Whose strength might boldly on your favours build;
Our russet, tissue; drone, a honey bee;
Our barren plot, a large and spacious field.
These rhetorical antitheses are an apology for meanness of theme, rather than, like the prologues to Henry V, for scenic imperfections, and I hesitate to believe that, when the actor said ‘twig’, he pointed to a branch which served as sole symbol on the stage for a woodland.
[137] Looking-Glass, V. iii. 2059, 2075, ‘Lo, a pleasant shade, a spreading vine ... A Serpent deuoureth the vine’; O. Furioso, 572, ‘Sacrepant hangs vp the Roundelayes on the trees’ (cf. A. Y. L. III. ii. 1, ‘Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love’); B. B. of Alexandria, sc. vi, ‘Here’s a branch, forsooth, of your little son turned to a mandrake tree’; Old Fortunatus, 1–357, where Fortunatus dreams under a tree, 1861–2128, where there are apple-and nut-trees in a wilderness; &c., &c. Simon Forman in 1611 saw Macbeth and Banquo ‘ridinge thorowe a wod’ (N. S. S. Trans. 1875–6, 417), although from the extant text we could have inferred no trees in I. iii.
[138] M. N. D. II-IV. i; Mucedorus, I.; II. iii; III. iii-v; IV. ii, iii; V. i; T. A. Women of Abingdon, scc. vii, ix-xii.
[139] Edw. I, 2391, ‘I must hang vp my weapon vppon this tree’; Alphonsus, II. i. 417, ‘this wood; where in ambushment lie’. For a river cf. p. 51, n. 8 (Locrine).
[140] Hen. V, IV, prol. 49.
[141] 1 Tamb. 705, ‘Sound trumpets to the battell, and he runs in’; 1286, ‘They sound the battell within, and stay’; 2 Tamb. 2922, ‘Sound to the battell, and Sigismond comes out wounded’; 1 Contention, sc. xii. 1, ‘Alarmes within, and the Chambers be discharged, like as it were a fight at sea’.
[142] Alphonsus, II. i, ii; 1 Hen. IV, V. i-iv. The whole of Edw. III, III, IV, V, is spread over Creçy and other vaguely located battle-fields in France.