[1053] Henslowe Papers, 67; cf. ch. xiii (Lady Elizabeth's).
[1054] Henslowe, ii. 20.
[1055] Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589):
by oath he bound me
To write no more of that whence shame doth grow,
Or tie my pen to Pennie-knaves delight.
[1056] The pun on 'comoedians' and 'camoelions' had been made by 'certayne gentlemen' against the Duttons as early as 1580; cf. ch. xiii (Warwick's). It is still in use in Ratseis Ghost (1605); cf. p. 340, n. 2.
[1057] The Aesopic allusion is complicated by another to the story in Macrobius, Saturnalia, ii. 4, 30, perhaps based on Martial, xiv. 73, of the cobbler who tried to teach a crow to say 'Ave Caesar' in flattery of Augustus after the battle of Actium; cf. Mr. McKerrow's note to Nashe's Pierce Penilesse (Works, iv. 105). Both ideas are suggested in Nashe's Menaphon preface, and Greene, in Francescos Fortunes (App. C, No. xliii), combines them with a third story, also due, perhaps through Cornelius Agrippa (App. C, No. xii), to Macrobius (Sat. III. xiv. 12), of a debate on the respective powers of orator and actor between Cicero and Roscius, into an obviously apocryphal jest: 'Cicero. Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the glory of others feathers? Of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler hath taught thee to say Aue Caesar, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a kings chamber.' Fleay, i. 258, chooses to identify the cobbler with Marlowe and Roscius with Robert Wilson, and (being ignorant of Macrobius) cites the use of the phrase 'Ave Caesar' in Edward III, I. i. 164, which he ascribes to Marlowe, as evidence. Such equations are always hazardous. The point of the passage is in the indebtedness of the players as a body to the poets as a body. If any individual actor were designated as Roscius about 1590, it would be more likely to be Alleyn than another; the compliment to him is not unusual later (cf. ch. xv). But he had hardly a monopoly of the name; and in the present case there is really no reason to suppose that Greene had any individual in mind, other than the historical Roscius. The name is given to Ostler (q.v.) in 1611, and was in common generic use for a player; cf. e.g. Marston, Satires (1598), ii. 42:
That fair-framed piece of sweetest poesy,
Which Muto put between his mistress' paps ...