[23] Durance was the name of a sort of strong buff-coloured stuff.
[24] Old ed. “shoute.” I have not been able to discover the song (if discoverable it is) from which Gertrude is quoting; there is something similar in one of the Roxburghe Ballads (vol. ii. p. 207) entitled “Have at a venture,” but the passage is hardly quotable.
[25] It was a horse (or an ass) and an ox that Ulysses yoked together, according to the ordinary account. See Hyginus Fab. xcv., and the notes of the commentators thereon.
[26] The Scotch farthingale is mentioned in Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho, i. 1.
[27] A game in which a large inflated ball of leather was driven to and fro by a flat piece of wood attached to the arm.
[28] This affected pronunciation of the word citizens occurs frequently in Middleton’s Blurt, Master Constable.
[29] “’Tis an ordinary thing,” says Burton (Anat. of Mel., ed. 1660, p. 476), “to put a thousand oaks and an hundred oxen into a suit of apparel, to wear a whole manor on his back.” Cf. Henry VIII., i. 1, 30-35, &c.
[30] “Well parted” = of good abilities. The expression is Jonsonian. Macilente in “The Character of the Persons” prefixed to Every Man out of his Humour is described as “A man well parted, a sufficient scholar,” &c.
ACT II.
SCENE I.