Nano, the dwarf, coming in with Androgyno and Castrone, asks for room for the new gamesters or players, and says to the public:—
They do bring you neither play, nor university show;
And therefore do intreat you that whatsoever they rehearse,
May not fare a whit the worse, for the false pace of the verse. [17]
If you wonder at this, you will wonder more ere we pass,
For know, here [18] is inclosed the soul of Pythagoras, [19]
That juggler divine, as hereafter shall follow;
Which soul, fast and loose, sir, came first from Apollo.
It is explained how that soul afterwards transmigrated into 'the goldy-locked Euphorbus who was killed, in good fashion, at the siege of old Troy, by the cuckold of Sparta;' how it then passed into Hermotimus, 'where no sooner it was missing, but with one Pyrrhus of Delos [20] it learned to go a-fishing;' [21] how thence it did enter the Sophist of Greece, Pythagoras. After having been changed into whom,
she became a philosopher,
Crates the cynick, as itself doth relate it: [22]
Since kings, knights and beggars, knaves, lords, and fools get it,
Besides ox and ass, camel, mule, goat, and brock, [23]
In all which it has spoke, as in the cobbler's cock. [24]
Nano's present intention, however, is not to refer to such things:—
But I come not here to discourse of that matter,
Or his one, two, or three, or his great oath, BY QUATER, [25]
His musics,[26] his trigon, his golden thigh, [27]
Or his telling how elements [28] shift: but I
Would ask, how of late thou hast suffered translation
And shifted thy coat in these days of Reformation.
Androgyno. Like one of the reformed, a fool, as you see,
COUNTING ALL OLD DOCTRINE HERESIE.
Nano. But not on thine own forbid meats hast thou ventured.
Androgyno. On fish, when first a Carthusian I entered.[29]
Nano. Why, then thy dogmatical silence hath left thee?