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Planet.

Brabant, Jun.

I'faith, I like the audience that frequenteth there
With much applause; a man shall not be choaked
With the stench of garlick, nor be pasted
To the barmy jacket of a beer-brewer.
Tis a good gentle audience," etc.

Many of the commentators have taken it for granted that
this passage was pointed at these choir-boys of St Paul's,
but we are very strongly disposed to adopt a different opinion,
and to believe that the poet meant the rebuke or remon-
strance for the "children of the Queen's Chapel." The boys
of St Paul's seem to have performed at this period in their
own singing school. With the limited accommodation,
which was all we must suppose that such a building afforded,
they could hardly have become the successful rivals of the
proprietors of a great public theatre, and in all probability
their "good gentle audiences" were not the rushing multi-
tudes which carried away Hercules and his load too. The
young singers of the Queen's Chapel, on the other hand,
were in possession of a regular theatrical establishment. We
know that they performed Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels in
the year 1600 and his Poetaster in the year 1601. Both these
plays contain a number of caustic allusions to the dramatists
and actors of the day, including the members of the Globe
company; they involved their author in a bitter literary
warfare, and Shakespeare seems to us very distinctly to refer
to this contest, and to complain temperately but firmly of the
"wrong which was done to the youths themselves by
making them the vehicles of an attack on the members of a
profession to which they might themselves one day belong'-
The Life and Genius of Shakespeare, by Thomas Kenney,
p. 374. The passage, which stands thus in quarto 1603,

"

'I'faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away,
For the principal public audience that
Come to them are turned to private players
And to the humours of children,'

does not appear in 1604, but occurs as in the text in folio
1623.

319. The late innovation. J. Monck Mason would interpret this as meaning 'the recent change in the government,' and supports his view by reference to the following line from The Coronation-a play published in the folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher's works, as a drama by the latter, though really the composition of James Shirley-in which, after Leonatus is proclaimed king, Lysander says to Philocles :

What dost thou think of this innovation?'

-Comments on Shakespeare's Plays, p. 381.

325. Aery of children, little eyases, that cry out, etc. These are technical terms in falconry. 'Names are bestowed on a falcon according to her age or taking. The first is an eyess, which name lasts as long as she is in the eyrie. These are very troublesome in their feeding, and do cry very much, and are difficultly entred' - The Gentleman's Recreations.

Ib. Eyrie (from ei, an egg)-an eggery or collection of eggs. Ib. Eyases (from nidiace, a nestling; originally a niais, regarded as an eyas)-nestlings. 331. Escoted paid by share; escoter.

343. Hercules and his load too. A good-humoured phrase of praise; for the sign of 'the Globe on the Bankside, Southwark (Shakespeare's theatre), was 'Hercules carrying the world on his shoulder.'

366. An old man is twice a child. A Latin proverb, 'Bis pueri senes.' 377. Tragedy,

poem unlimited. Bishop Percy notices that

this enumeration, 'tragedy, comedy, history,' is that adopted by Shakespeare's editors in the early folios; that Beaumont and Fletcher in their prologue to The Captain, 1613, say:

This is nor comedy, nor tragedy,
Nor history;'

that Stow, writing in 1598, what was published in 1603, tells how stage-playes hath been used, comedies, tragedies, enterludes, and histories, true and fayned.' Besides this, he calls attention to the facts, that in 1574 the Earl of Leicester's players were authorised to 'use, exercise, and occupie the arte and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, enterludes, stage-playes,' etc.; but that 'when Shakespeare's Histories had become the ornaments of the stage, they were considered by the public, and by himself, as a formal and necessary species.' Hence, in the licence of 1603, Fletcher, Shakespeare, etc., are authorised to play 'comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, morals, pastorals, stage-plaies, and such like.' This early claim for his histories or historical plays to a distinct place as a legitimate species, sufficiently different from tragedies and comedies to be reckoned apart, is an important fact in Shakespeare's biography.

380. Scene individable, or poem unlimited. A drama in which the unity of place is observed, and one in which 'the unities' are disregarded.

...

Ib. Seneca. 'The tragedies of Seneca, having separately appeared in an English dress during the previous fifteen years, were collected and published together as early as 1581.. Shakespeare himself, at the outset of his career, had been indirectly charged by Nash with pillaging the English Seneca for sensational effects; and though there is little evidence of this [on his part), the practice was probably common enough, as Nash goes on to add-"The sea exhaled by drops will in

continuance be dry; and Seneca let blood line by line and
page by page, at length must needs die to our stage."
Shakespeare showed a far truer appreciation of the tragedies
in stigmatising them as "heavy"-the heaviest of all works
avowedly dramatic'--Thomas S. Baynes in the Athenæum
of 5th May 1877, p. 577. We ought perhaps to note here
that Queen Elizabeth herself was a translatress of the 'heavy'
Seneca. Plautus, unless in the Menæchmi, by W. W., 1595,
was not available to a merely English and unacademic reader.
Perhaps his just claim to the epithet of 'light,' in the sense of
evoking heart-easing mirth, is strongly enough stated in his
own epitaph:

Postquam morte datu'st Plautus Comedia luget,
Scena est deserta, dein Risus Ludu' Jocusque
Et numeri innumeri simul omnes collacrumarunt."

'Since Plautus died Thalia beats her breast,
The stage is empty, Laughter, Sport, and Jest,
Eke for his tuneless tones, together, weep distrest.'

Compare this with Spenser's Tears of the Muses, 197-204. 381. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. This has been interpreted by the Rev. C. E. Moberly to mean, 'For adhering to their text, or for extemporising when need requires;' but perhaps there is a quip intended, within the city, where 'the law of writ' prevails, and 'the liberty,' or the outlying districts to which the municipal franchises and privileges have been extended. In a very old map of Southwark, preserved in the Record Office, a boundary in three or four places is thus indicated: 'Hyer endeth the lyberte of the Mayre, and beghinneth the Kyng.'

383. Jephthah. There is an old ballad on this topic by William Petowe. In the Stationers' Registers, 1567, there is an entry to Alexander Lacy, of 'A ballett intituled the Songe of Jesphas daughter at his death.' There was a Tragedy of Jephthah taken from Judges xi, written both in Latin and Greek, by a learned divine, John Christopherson, 1546; George Buchanan produced a tragedy on the same subject in 1554; and in 1587 an Italian tragedy was composed by Benedict Capuano, a monk of Casino. In Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 1844, vol. i, a copy of this ballad is given as 'it was retrieved from utter oblivion by a lady who wrote it down from memory as she had heard it sung by her father. I am indebted for it,' says Percy, 'to the friendship of Mr Steevens. It has been said that the original ballad, in black letter, is among Antony à Wood's collections in the Ashmolean Museum. But upon application, lately made, the volume which contained this song was missing, so that I can only now give it as in the former edition.' Read Judges xi, 30-39, and xii, 7. 406. Chopine. S. W. Singer's explanation of this phrase is perhaps the best. It alludes 'to the boy having grown so as to fill the place of a tragedy heroine, and so assumed the cothurnus,' which Puttenham described as 'those high-corked shoes or pantofles, which now they call in Spaine and Italey shopini,' i.e., ciopini-Arte of Poesie, p. 49.

407. Cracked-broken, altered by age, as boy's voices do. Coins when cracked beyond the ring which encircled the royal effigies were declared uncurrent.

408. French falconers with zest, like keen sportsmen.

415. Caviare to the general—too dainty for the untaught commonalty. Nehemiah Grew, M.D., F.R.S., informs us in his Museum Regalis Societatis, 1681, that 'the eggs [roe] of a sturgeon, being salted and made up into a mass, were first brought from Constantinople by the Italians, and called caviare.' It is reckoned a peculiar delicacy. Giles Fletcher, in The Russe Commonwealth, 1591, p. 11, notes and describes it. 420. Sallets. As salad is made of fragrant and piquant herbs, sallets is used to signify sharp conceited words, to excite mirth.

424. Æneas' tale to Dido. It is not improbable that 'Ritson has hit the mark [when he says], It appears to me not only that Shakespeare had the favourable opinion of these lines which he makes Hamlet express, but that they were extracted from some play which he at a more early period had either produced or projected upon the story of Dido and Æneas. The verses recited are far superior to those of any coeval writer. The parallel passage in Marlow and Nash's Dido will not bear the comparison. Possibly, indeed, it might have been his first attempt, before the divinity that lodged within him had instructed him to despise the timid and unnatural style so much and so unjustly admired in his predecessors and contemporaries. The introduction of these lines, we think, cannot be accounted for on any other supposition but that they were written by Shakespeare himself; and he is so thoroughly in earnest in his criticism upon the play, and his complaint of its want of success is so apparently sincere, that it is impossible that the passage had reference to something nonexistent'-Charles Knight's Pictorial Shakespeare, 'Tragedies,' vol. i, p. 96.

Ib. Dido. 'Cardinal Wolsey once condescended to be a spectator of a Latin Tragedy of Dido from Virgil, acted by the scholars of Saint Paul's School, written by John Rightwise, the master, an eminent grammarian '-WARTON. In Shakespeare's birth-year, 1564, Queen Elizabeth honoured the University of Cambridge with a visit, and was present at a representation of a Tragedy of Dido, by Edward Halliwell (Warton), performed by a select company of scholars. A Ballet of a Lover blamynge his Fortune by Dido and Æneas for_theyr untruthe, was entered at the Stationers' Hall in the same year. In 1583, Albertus de Alasco, a Polish prince-palatine (see Merchant of Venice, I, ii, 43), arrived in Oxford, and there saw the Tragedy of Dido, by Dr Wın. Gager, acted by the scholars of Christ's Church Hall and St John's College, in a very gorgeous and expensive manner. Marlow's tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, left incomplete, was finished by his friend, Thomas Nash, and published 1594. There were extant, in choice Italian,' the Didone, both of Luigi Dolce, 1547, and of Giraldi Cinthio, 1583. On 3d January 1597, the play of Dido and Æneas was performed by Henslowe's company. Percy, in his Reliques, prints an old ballad on 'Queen Dido; or Æneas, the Wandering Prince of Troy.' Shakespeare makes upwards of a dozen allusions to the Virgilian romance.

430. The rugged Pyrrhus, etc. 'Shakespeare has made these lines elaborately turned for the purpose of marking a distinction between the diction of this supposed tragedy, and that of the personages of the drama-whose language he would have taken to be that of real life-and by this artifice to give the greater appearance of reality to his play'-John Howe, Lord Chédworth's Notes on Shakespeare's Plays, p. 251.

482. Mobled. Upton, who once thought this word should be mabbled, carelessly dressed, afterwards suggested that 'this designedly affected expression seemed to be formed from Virgil's Æneid, ii, 40: Magna comitante caterva (engirt by a mighty throng); as if mob-led.' Warburton explains it as veiled; Holt White holds that it is a depravation of muffled up. 484. Bisson-blinding; Dutch, bij sien, near-sighted; beesen, bleared, a Lincolnshire provincialism.

533. Hecuba. On Ist August 1586, E. White entered in the Stationers' Registers, the Lamentation of Hecuba and the Ladies of Troy; in [Thomas] Fennes Frutes, 1590, after a prose narrative of the ruinous fable of stately Troy, there is given a poem on the same topic, entitled Hecubae's Mishaps (pp. 91-115); and on 22d February 1593, W. Matthews entered the Lamentation of Troy for the Death of Hector.

544. John-a-dreams. Like Jack-a-lantern-John o' the Dreams, a dreamy impracticable fellow. 549. Plucks off my beard. Isa. i, 6.

566. Guilty creatures sitting at a play. ''Tis plain Shakespeare alludes to a story told of Alexander, the cruel tyrant of Pheræ, in Thessaly, who, seeing a famous tragedian act the Troades of Euripides, was so sensibly touched, that he left the theatre before the play was ended; being ashamed, as he owned, that he, who never pitied those he murdered, should weep at the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache. See Plutarch, in the Life of Pelopidas'-Upton's Observations on Shakespeare, p. 62. In A Warning for Fair Women (written before 1590) the following example is given :

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