A Select Collection of Old English Plays Volume Viii Part 99

[97] Old copy, _Hope_.

[98] Old copy, _as this, like_.

[99] Old copy, _Will_.

[100] The "shepherd that now sleeps in skies" is Sir Philip Sidney, and the line, with a slight inversion for the sake of the rhyme, is taken from a sonnet in "Astrophel and Stella," appended to the "Arcadia"--

"Because I breathe not love to every one, Nor do I use set colours for to wear, Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair, Nor give each speech a full point of a groan, The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan Of them who in their lips love's standard bear, 'What he?' say they of me, 'now I dare swear He cannot love: no, no; let him alone.'

And think so still, so Stella know my mind: Profess, indeed, I do not Cupid's art; But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find, That his right badge is but worn in the heart.

Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove: They love indeed who quake to say they love."

--P. 537, edit. 1598.

It may be worth a remark that the two last lines are quoted with a difference in "England's Parna.s.sus," 1600, p. 191--

"Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove; They love indeed who _dare not say_ they love."

In the quarto copy of Nash's play the word _swains_ is misprinted for _swans_. The introduction to the pa.s.sage would have afforded Mr Malone another instance, had he wanted one, that shepherd and poet were used almost as synonymes by Shakespeare's contemporaries.

[101] Perhaps we ought to read _feign_ instead of _frame_; but _frame_ is very intelligible, and it has therefore not been altered.

[102] The quarto gives this line thus--

"Of secrets more desirous _or_ than men,"

which is decidedly an error of the press.

[103] [Old copy, every.]

[104] [Old copy, true h.e.l.l.]

[105] See act i. sc. 3 of "Macbeth"--

2D WITCH. I'll give thee a wind.

1ST WITCH. Thou art kind.

3D WITCH. And I another.

From the pa.s.sage in Nash's play, it seems that Irish and Danish witches could sell winds: Macbeth's witches were Scotish.

[106] [Old copy, _party_.]

[107] [Old copy, _Form'd_.]

[108] As usual, Nash has here misquoted, or the printer has omitted a word. Virgil's line is--

"_Fama malum, quo non aliud velocius ullum_."

--"Aeneid," iv. 174.

Gabriel Harvey, replying in 1597, in his "Tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of Thomas Nash, Gentleman" (written in the name of Richard Litchfield, the barber-surgeon of Trinity College, Cambridge), also alludes to this commonplace: "The virtuous riches wherewith (as broad-spread fame reporteth) you are endued, though _fama malum_ (as saith the poet) which I confirm," &c. Perhaps this was because Nash had previously employed it, or it might be supposed that the barber would have been unacquainted with it.

[109] A soldier of this sort, or one pretending to be a soldier, is a character often met with in our old comedies, such as Lieutenant Maweworm and Ancient Hautboy in "A Mad World, my Masters," Captain Face in "Ram-Alley," &c.

[110] [_Dii minores_.]

[111] Pedlar's French was another name for the cant language used by vagabonds. What pedlars were may be judged from the following description of them in "The Pedlar's Prophecy," a comedy printed in 1595, but obviously written either very early in the reign of Elizabeth, or perhaps even in that of her sister--

"I never knew honest man of this occupation.

But either he was a dycer, a drunkard, a maker of s.h.i.+ft, A picker, or cut-purse, a raiser of simulation, Or such a one as run away with another man's wife."

[112] [Old copy, _by_.]

[113] _Ink-horn_ is a very common epithet of contempt for pedantic and affected expressions. The following, from Churchyard's "Choice," sig.

E e 1., sets it in its true light--

"As _Ynkehorne_ termes smell of the schoole sometyme."

It went out of use with the disuse of ink-horns. It would be very easy to multiply instances where the word is employed in our old writers. It most frequently occurs in Wilson's "Rhetoric," where is inserted an epistle composed of _ink-horn terms_; "suche a letter as Wylliam Sommer himself could not make a better for that purpose. Some will thinke, and swere it too, that there never was any suche thing written: well, I will not force any man to beleve it, but I will saie thus much, and abyde by it too, the like have been made heretofore, and praised above the moone." It opens thus--

"Ponderying, expendying, and revolutying with myself, your urgent affabilitee, and ingenious capacitee, for mundaine affaires, I cannot but celebrate and extolle your magnificall dexteritee above all other; for how could you have adopted such ill.u.s.trate, prerogative, and dominicall superioritee, if the fecunditee of your inginie had not been so fertile and wonderfull pregnant?"--Fo. 86. edit. 1553. Wilson elsewhere calls them "_ink-pot_ terms."

[114] [The popular idea at that time, and long afterwards, of Machiavelli, arising from a misconception of his drift in "Il Principe."

See an article on this subject in Macaulay's "Essays."]

[115] [Old copy, _toucheth_, which may, of course, be right; but the more probable word is that here subst.i.tuted.]

[116] [The "Ebrietatis Encomium."]

[117] [Perhaps the "Image of Idleness," of which there was an edition in 1581. See Hazlitt's "Handbook," p. 291, and ibid. Suppl.]

[118] Nash alludes to a celebrated burlesque poem by Francisco Copetta, ent.i.tled (in the old collection of productions of the kind, made in 1548, and many times afterwards reprinted), "Capitolo nel quale si lodano le Noncovelle." Some of the thoughts in Rochester's well-known piece seem taken from it. A notion of the whole may be formed from the following translation of four of the _terze rime_--

"_Nothing_ is brother to primaeval matter, 'Bout which philosophers their brains may batter To find it out, but still their hopes they flatter.

"Its virtue is most wondrously display'd, For in the Bible, we all know, 'tis said, G.o.d out of _nothing_ the creation made.

"Yet _nothing_ has nor head, tail, back, nor shoulder, And tho' than the great _Dixit_ it is older, Its strength is such, that all things first shall moulder.

"The rank of _nothing_ we from this may see: The mighty Roman once declared that he Caesar or _nothing_ was resolv'd to be."

[But after all, had not Nash more probably in his recollection Sir Edward Dyer's "Praise of Nothing," a prose tract printed in 1585?]

[119] [See Hazlitt's "Handbook," v. Fleming.]

[120] [Alluding to the "Grobia.n.u.s et Grobiana" of Dedekindus.]