[317] I must repeat that I see no advantage to be gained from the method adopted by Homer Smith, who tries to extract and separate the strictly pastoral elements from the medley.  A play is not a child’s puzzle that can be taken to pieces and labelled, nor even a chemical compound to be analysed into its component parts.  What is of interest is to note the various influences which have affected and modified the growth of the literary organism.

[318] Though the author may very likely have known Spenser’s description of the house of Morpheus (Faery Queen, I. i. 348, &c.), he certainly drew his own account straight from Ovid (Metam. xi. 592, &c.), to which, of course, Spenser was also indebted.  I am rather inclined to think the author drew his material from Golding’s translation (xi. 687, &c.).  With the second passage quoted, cf. Faery Queen, II. xii. 636, &c.

[319] ‘Trip and go’ was a proverbial expression, and is found, with its obvious rime ‘to and fro,’ in several old dance-songs.

[320] The only composition I can recall which at all anticipates the peculiar effect of this lyric is Thestylis’ song in the Arraignment of Paris (III. ii.), to which, in the old edition, is appended the quaint note, ‘The grace of this song is in the Shepherds’ echo to her verse.’

[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?