!
Shall I disown my son, my own dear child?
Chremes.
What! do you fear you cannot at your pleasure,
Produce convincing proofs that he's your own?
Sostra.
Is it, because my daughter's found, you say this?
No: but because, a stronger reason far,
His manners so resemble yours, you may
Easily prove him thence to be your son.
He is quite like you: not a vice, whereof
He is inheritor, but dwells in You:
And such a son no mother but yourself
Could have engender'd.—But he comes.—How grave!
Look in his face, and you may guess his plight.
Subditum se SUSPICATUR. It is odd enough that Madam Dacier changes the text here, according to an alteration of her father, and reads SUSPICETUR, He MAY think himself a foundling—and assigns as a reason for it, that Terence could not be guilty of the very impropriety which she undertook to vindicate in the preceding scene. I have followed the common reading; because Chremes, ordering her to confirm her son's suspicions, shews that he understood her words in a positive, not a potential, sense. Clitipho, on his entrance in the next scene, seems to renew a request already made; and it would be a poor artifice in the poet, and, as Patrick observes, below the genius of Terence, to make Sostrata apprehend that these would be her son's suspicions, before she had any reason to suppose so.
Madam Dacier, as well as all the rest of the commentators, has stuck at these words. Most of them imagine she means to say, that the discovery of Antiphila is a plain proof that she is not barren. Madam Dacier supposes that she intimates such a proof to be easy, because Clitipho and Antiphila were extremely alike; which sense she thinks immediately confirmed by the answer of Chremes. I cannot agree with any of them, and think that the whole difficulty of the passage here, as in many other places, is entirely of their own making. Sostrata could not refer to the reply of Chremes, because she could not possibly tell what it would be: but her own speech is intended as an answer to his preceding one, which she takes as a sneer on her late wonderful discovery of a daughter; imagining that he means to insinuate, that she could at any time with equal ease make out the proofs of the birth of her son.—The elliptical mode of expression, so usual in Terence, together with the refinements of commentators, seem to have created all the obscurity.
| The Self-Tormentor | |