A Postdating ofThrow‘Time’ inTwelfth Night

Abstract

IN the final act of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1600–01), Duke Orsino rebuffs Feste’s third request for payment: ‘You can fool no more money out of me at this throw’ (V.i.32). 1 The primary meaning of throw is ‘time’, from Old English þrag ‘time; season’. 2 The secondary meaning is ‘throw (of the dice)’, playing on Feste’s dice metaphor (‘ Primo , secundo , tertio is a good play’, V.i.29) and perhaps echoing Sir Toby’s rhetorical question to Maria, ‘Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip and become thy bondslave?’ (II.v.157–158). 3 Thus the Duke’s prior disbursement of two coins is likened to a player’s throws in a dice game. Feste’s third request, organized around the concept of complete sets of three (‘one, two, three’, V.i.31), places dicing alongside other metaphorical fields: proverbial wisdom (‘and the old saying is “The third pays for all”’, V.i.29–30), dancing measures (‘the triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure’, V.i.30), and campanology (‘the bells of St. Bennet, sir, may put you in mind’, V.i.31). 4 This occurrence of throw ‘time’ postdates by almost a century the last citation for that meaning at Oxford English Dictionary Online, ‘throw, n . 1 ’, 1 (‘The time at which anything happens; an occasion’), from Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513).