PROLOGUE
[Enter Chorus.] As Malone suggests, this probably meant only that the prologue was to be spoken by the same actor that personated the chorus at the end of act i. The prologue is omitted in the folio, but we cannot doubt that it was written by S. It is in form a sonnet, of the pattern adopted in his Sonnets. See comments upon it, p. 22 above.
2. [Fair Verona.] The city is thus described in the opening lines of Brooke's poem:[4]—
"There is beyonde the Alps, a towne of auncient fame
Whose bright renoune yet shineth cleare, Verona men it name:
Bylt in an happy time, bylt on a fertile soyle:
Maynteined by the heauenly fates, and by the townish toyle.
The fruitefull hilles aboue, the pleasant vales belowe,
The siluer streame with chanell depe, that through the towne doth flow:
The store of springes that serue for vse, and eke for ease:
And other moe commodities, which profite may and please;
Eke many certaine signes of thinges betyde of olde,
To fyll the houngry eyes of those that curiously beholde:
Doe make this towne to be preferde aboue the rest
Of Lumbard townes, or at the least compared with the best."
6. [Star-cross'd.] For the astrological allusion, cf. i. 4. 104, v. 1. 24, and v. 3. 111 below. The title of one of Richard Braithwaite's works, published in 1615, is "Love's Labyrinth: or the True Lover's Knot, including the disastrous falls of two Star-crost lovers Pyramus and Thisbe."
8. [Doth.] The reading of the quartos, changed by most of the modern editors to "Do." Ulrici considers it the old third person plural in -th. He adds that S. mostly uses it only where it has the force of the singular, namely, where the sense is collective, as in overthrows here. Cf. v. 1. 70 below.
12. [Two hours.] Cf. Hen. VIII. prol. 13: "may see away their shilling Richly in two short hours."