l. 14. or like ended playes. This suggests that the Elizabethan stage was not so bare of furniture as used to be stated, and also that furniture was not confined to the curtained-off rear-stage. What Donne recalls is a stage deserted by the actors but cumbered with furniture and decorations.
l. 16. a frippery, i.e. 'A place where cast-off clothes are sold', O.E.D. 'Oh, ho, Monster; wee know what belongs to a frippery.' Tempest, IV. i. 225. Here the rigging has the appearance of an old-clothes shop.
l. 17. No use of lanthornes. The reference is to the lanterns in the high sterns of the ships, used to keep the fleet together. 'There is no fear now of our losing one another.' Each squadron of a fleet followed the light of its Admiral. Essex speaks of having lost, or missing, 'Sir Walter Raleigh with thirty sailes that in the night followed his light.' Purchas, xx. 24-5.
l. 18. Feathers and dust. 'He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world for some things: his verses of the Lost Chaine he hath by heart; and that passage of the Calme, That dust and feathers doe not stirre, all was soe quiet. Affirmeth Donne to have written all his best peeces ere he was twenty-five yeares old.' Jonson's Conversations with Drummond. When Donne wrote The Calme he was in his twenty-fifth year.
l. 21. lost friends. Raleigh and his squadron lost the main fleet while off the coast of Spain, before they set sail definitely for the Azores. He rejoined the fleet at the Islands. Donne's poem was probably written in the interval.
The reading of some MSS., 'lefte friends,' is quite a possible one. Carleton, writing from Venice to Chamberlain, says: 'Let me tell you, for your comfort (for I imagine what is mine is yours) that my last news from the left island ... took knowledge of my vigilancy and diligency.' The 'left island' is Great Britain, and Donne may mean no more than that 'we can neither get back to our friends nor on to our enemies.' There may be no allusion to Raleigh's ships.
l. 23. the Calenture. 'A disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it.' O.E.D. Theobald had the Calenture in mind when he conjectured that Falstaff 'babbled o' green fields'.
Page 179, l. 33. Like Bajazet encaged, &c.: an echo of Marlowe's Tamburlaine:
There whiles he lives shall Bajazet be kept;
And where I go be thus in triumph drawn: