In further illustration, the following story from Wits, fits and fancies, 1614, 4to, is added:—"Haniball Gonsaga being in the low countries overthrowne from his horse by an English captaine, and commanded to yeeld himselfe prisoner: kist his sword and gave it the Englishman saying: Si fortuna me tormenta, il speranza me contenta." Part of this story had already been quoted by Dr. Farmer, but not for a similar purpose.
Scene 4. Page 94.
Fal. Quoit him down, Bardolph, like a shove-groat shilling.
Mr. Steevens supposes the shove-groat shilling to have been used in the game of shovel-board, by which he seems to infer that the games of shove-groat and shovel-board were the same; but this is apparently a mistake. The former was invented during the reign of Henry the Eighth; for in the statutes of his 33rd year, chap. ix., it is called a new game. It was also known by the several appellations of slide-groat, slide-board, slide-thrift, and slip-thrift, the first of which was probably adopted from the game being originally played with the silver groats of the time, then nearly as large as modern shillings. When the broad shillings of Edward the Sixth were coined, they were substituted for the groats in this game, and used also at that of shovel-board, which seems to have been only a variation of the other on a larger scale. Nothing has occurred to carry it beyond the time of Henry the Eighth; and from the want of such a term as a shovel-groat, it is probably not older than the reign of Edward the Sixth, who first coined the shilling piece. Shovel-board is already too well known to require any description of it in this place; but of the other little seems recorded, or not sufficient to discover the manner in which it was played. Holinshed, or rather Stanihurst, in his history of Ireland, speaking of a mandate for the execution of the Earl of Kildare in the reign of Henry the Eighth, says, that "one night when the lieutenant and he for their disport were playing at slidegrote or shofleboorde, sodainly commeth from the Cardinall (Wolsey) a mandatum to execute Kyldare on the morrow. The earle marking the lieutenant's deepe sigh, By S. Bryde, Lieutenant, quoth he, there is some made game in that scrole; but fall how it will, this throwe is for a huddle." Here the writer has either confounded the two games, or might only mean to state that the Earl was playing at one or the other of them. Rice the puritan, in his Invective against vices, black letter, no date, 12mo, speaks of "paysed [weighed] groates to plaie at slip-thrifte;" and in another place he asks whether God sent Adam into Paradise to play at it. There is a modern game called Justice Jervis, which is supposed by Mr. Strutt, who has described it at large, to bear some resemblance to shove-groat. See his Sports and pastimes, p. 225.
Scene 4. Page 94.
Pist. Why then let grievous, ghastly, gaping wounds
Untwine the sisters three. Come Atropos, I say!
This is manifestly in ridicule of Sackvile's Complaynt of Henry Duke of Buckingham, in The mirour for magistrates:
"Where eke my graundsire, Duke of Buckingham
Was wounded sore, and hardly scapt untane.
But what may boote to stay the sisters three?
When Atropos perforce will cut the thred."
Stanzas 5 and 6.