rd of night did sit
Even at noon-day upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
'These are their reasons; they are natural;' 30
For, I believe, they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.

[Note 21: /glaz'd/ Ff | glar'd Rowe.--/surly/ F1 F4 | surely
F2 F3.]

[Note 28: /Hooting/ Johnson | Howting F1 F2 F3 | Houting F4.]

[Note: 15. /you know./ Dyce suggested 'you'd know'; Craik,
'you knew.' But the text as it stands is dramatically vivid
and realistic.]

[Note 21: /Who./ See Abbott, Sect. 264.--/glaz'd./ Rowe's
change to 'glar'd' is usually adopted as the reading here, but
'glaze' is used intransitively in Middle English in the sense
of 'shine brilliantly,' and Dr. Wright (Clar) says: "I am
informed by a correspondent that the word 'glaze' in the sense
of 'stare' is common in some parts of Devonshire, and that
'glazing like a conger' is a familiar expression in Cornwall."
See Murray for additional examples.]

[Note 23: /Upon a heap:/ together in a crowd. 'Heap' is often
used in this sense in Middle English as it is colloquially
to-day. The Anglo-Saxon _heap_ almost always refers to
persons. In _Richard III_, II, i, 53, occurs "princely heap."
So "Let us on heaps go offer up our lives" in _Henry V_, IV,
v, 18.]

[Note 26: /the bird of night./ The old Roman horror of the owl
is well shown in this passage (spelling modernized) of
Holland's Pliny, quoted by Dr. Wright (Clar): "The screech-owl
betokeneth always some heavy news, and is most execrable ...
in the presages of public affairs.... In sum, he is the very
monster of the night.... There fortuned one of them to enter
the very sanctuary of the Capitol, in that year when Sextus
Papellio Ister and Lucius Pedanius were Consuls; whereupon, at
the Nones of March, the city of Rome that year made general
processions, to appease the wrath of the gods, and was
solemnly purged by sacrifices."]

[Note 30: /These:/ such and such. Cf. "these and these" in II,
i, 31. Casca refers to the doctrine of the Epicureans, who
were slow to believe that such pranks of the elements had any
moral significance in them, or that moral causes had anything
to do with them, and held that the explanation of them was to
be sought for in the simple working of natural laws and
forces. Shakespeare deals humorously with these views in
_All's Well that Ends Well_, II, iii, 1-6.]