[325] Branded.
[326] Disdain.
[327] Finely dressed.
[328] Fools.
[329] This Prologue and the Epilogue are specially devised for the performance of the play before the queen, hence “At Court.”
[330] i.e. Queen Elizabeth, at this time in her sixty-eighth year.
Pandora is the only one of these poetic terms for Elizabeth peculiar to Dekker. The rest of them are used by others of the Elizabethan poets. He evidently here conceives Pandora on the side of her good fortune only, as receiving the gifts of the gods, and not in her more familiar association with the story of Pandora’s Box and its evils.
[331] Probably a church in Famagosta, which tradition makes Fortunatus’s native place, and which was at one time the chief port and fortress in Cyprus.
[332] “A gardener” in the original, which does not tally with the description given by Fortune on p. [300]. q.v.
[333] “A smith” in the original, which is again a confusion with the description in the text.