[345] Lives, Oxford, 1898, i. p. 251.

[346] ‘The Dramatic Works of John Tatham,’ 1879.  In Maidment and Logan’s Dramatists of the Restoration.

[347] Another parallel may be found in Shirley’s Maid’s Revenge, IV. iv, where the wounded Antonio exclaims: 

  Where art, Berinthia? let me breathe my last
  Upon thy lip; make haste, lest I die else.

The situation, however, is different.  Shirley’s play was licensed in 1626.

[348] In a small quarto volume, classed as Addit.  MS. 14,047.  The piece has hitherto been ascribed to George Wilde, on the authority of Halliwell.  There appears to be no reason for this ascription, beyond the fact that the same volume also contains two pieces by Wilde.  His name, however, does not occur in connexion with the present play, and the volume, which is in a variety of hands, certainly includes work not by him.  Wilde was scholar and fellow of St. John’s, chaplain to Laud, and Bishop of Londonderry after the restoration.  His plays consist of the two comedies in this volume, viz. the Latin Euphormus, sive Cupido Adultus, acted on Feb. 5, 1634/5, and the Hospital of Lovers, acted before the king and queen on Aug. 29, 1636, both at St. John’s.  He is also said to have written another Latin play, called Hermophus, though nothing is known of it beyond the record of its being acted.  It was most probably the same as Euphormus, the titles being anagrams of each other.

[349] The Dic.  Nat.  Biog. gives the date as 1635.

[350] The stage directions for these entries are interesting:  (l) ’Enter An Antique [i.e. antimasque] of Sheapheards’; (2) ‘enter the Masque’; (3) ‘the masque enters and dances, and after wardes exit.’  The terms ‘masque’ and ‘antimasque’ appear to have been used technically for the dances of the masque proper, and of its burlesque counterpart.  In this sense the words occur repeatedly in the British Museum Addit.  MS. 10,444, which contains the music only.  In the present case the masquers appear to have been distinct from the characters of the play.

[351] R. Brotanek, Die englischen Maskenspiele, 1902, p. 201.  See also the edition by R. Brotanek and W. Bang, Materialien zur Kunde des aelteren Englischen Dramas, vol. ii, 1903; and further in the Modern Language Quarterly for April, 1904, vii. p. 17.

[352] The first issue was printed ‘for the use of the Author,’ without date, but was received by Thomason on Sept. 1, 1656, which would appear to dispose of the fiction that Cox died in 1648.

[353] This letter was prefixed to the masque in the collected edition of the Poems (1645), but was written to the author without view to publication.

[354] Fifty-eight lines in decasyllabic couplets—­not eighty-three lines of blank verse, as for some inexplicable reason Masson asserts (i. p. 150).