SCENE III.[398

_The palace of the Duke of Genoa._

_Enter_ MALEVOLE _and_ PASSARELLO.

_Mal._ Fool, most happily encountered: canst sing, fool?

_Pass._ Yes, I can sing, fool, if you'll bear the burden; and I can play upon instruments, scurvily, as gentlemen do. O, that I had been gelded! I should then have been a fat fool for a chamber, a squeaking fool for a tavern, and a private fool for all the ladies.

_Mal._ You are in good case since you came to court, fool: what, guarded, guarded![399] 9

_Pass._ Yes, faith, even as footmen and bawds wear velvet, not for an ornament of honour, but for a badge of drudgery; for, now the duke is discontented, I am fain to fool him asleep every night.

_Mal._ What are his griefs?

_Pass._ He hath sore eyes.

_Mal._ I never observed so much.

_Pass._ Horrible sore eyes; and so hath every cuckold, for the roots of the horns spring in the eyeballs, and that's the reason the horn of a cuckold is as tender as his eye, or as that growing in the woman's forehead twelve years since,[400] that could not endure to be touched. The duke hangs down his head like a columbine. 22

_Mal._ Passarello, why do great men beg fools?[401]

_Pass._ As the Welshman stole rushes when there was nothing else to filch; only to keep begging in fashion.

_Mal._ Pooh, thou givest no good reason; thou speakest like a fool.

_Pass._ Faith, I utter small fragments, as your knight courts your city widow with jingling[402] of his gilt spurs, advancing his bush-coloured beard,[403] and taking tobacco: this is all the mirror of their knightly complements.[404] Nay, I shall talk when my tongue is a-going once; 'tis like a citizen on horseback, evermore in a false gallop. 33

_Mal._ And how doth Maquerelle fare nowadays?

_Pass._ Faith, I was wont to salute her as our English women are at their first landing in Flushing;[405] I would call her whore: but now that antiquity leaves her as an old piece of plastic[406] to work by, I only ask her how her rotten teeth fare every morning, and so leave her. She was the first that ever invented perfumed smocks for the gentlewomen, and woollen shoes, for fear of creaking for the visitant. She were an excellent lady, but that her face peeleth like Muscovy glass.[407] 43

_Mal._ And how doth thy old lord, that hath wit enough to be a flatterer, and conscience enough to be a knave?

_Pass._ O, excellent: he keeps beside me fifteen jesters, to instruct him in the art of fooling, and utters their jests in private to the duke and duchess: he'll lie like to your Switzer or lawyer; he'll be of any side for most money. 50

_Mal._ I am in haste, be brief.

_Pass._ As your fiddler when he is paid.--He'll thrive, I warrant you, while your young courtier stands like Good-Friday in Lent; men long to see it, because more fatting days come after it; else he's the leanest and pitifullest actor in the whole pageant. Adieu, Malevole.

_Mal._ [_Aside._] O world most vile, when thy loose vanities, Taught by this fool, do make the fool seem wise!

_Pass._ You'll know me again, Malevole.

_Mal._ O, ay, by that velvet. 60

_Pass._ Ay, as a pettifogger by his buckram bag. I am as common in the court as an hostess's lips in the country; knights, and clowns, and knaves, and all share me: the court cannot possibly be without me. Adieu, Malevole.

[_Exeunt._

[398] This scene was added in ed. 2.

[399] Ornamented with _guards_ or facings.--The coats of fools were commonly guarded.

[400] "The woman with the horn in her forehead was probably Margaret Griffith, wife of David Owen, of Llan Gaduain, in Montgomery. A portrait of her is in existence, prefixed to a scarce pamphlet, entitled, '_A miraculous and monstrous, but yet most true and certayne Discourse of a Woman, now to be seen in London, of the age of threescore yeares or thereabouts, in the midst of whose forehead there groweth out a crooked Horne of four ynches long. Imprinted at London, by Thomas Orwin, and are to be sold by Edward White, dwelling at the little north dore of Paules Church, at the signe of the Gun_, 1588.'"--_Gilchrist._

[401] _To beg a person for a fool_ was to apply to be made guardian of a person who had been legally proved to be an idiot. It was in the king's power to grant the custody of an idiot's person and the profits of his estate to any subject.

[402] Gallants prided themselves on wearing spurs that jingled. Middleton, after elaborately describing a young prodigal's attire, adds:--"Lastly, he walked the chamber with such a pestilent jingle that his spurs over-squeaked the lawyer" (_Works_, viii. 71). So Chapman in _Monsieur D'Olive_:--"You may hear them (the gallants) half a mile ere they come at you--six or seven make a perfect morice-dance; they need no bells, their spurs serve their turn."

[403] This is the reading of Dyce's copy of ed. 2. Other copies read:-- "Faith, I utter small fragments as your knight courtes your Citty widow _with something of his guilt: some aduancing his high-colored beard_," &c.

[404] Accomplishments.

[405] "At this time Flushing was in the hands of the English as part of the security for money advanced by Queen Elizabeth to the Dutch. The governor and garrison were all Englishmen."--_Reed._

[406] Model in wax or clay.

[407] Talc.--Reed quotes from Giles Fletcher's _Russe Commonwealth_, 1591, p. 10:--"In the province of Corelia, and about the river Duyna towards the North-sea, there groweth a soft rock which they call Slude. This they cut into pieces, and so tear it into thin _flakes, which naturally it is apt for_, and so use it for glasse lanthorns and such like. It giveth both inwards and outwards a clearer light then glasse, and for this respect is better than either glasse or horne; for that it neither breaketh like glasse, nor yet will burne like the lanthorne."