[344] Tailor. See The Devil’s Answer to Pierce Pennylesse (Dekker’s non-dramatic works, The Huth Library, edited by the Rev. A. B. Grosart, vol. ii. p. 147), “That botcher I preferred to be Lucifer’s tailor, because he works with a hot needle and burnt thread.”
[345] John of Leyden (John Beccold), b. 1510, d. 1536, a tailor, who became a leader of the Anabaptists and at their head took extraordinary possession of the city of Munster, and ruled for a brief space as king there, before constitutional authority was restored and he was seized and put to death.
[346] The Three Destinies, to whom Fortune herself was sometimes added as a fourth. Fortunatus here seems to be addressing Fortune and her two attendant nymphs, for no stage direction is specially given for the entrance of the Three Destinies, as in [Act II. sc. ii.], q.v.
[347] See an anonymous poem in Tottel’s Miscellany, 1557, called “A praise of his Lady,” from which Dekker may have borrowed the fancy:—
“In each of her two crystal eyes
Smileth a naked boy.”
[348] Dekker is not careful even to remember here that Cyprus is an island.
[349] Compare Shakespeare’s “Crabbed Age and Youth.”
[350] A corruption of “God’s heart.”
[351] Hired witnesses.
[352] One of the usual puns on the coin of that name.