Merchant of Venice Tweet Alignments

Topic: Merchant of Venice Tweet Alignments

1. Verified Sourced Facts

The “infinitely + bound/tied” construction in Shakespeare

The images attached to this tweet show a concordance search for “infinitely” across Shakespeare's works. The directly visible examples are:

• Merchant of Venice 5.1.132: “BASS. To whom I am so infinitely bound.”
• Cymbeline 1.6.22: “He is one of the noblest note, to whose kindnesses I am most infinitely tied.”
• Henry IV, Part 2, Epilogue: “...and I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely, and so I kneel down before you—“
• Timon of Athens 1.2.180: “So infinitely endear'd—“
• Two Noble Kinsmen 2.4.15: “Extremely lov'd him, infinitely lov'd him”
• Henry IV, Part 1, 2.3.75: “I love thee infinitely.”

The two uses with binding/tying words — Merchant of Venice (“infinitely bound”) and Cymbeline (“infinitely tied”) — are the constructions highlighted by Feinstein as distinctive.

Neville's usage

Feinstein's tweet identifies two parallel constructions in Neville's letters:

• “infinitely entangled”
• “infinitely beholden”

These have not yet been extracted with corpus citations in this packet; they should be verified against the XML letters corpus at /Users/kenf/Neville Book/08_Neville_Letters_Vocabulary/source_xml/Neville_Letters_Corpus_v8.xml.

2. Ken Feinstein Twitter and Blog Information

2 Oct. 2021

• “There are very few examples in EEBO of the word infinitely followed by a word meaning tied or bound.”
• “Shakespeare does this twice.”
• “Merchant of Venice and Cymbeline among other uses.”
• “Henry Neville does it twice.”
• “infinitely entangled”
• “infinitely beholden”

3. Citations

• Feinstein, Ken. Tweet, 2 Oct. 2021, https://twitter.com/user/status/1444327541536219140. Local preservation: twitter_Merchant_of_Venice.md.
• play_cymbeline.md, related play packet.

4. Notes on Access

• The Shakespeare-side quotations are now extracted from the tweet images and confirmed against the play texts (MV 5.1.132; Cym. 1.6.22).
• The Neville-side quotations ("infinitely entangled," "infinitely beholden") should be verified against the XML letters corpus before this packet is treated as a hardened comparison.
• A direct Play: Merchant of Venice packet does not yet exist in the corpus.
• The EEBO frequency claim ("very few examples") remains a Feinstein assertion; it would benefit from an independent EEBO/EEBO-TCP search for "infinitely" + "bound/tied/beholden/entangled."

5. Local Images