SUMMER'S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.[16]
Enter WILL SUMMER,[17] in his fool's coat but half on, coming out.
Noctem peccatis et fraudibus objice nubem.[18] There is no such fine time to play the knave in as the night. I am a goose or a ghost, at least; for what with turmoil of getting my fool's apparel, and care of being perfect, I am sure I have not yet supp'd to-night. Will Summer's ghost I should be, come to present you with "Summer's Last Will and Testament." Be it so; if my cousin Ned will lend me his chain and his fiddle. Other stately-pac'd Prologues use to attire themselves within: I that have a toy in my head more than ordinary, and use to go without money, without garters, without girdle, without hat-band, without points to my hose, without a knife to my dinner, and make so much use of this word without in everything, will here dress me without. Dick Huntley[19] cries, Begin, begin: and all the whole house, For shame, come away; when I had my things but now brought me out of the laundry. God forgive me, I did not see my Lord before! I'll set a good face on it, as though what I had talk'd idly all this while were my part. So it is, boni viri, that one fool presents another; and I, a fool by nature and by art, do speak to you in the person of the idiot of our play-maker. He, like a fop and an ass, must be making himself a public laughingstock, and have no thank for his labour; where other Magisterii, whose invention is far more exquisite, are content to sit still and do nothing. I'll show you what a scurvy Prologue he had made me, in an old vein of similitudes: if you be good fellows, give it the hearing, that you may judge of him thereafter.