[267] The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897. That held by the vendor is in the Guildhall Library.
[268] Shakespeare’s references to puritans in the plays of his middle and late life are so uniformly discourteous that they must be judged to reflect his personal feeling. The discussion between Maria and Sir Andrew Aguecheek regarding Malvolio’s character in Twelfth Night (II. iii. 153 et seq.) runs:
Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.
Sir Andrew. O! if I thought that, I’d beat him like a dog.
Sir Toby. What, for being a puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight.
Sir Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for ‘t, but I have reason good enough.
In Winter’s Tale (IV. iii. 46) the Clown, after making contemptuous references to the character of the shearers, remarks that there is ‘but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.’ Cf. the allusions to ‘grace’ and ‘election’ in Cymbeline, p. 250, note 1.
[269a] The town council of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost overlooked Shakespeare’s residence of New Place, gave curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama on February 7, 1612, when they passed a resolution that plays were unlawful and ‘the sufferance of them against the orders heretofore made and against the example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,’ and the council was therefore ‘content,’ the resolution ran, that ‘the penalty of xs. imposed [on players heretofore] be xli. henceforward.’ Ten years later the King’s players were bribed by the council to leave the city without playing. (See the present writer’s Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.)
[269b] The lines as quoted by Aubrey (Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 226) run:
Ten-in-the-hundred the Devil allows,
But Combe will have twelve he sweares and he vowes;
If any man ask, who lies in this tomb?
Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, ’tis my John-a-Combe.
Rowe’s version opens somewhat differently:
Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav’d.
’Tis a hundred to ten, his soul is not sav’d.
The lines, in one form or another, seem to have been widely familiar in Shakespeare’s lifetime, but were not ascribed to him. The first two in Rowe’s version were printed in the epigrams by H[enry] P[arrot], 1608, and again in Camden’s Remaines, 1614. The whole first appeared in Richard Brathwaite’s Remains in 1618 under the heading: ‘Upon one John Combe of Stratford upon Aven, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had Caused to be built in his Life Time.’