Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/58

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. XL JAN. i6, 1909.

and, moreover, as showing how untrust- worthy the list is, quotations appear in the book from many poets and dramatists whose names are not mentioned, although the list is stated to be complete. Shakespeare heads the list of authors, as regards the number of passages copied from a single writer ; and he is closely followed by Samuel Daniel. Lodge, Spenser, and Drayton figure largely in the book ; and Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, R. Greene, Joshua Sylvester, and the anony- mous play of ' Edward III.' are very well represented. Altogether I have been able to trace about 1,250 quotations in Boden- ham's book, from about forty authors, not including passages that were copied by Bodenham from manuscripts in the Har- leian and similar collections, some of which remained unpublished and inedited until the present century ; and hardly one in fifty of these passages is correctly quoted.

Who is " A. M." ? Everybody is agreed that these initials belong to Anthony Munday. ' Belvedere ' quotes several times from ' The Case is Altered ' : would Anthony Munday, who had control of Bodenham's quotations, go out of his way to favour the writer who had lampooned him so unmercifully in this very play ? We may conclude that he would not ; con- sequently, we are permitted to assume that when Munday admitted into ' Belvedere ' quotations from ' The Case is Altered,' that play did not exhibit him in its first scene, as it does in the quarto of 1609. This conclusion bears out what I have said previously.

The following are the passages quoted from Jonson's play, and it will be seen that three out of the four have been tampered with to make them fit in with the design of ' Belve- dere,' which limits quotations to one or two lines at most, and then only when they contain " ten syllables " to the verse. To obtain his results as we see them now, " A. M." had to treat Bodenham's quotations as Procrustes treated unwary travellers : he lengthened or shortened them to fit the beds he had provided for them.

' Of Covetousness,' &c., p. 128. Gold that makes all men false, is true itself. Should be :

O, wondrous pelf !

That which makes all men false, is triie it self Act II. sc. i. 11. 30-31, Hart.

' Of Nobilitie,' p. 67. He is not noble, but most basely bred, That ransacks tombes, and doth deface the dead.

Should be :

It may be nature fashioned this affection, Both in the child and her : but he 's ill-bred That ransacks tombs, and doth deface the dead.

II. i. 44-6.

'Of Covetousness,' &c., p. 128. The more we spare, the more we hope to gain. Should be :

The more we spare, my child, the more we gain.

II. i. 66.

' Of Covetousness,' &c., p. 128. To have gold, and to have it safe, is all.

III. ii. 28.

The last quotation is correctly given, but the others, though maltreated, are not tor- tured more than most that find a place in ' Belvedere.'

There are three other quotations from Jonson in ' Belvedere,' two being from ' Every Man in his Humour,' and the third from some work that does not seem to have come down to us. The last is also quoted in ' England's Parnassus,' and there it is signed with Jonson's name.

I conclude, then, that ' The Case is Altered ' is the oldest of Jonson's published plays, and that the scene in which Anthony Munday is ridiculed was altered after 1600,, or subsequent to the compilation of Boden- ham's ' Belvedere.'

CHARLES CRAWFORD.

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WOMAN SURGEON.

I SUBJOIN a copy of an original document which may prove of interest to your readers. Apart from the quaintness of its language, the value of the letter lies in the two points ; which are raised in it, and which certainly demand explanation.

From the articles on ' Medicine ' ~- and ' Public Health ' in ' Social England ' (vol. iv.,. pp. 630 -46 and 805), it will be gathered that though the theory of medicine in the seven- teenth century was by no means in so back- ward a condition as is usually supposed, the practice of it, as regards the poorer classes,, was exceedingly circumscribed. " Specialists " at this period there undoubtedly were men who demanded a large fee in return for their connexion with the Royal College of Physicians. But general practitioners were scarcely to be found till the end of the eighteenth century, when they were pro- bably the outcome of that philanthropic wave which marks the social history of that period.

It is true that in the seventeenth century " hospitals " were indeed in existence ;-