Footnote 131:  In fact, Heywood “cribbed” from Chaucer’s Tales in another Interlude called “The Pardoner and the Frere.”

Footnote 132:  Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, I, 86.

Footnote 133:  That these gallants were an unmitigated nuisance, and had frequently to be silenced by the common people who came to enjoy the play, seems certain.  Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook (1609) has an interesting chapter on “How a Gallant should behave Himself in a Playhouse.”

Footnote 134:  The first actors were classed with thieves and vagabonds; but they speedily raised their profession to an art and won a reputation which extended far abroad.  Thus a contemporary, Fynes Moryson, writes in his Itinerary: “So I remember that when some of our cast despised stage players came ... into Germany and played at Franckford ... having nether a complete number of actors, nor any good aparell, nor any ornament of the stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a worde they sayde, both men and wemen, flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and action.”

Footnote 135:  Schelling, Elizabethan Drama.

Footnote 136:  Baker, in his Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist, pp. 57-62, takes a different view, and shows how carefully many of the boy actors were trained.  It would require, however, a vigorous use of the imagination to be satisfied with a boy’s presentation of Portia, Juliet, Cordelia, Rosalind, or any other of Shakespeare’s wonderful women.

Footnote 137:  These choir masters had royal permits to take boys of good voice, wherever found, and train them as singers and actors.  The boys were taken from their parents and were often half starved and most brutally treated.  The abuse of this unnatural privilege led to the final withdrawal of all such permits.

Footnote 138:  So called from Euphues, the hero of Lyly’s two prose works, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579), and Euphues and his England (1580).  The style is affected and over-elegant, abounds in odd conceits, and uses hopelessly involved sentences.  It is found in nearly all Elizabethan prose writers, and partially accounts for their general tendency to artificiality.  Shakespeare satirizes euphuism in the character of Don Adriano of Love’s Labour’s Lost, but is himself tiresomely euphuistic at times, especially in his early or “Lylian” comedies.  Lyly, by the way, did not invent the style, but did more than any other to diffuse it.

Footnote 139:  See Schelling, I, 211.

Footnote 140:  See p. 114.

Footnote 141:  In 1587 the first history of Johann Faust, a half-legendary German necromancer, appeared in Frankfort.  Where Marlowe found the story is unknown; but he used it, as Goethe did two centuries later, for the basis of his great tragedy.

Footnote 142:  We must remember, however, that our present version of Faustus is very much mutilated, and does not preserve the play as Marlowe wrote it.