Illustrations of Shakspeare, and of Ancient Manners: / with Dissertations on the Clowns and Fools of Shakspeare; on a Collection of Popular Tales Entitled Gesta Romanorum; and on the English Morris dance.

by Francis Douce

THE CLOWN.

He is nothing more than a shrewd rustic, performing the office of a messenger.

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[PERICLES.]

Page 388.

Pentapolis.]

"This," says Mr. Steevens, "is an imaginary city, and its name might have been borrowed from some romance. We meet, indeed, in history with Pentapolitana regio, a country in Africa, and from thence perhaps some novelist furnished the sounding title of Pentapolis," &c. But there was no absolute reason for supposing it a city in this play, as Gower in the Confessio amantis had done, a circumstance which had probably misled Mr. Steevens. In the original Latin romance of Apollonius Tyrius, it is most accurately called Pentapolis Cyrenorum, and was, as both Strabo and Ptolemy inform us, a district of Cyrenaica in Africa, comprising five cities, of which Cyrene was one.