FOOTNOTES:

[989] "To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities," prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, a well-known passage. Little, if anything, can be made of Meres when (Haslewood, II., 153) he couples Peele now with Ariosto, now, as tragical poet, with Apollodorus Tarsensis. He does not name Peele among the writers of comedy. Later, in Have with You to Saffron Walden (Grosart, III. 196), Nashe, with no mention of Peele, concedes to Greene mastery, above all the craft, in "plotting of plaies." This dramatic art of words, by the way, must not be confused with Euphuistic feats. Greene, Nashe, even Harvey, turned with Sidney against mere "playing with words and idle similies," and Peele is anything but a follower of Guevara.

[990] Merrie conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman, sometimes a Student in Oxford Wherein is shewed the course of his life, how he lived: a man very well knowne in the Citie of London and elsewhere.... There was an edition in 1607, hardly ten years after Peele's death.

[991] The Looking Glasse for London and England has some boisterous comedy, but no humour. In George-a-Greene, good play that it is, the ballad material is taken quite seriously. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay there is exquisite idyllic work, a dash of passable, though quite traditional, comedy, but no trace of the peculiar element, presently to be described as the dominant note of treatment in The Old Wives' Tale.

[992] Fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 109 f. So in his Geburt der Tragödie, p. 89, speaking of the prologue as used by Euripides, which told in advance the action of the play, Nietzsche asserts that the Athenians were less interested in the plot than in the pathos of situations and the rhetoric of the players.

[993] "The romantic play, the English Farsa, may be called in a great measure his discovery." Shakespeare's Predecessors, p. 580.

[994] "A matter in which he certainly anticipated Marlowe," Biog. Chron. II. 151.

[995] Ed. Shakespeare Society, 1841, p. 52.

[996] Peele is not of the extreme group whose feats in diction remind one of what Dr. Johnson said about the metaphysical poets, that "their wish was only to say what they hoped had never been said before."

[997] Gosson, in a well-known passage, puts brave language first among dramatic attractions: "sweetness of words, fitness of epithets, with metaphors, allegories...."

[998] Lämmerhirt counts nearly 84 per cent of the verses in the Arraignment of Paris as rhymed; David and Bethsabe has less than 7 per cent, and The Battle of Alcazar barely 3 per cent.

[999] The diction of The Old Wives' Tale differs from Lyly's comic prose much as Nashe's style in his pamphlets differs from the periods of Lyly's Euphues.

[1000] Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, Roxburgh Library, 1869, p. 145.

[1001] See the song in Appius, "Hope so and hap so."—In Misogonus, the Vice appears as a domestic fool.

[1002] Compare the French and broken English in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, the dialect of Boban the Scot in Greene's James IV., and the inevitable Welshman.

[1003] Das Schauspiel im Schauspiel, Wien and Leipzig, 1896.

[1004] "A new motiv," says Schwab. Fleay (work quoted, I. 266) thinks The Old Wives' Tale fairly parodies the induction in James IV.

[1005] See a similar bit of horse-play in Wily Beguiled.

[1006] The delicate irony of later triflings with romance—as in Wieland's Oberon—is, of course, quite out of the question.

[1007] See English Fairy Tales, J. Jacobs, edition of 1898, pp. 243, 245. A monograph could be written on the folk-lore of this play, where, it is to be conjectured, Peele has followed no single tale, but has combined parts of separate stories, and flung in bits of rhyme and fragments of superstition, as fancy bade him.

[1008] English Fairy Tales, p. 104. This theme of the Thankful Dead is extremely common. It is found in an old English romance, Sir Amadace, and has been treated by Max Hippe, in Herrig's Archiv, Vol. LXXXI, p. 141.

[1009] Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, Notes, p. 252. See also Frazer's Golden Bough.

[1010] Annals of Stage, etc., III. 197.

[1011] Eng. Dram. Lit. I. 372.

[1012] Shakespeare's Predecessors, p. 563 ff. Mr. Jacobs thinks that both poets went to folk-lore for their materials. Childe Rowland is the probable source.

[1013] It is entered on the Stationers' Registers to Raphe Hancock, April 16, 1595, the owlde wifes tale. Cf. "an olde wives tale," Greene, Groatsw. (Grosart XII. 119).—Gen. Ed.

[1014] G. P. Untersuchungen, etc., Rostock, 1862, pp. 62 ff.

[1015] Biogr. Mem. of the late Jos. Warton, DD., London, 1806, p. 398.

[1016] Metrische Untersuchungen zu George Peele, in the Archiv fur das Studium d. neueren Spracben, etc. (1890), LXXXV. 279.

THE
Old Wiues Tale.

A pleasant conceited Comedie
played by the Queenes Maiesties
players

Written by G. P.

VIGNETTE

Printed at London by Iohn Danter, and are to
be sold by Raph Hancocke, and Iohn
Hardie, 1595.

[The Persons of the Play[1017]