FullReads

John Taylor. See note, p. 163. “I have quoted many pieces of John Taylor, but it was impossible to give their original dates. He may be traced as an author for more than half a century. His works were collected in folio, 1630, but many were printed afterward,” etc. (Farmer). The reference to Gargantua will be found on p. 160 of the Spenser Society Reprint of the Folio. Taylor refers to Rabelais also in his Dogge of Warre, id., p. 364.

213. Richard the third. “Some inquiry hath been made for the first performers of the capital characters in Shakespeare. We learn that Burbage, the alter Roscius of Camden, was the original Richard, from a passage in the poems of Bishop Corbet; who introduces his host at Bosworth describing the battle:

“But when he would have said King Richard died,
And call’d a horse, a horse, he Burbage cried.”

The play on this subject mentioned by Sir John Harrington in his Apologie for Poetrie, 1591, and sometimes mistaken for Shakespeare’s, was a Latin one, written by Dr. Legge, and acted at St. John’s in our University, some years before 1588, the date of the copy in the Museum. This appears from a better MS. in our library at Emmanuel, with the names of the original performers.

It is evident from a passage in Camden’s Annals that there was an old play likewise on the subject of Richard the Second ; but I know not in what language. Sir Gelley Merrick, who was concerned in the hare-brained business of the Earl of Essex, and was hanged for it with the ingenious Cuffe in 1601, is accused, amongst other things, “quod exoletam Tragoediam de tragica abdicatione Regis Ricardi Secundi in publico theatro coram conjuratis data pecunia agi curasset” (Farmer).

213. Remember whom ye are, etc. Richard III., v. 3. 315.

Holingshed. “I cannot take my leave of Holingshed without clearing up a difficulty which hath puzzled his biographers. Nicholson and others have supposed him a clergyman. Tanner goes further and tells us that he was educated at Cambridge and actually took the degree of M.A. in 1544.–Yet it appears by his will, printed by Hearne, that at the end of life he was only a steward, or a servant in some capacity or other, to Thomas Burdett, Esq. of Bromcote, in Warwickshire.–These things Dr. Campbell could not reconcile. The truth is we have no claim to the education of the Chronicler : the M.A. in 1544 was not Raphael, but one Ottiwell Holingshed, who was afterward named by the founder one of the first Fellows of Trinity College” (Farmer).

214. Hig, hag, hog. Merry Wives, iv. 1. 44.

writers of the time. “Ascham, in the Epistle prefixed to his Toxophilus, 1571, observes of them that ‘Manye Englishe writers, usinge straunge wordes, as Lattine, Frenche, and Italian, do make all thinges darke and harde,’ ” etc. (Farmer).

all such reading as was never read. Dunciad, i., line 156, first edition (see Introduction, p. xliv.; iv., line 250, edition of 1742).

Natale solum. “This alludes to an intended publication of the Antiquities of the Town of Leicester. The work was just begun at the press, when the writer was called to the principal tuition of a large college, and was obliged to decline the undertaking. The plates, however, and some of the materials have been long ago put into the hands of a gentleman who is every way qualified to make a proper use of them” (Farmer). This gentleman was John Nichols, the printer, whose History and Antiquities of the County of Leicester appeared from 1795 to 1815.

215. primrose path. Hamlet, i. 3. 50; cf. Macbeth, ii. 3. 21.

Age cannot wither. Antony and Cleopatra, ii. 2. 240.