V., 1, 232-250: Cleanthes' speech. (Notice the parenthesis in lines 246-7.)
The play is usually assigned to 1599, on the strength of the passage where Gnotho gets the clerk to alter the Parish Chronicle (III., 1). Gayley thinks the mention of 1599 “purely dramatic” (R. E. C., III., p. lv). He says the style is not like that of Middleton in 1599, and points out that Rowley was only fourteen years of age in that year. “If Massinger had any share in the play, it was in revision, after Middleton's death in 1627.” Gayley dates the play 1614-16. It must be pointed out, however, that it is not easy to alter 40 to 39. The author could have chosen a date whose figures were more easy to deal with. I therefore think the usually accepted date is right, though it does not, of course, settle the question of authorship.
Massinger was fond of scenes in courts of justice, and it is highly probable that he elaborated the details of Act V.
V., 3, 148:
O Philanax, as thy name
Interpreted speaks thee, thou hast ever been
A lover of the King.
III., 1, 7. Cf. Ben Jonson's Staple of News, IV., 4 Pennyboy junior:
Thou appears't
κατ᾽ ἐξοχήν, a canter.
Telephus frag., 722:
Σπάρταν ἔλαχες, κείνην κόσμει;
τὰς δὲ Μυκήνας ἡμεῖς ἰδίᾳ.
Notice that in all these false quantities the stress is laid on the syllable which bears the Greek accent; that is to say, the words are scanned as a Byzantine Greek of the time would have pronounced them. Cf. in Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Pt. II., IV., 4: “As in the theoria of the world.” A similar suggestion is anonymously made in The Times Literary Supplement, March 20th, 1919, for another line of Marlowe: “Our Pythagôras' Metempsýchosis.”