The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (70 page)

307
. Inhabitants of a city in S. Italy, proverbial for luxury.

308
. Shining.

309
. i.e. the spheres.

310
. Meaning unknown.

311
. A capriol, a jump which horses could be trained to perform.

312
. Dances the lavolta.

313
. Gilded, golden.

314
. Landgrave, a German count or prince.

315
. Alchemical.

316
. Barked.

317
. Somersaulted.

318
. Made a series of somersaults.

319
. The last man.

320
. Harrow; a cry of denunciation.

321
. Popular verse-romance, early fourteenth century.

322
. Kastriota, fifteenth-century Albanian patriot (derived from ‘lskander-Bey', the Turkish name for him).

323
. Tender.

324
. Skilled.

325
. Blacken.

326
. Impute the dirtiness of the collier's trade, commonly reckoned to involve much cheating.

327
. (?) Silent.

328
. A courtesan.

329
. Alchemy.

330
. Goes his rounas.

331
. Wallets, satchels.

332
. Libyan giant, defeated by Hercules.

333
. Sneezes.

334
. ‘There is no redemption from the inferno.'

335
. Puzzle, riddle.

336
. Quibble.

337
. Turbaned blockheads.

338
. Bowls, drinking-cups.

339
. Tyrant of Syracuse,
361
–
289
.
B.C.

340
. Tyrant of Syracuse, fourth century
B.C.
, notorious for plundering shrines.

341
. Joseph Justice Scaliger (
1540
–
1609
), or Julius Caesar Scaliger (
1484
–
1558
), both brilliant scholars.

342
. Marrowbones, knees.

343
. Hay-rakes.

344
. Solemnly.

345
. With a vengeance.

346
. Angrily.

347
.
Demy or mandillion
: Sleeveless coat.

348
. Stomach.

349
. Whom, according to Hackluyt, the Persians regarded as Mahomet's true successor.

350
. Oppose, controvert.

351
. Foolish.

352
. ‘From the egg'.

353
. Parish register.

354
. Raphael Holinshead, author of
Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland
(
1577
, enlarged
1586
).

355
. Marlowe's
Hero and Leander
, the chief source of which was the poem by Musaeus, a fifth-century Alexandrian.

356
. Where booksellers had their stalls.

357
. Pigsney, term of endearment.

358
. Dabchick, a bird supposed to hide under water.

359
.
Ducking water spaniel
: ‘Used in falconry to put up water birds' (M.).

360
. Dusk.

361
. Jerk.

362
. Spacious, roomy.

363
. Hag, beldame.

364
. Deliberately.

365
. Harlots (Cytherea = Venus, Venus' nun = prostitute).

366
. Without let or hindrance.

367
. Dealing in petty commerce.

368
. Bad-tempered.

369
. Warrant certifying that goods have passed through the customs.

370
. (Permission) to cross.

371
. Release from life (literally ‘he is quit').

372
. Leaping (as on horseback).

373
. Pun on leman, lover.

374
. Children's game played with pebbles.

375
. Queen of Nineveh after Ninus' death.

376
. Containing hair-lotion.

377
. Plasters (as for healing a wound).

378
. Though in fact this later part of
Hero and Leander
was written by Chapman.

379
.
bread and crow
. Meaning unknown.

380
. Depressed.

381
. Fast-moving chariot.

382
. Called.

383
. In
The Voyage of Sir John Mandeville
(c.
1360
), a compilation of travel stories sometimes attributed to Jean d'Outremeuse.

384
. Pregnant.

385
. Swollen.

386
. A reference to a Spanish romance by Luis Hurtado.

387
. M. quotes Stow on a sailors' tavern: ‘Amongst others, she, Mother Mumpudding (as they termed her), for many years kept this house.'

388
. The supernal gods.

389
. The daughter of Humber, drowned in the Severn. Humber himself was drowned in the river named after him.

390
.
to cast and scour
: To make them vomit

391
. Chose.

392
. Those armed with short lances.

393
. Trudge.

394
. ‘The seas terrify us and the sad aspect of the deep' (Ovid).

395
. Here meaning allies, backers.

396
. Jack o' both sides (M.).

397
. Vice character in the play
Cambyses
.

398
. Merman.

399
. Draw up.

400
. Meaning unknown.

401
. M. suggests this means ‘In the abstract', Laertes having little property to bequeath Ulysses.

402
. Bring low.

403
.
journey or canvazado
: Day's fighting or sudden attack.

404
. Petrus Alfunsi (
1062
–
1110
) whose tales,
Disciplina Clericalis
, were sometimes printed with Aesop's Fables.

405
. Poggio, another writer of fables.

406
. Over
10
,
000
.

407
. Infancy.

408
.
poldavies entiltments
: Awnings, coverings of coarse linen.

409
. Very small (literally the size of a page in a book, one-sixteenth the normal size).

410
. High place.

411
. Lowestoft.

412
. ‘Tattered' in
1599
edition, (‘tattered' in Harleian Miscellany,
1745
).

413
. Unloaded.

414
.
papal chair
…
fasted
: Vigilius was Pope,
537
–
555
. M. points out that vigils wore instituted earlier than this, and calls Nashe's observation ‘a piece of popular etymology'.

415
. Lance-knights, mercenary foot-soldiers.

416
. Store.

417
. Rubbed, treated.

418
. Turquoise.

419
. Meaning unknown.

420
. Copper alloy used asleaf-gold.

421
. Lecherous.

422
. Knife used for cutting purses.

423
. Immediately.

424
. Hesitated to come to an agreeement, ‘dithered'.

425
. Mulligrubs, a fit of depression.

426
. Suffice.

427
. (?) Gut, disembowel.

428
. Literally a stupid greasy shoemaker.

429
. Faeces.

430
. Inhaled.

431
. Choked.

432
. M. suggests a reference to some lost ballad.

433
. A thrust in fencing.

434
. ‘That part of the play where the plot thickens' (NED).

435
. Perhaps a reference to a ballad (M.). Swart-rutters were bands of irregular troopers in the Low Countries.

436
. Phocae are Neptune's team of sea-calves. M. points out that it was a bull that frightened Hippolytus' horses.

437
. It was Helios, the sun-god, who sent the furies, as punishment for choosing blindness rather than death.

438
. ‘As if in the circus or arena'.

439
. Privy.

440
. Treacherously.

441
. Equivocations, circumlocutions.

442
. Small ring.

443
. ‘Fools sing to the deaf; evil brothers bewitch a dea man.'

444
. Perhaps a reference to a popular song with the lin ‘Friar how fares thy bandelow, bandelow'; perhaps idenified with ‘Friar Sandelo',
Faustus
, III,
2
.

445
. Correctly a sequence of thirty Requiem masses.

446
. ‘The limbo, where our fathers have gone before'.

447
. ‘Unanimously'.

448
. Heads.

449
. Useless.

450
. Misers.

451
. Bagshaw is Bagshot in Surey, much pestered by highwaymen, ‘baw waw' (or ‘bow wow') being commonly associated with references to it in Elizabethan plays (F.P.W.).

452
. Lags, dawdles (NED).

453
.
the bubbling of Moorditch
: Meaning unknown.

454
. Perhaps a reference to a writer called Durden who called himself Elias (F.P.W.).

455
. A reference to the several pretenders who claimed to be Don Sebastian after his death in
1578
.

456
. Payment for the gullible.

457
. Heraldry.

458
. Retreated, beaten.

459
.
mingle-mangle cum purre
: Said to be a call to pigs to come to the trough.

460
. Like, approve of.

461
. Pancras, a district of unsavoury reputaton.

462
. Pagans, heathens.

463
. Strained, overstretched.

464
. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert (
1470
–
1538
); a judge with many legal works attributed to him.

465
. Dr Lopez, accused of a plot against the Queen's life and tried in
1594
.

466
. Playing the lawyer, arguing.

467
. Blockheads.

468
. Part of a herring.

469
. Perfumed with incense.

470
. Published
c
.
1535
, (Erra Pater unidentified, probably fictitious).

471
. ‘Swollen' Antimachus; a verbose hellenistic love-elegist.

472
. Spanish governor.

473
. A velvety kind of taffeta, arranged in tufts.

474
. Massed sacrificial offerings.

475
. One of the Erinyes, goddesses of vengeance sometimes represente as like the Gorgons, whose looks turned the beholder to stone.

476
. The laurel.

477
. Ensnare.

478
.
This speech
…
audience
: This passage ‘seems to have no meaning whatever' (M.).

479
. Callisto, turned into a bear and placed in the sky as Arctos.

480
.
privy
…
Pierides
: Private pipe of the Muses.

481
. Cow-turd.

482
. Ephesian poet of second century
A.D.

483
. Wrinkled.

484
. ‘Let the king run, long live the law'; usually the other way round (
vivat rex
, etc)

485
. Rhadamanthus, one of the three judges of the dead.

486
. ‘It is understood'.

487
. Presumably ‘auspicious'.

488
. Tormenting.

489
. Look-out man on the Argo, proverbially sharp-eyed.

490
. The groat was a fourpenny-piece.

491
. The angel was worth fify pence in Edward VI's time.

492
. Seriously.

493
. Play by Ben Jonson
c
.
1598
.

494
.
Philippe Venus
, published
1591
; author given as Jo. M.

495
. ‘Can it have originated in a jesting allusion to the story of St Bernard riding all day by the Lake of Lausanne, so absorbed in meditation that he did notsee it?' (M.).

496
. Magic horse given by Charlemagne to Renaud.

497
. A dance or tune.

498
. Decry, disparage.

499
. ‘It is proved'.

500
. ‘From the moon to the sun'.

501
. (?) Head.

502
. ‘He himself.'

503
. Fancy dishes in cookery.

504
. Kegs holding
720
herrings.

505
. Rebel leader in
1381
.

506
. M. suggests meaning ‘cash down', the Greeks being hardheaded businessmen.

507
. ‘It seems to allude to the dressing of herrings with the tail in the mouth — as fried whiting are served at present'(M.).

508
. ‘Let forth or utter as in driblets' (NED).

509
. Have an argument (pick a bone).

510
. Putrid, contemptible.

511
. Rancid.

512
. Rank, of a bad smell.

513
. Namely, to wit

514
. As horses go, seeing they are horses.

515
. Hans van den Veken, a Dutch merchant with a share in the ship seized by the ‘pirate', Gilbert Lee, in
1588
(F.P.W.).

516
. i.e., the great antiquarians had neglected the red herring.