[40] Roarer was the common cant word for the swaggering drunkard of our poet's age. Its occurrence is sufficiently common. So in Dekker's play, "If it be not a Good Play, the Devil's in it"—
"Those bloody thoughts will damn you into hell.
Sou. Do you think so? What becomes of our roaring boys then, that stab healths one to another?"
[41] [A play may be intended on rob and Robert.]
[42] This seems a cant expression, as Brewen several times uses it.
[43] [Old copy and Dilke, long enclosed.]
[44] [In the old copy and Dilke this speech is printed as prose. The old copy reads that's—can hardly.]
[45] Our poet here evidently alludes to a passage in the First Epistle to St John, chap. iii. ver. 10.
[46] i.e., Idle tales.
[47] It appears to have been the custom for the sheriff to have a post set up at his door as an indication of his office. So in the "Twelfth Night" of Shakespeare, Malvolio says of Cesario, "He'll stand at your door like a sheriff's post." See notes on act i. sc. 5, where the passage in the text has been quoted by Steevens.