321. Fleay gives the date 1601, following Halliwell, but Haslewood has 1603.
322. According to Fleay, it 'was intended to be presented to James I on 13th Mar. 1614.' This date must be a slip, since it was not till 1615 that the king was at Cambridge. It is, moreover, correctly given in his History of the Stage. The preparations also appear to have been for the eleventh, not the thirteenth. Fleay further mentions a performance at King's before Charles I, but gives no authority.
323. An exception must be made of Ward, whose remarks are almost excessively laudatory, though his treatment of the piece is necessarily slight.
324. The incidents occur, however, in Book II of Browne's work (Songs 4 and 5), which was not printed till 1616. Either, therefore, Fletcher had seen Browne's poem in manuscript, or else the play, as originally performed, differed from the printed version. I think it unlikely that the borrowing should have been the other way.
325. Fleay confuses the two performances, and, by placing Goffe's death in 1627, is forced to suppose that the 'praeludium' was added by another hand. It may be noticed that, if this introduction is by Goffe, Salisbury Court was probably opened in the spring, a point otherwise unsettled.
326. The resemblance with the Sad Shepherd, I. i, is almost too close to be fortuitous. It is, on the other hand, not easily accounted for. The whole passage quoted above is somewhat markedly superior to the general level of the verse in the play, not merely the two or three lines in which a distinct resemblance to Jonson can be traced. Is it possible that both Goffe and Jonson were following, the one slavishly, the other with more imagination, one common original, now unknown? Or can it be that Goffe is here reproducing a passage from an early unpublished work of Jonson's own, a passage which Jonson later refashioned into the singularly perfect speech of Aeglamour?
327. Homer Smith, in making these assertions, overlooks historical evidence. It is, however, only fair to Goffe to say that other critics apparently take a very much more favourable view of the merits of the piece than I am able to do.
328. Hardly in those of the prologue to Hymen's Triumph, as suggested by Homer Smith.
329. W. C. Hazlitt (Manual of Plays, p. 25) records: 'Bellessa, the Shepherd's Queen: The scene, Galicia. An unpublished and incomplete drama in prose and verse. Fol.' In the absence of further evidence I conclude that this is an imperfect MS. of Montagu's piece.
330. The designs for the scene, by Inigo Jones, are preserved in the British Museum, MS. Lansd. 1,171, fols. 15-16. Fols. 5-6 of the same MS. contain the ground-plans 'for a pasterall in the hall at whitthall w'ch was ackted by the ffrench on St Thomas day the 23th of decemb'r 1635,' which may refer to the same piece.