[13] “Who calls, &c.”—a line from The Spanish Tragedy (Hazlitt’s Dodsley, v. 54).
[14] One who paid the reckoning for the whole company at a tavern. Cf. Jonson, Poetaster, i. 1:—“What shall I have my son ... a gull, a rook, a shot-clog, to make suppers and be laugh’d at?”
[15] A favourite spot for sturdy beggars.—“I took him begging o’ the way this morning as I came over Moorfields.”—Every Man in his Humour, iv. 4.
[16] Bettrice is not introduced elsewhere in the play. I presume she is a waiting-woman in attendance upon Gertrude, and that it is part of her duty to look after her mistress’s monkey. Formerly ladies kept monkeys for pets,—a custom to which the dramatists constantly allude.
[17] A line from a song in John Dowland’s First Book of Songs or Airs, 1597. The song begins—“Sleep, wayward thoughts, and rest you with my love.”
[18] “I have a notion,” says Nares in his Glossary, “of having seen a London licket somewhere else, but cannot recall the place.” I regret to say that I am in the same difficulty. Possibly we were both thinking of London lickpenny.—“Licket” may be another form of “tippet.”
[19] Red.
[20] Facing, trimmings.
[21] A sort of coarse cloth.
[22] Cf. Middleton, i. 65.—Dekker, in the Bachelors Banquet (1603), describing “The humour of a woman lying in child-bed,” says:—“She must have cherries, though for a pound he pay ten shillings, or green peacods at four nobles a peck.”