About 1501 Thomas Warley, Clerk of the King's Works to Henry VII, recorded in Latin the payments for preparations at St. Paul's Cathedral in connection with the marriage of the King's eldest son Arthur, along with payments for work at the Tower of London, Westminster Palace, Greenwich, and Eltham (British Museum, Egerton MS. 2358, Henry VII:15). With amounts for John Moore, Richard Codeman (or Codinham), Robert Bellamy, and Nicholas Delphyn, he listed those for a sculptor named John Hudde, who had carved two lions and a great rose surmounted by an imperial crown over the north door in Westminster Hall, and the dragon, lion, and leopards of a royal cipher in the Great Hall of the Tower of London, the latter afterwards painted and gilded by Robert Duke.

Everie Woman in her Humor has received very little critical attention since J. Quincy Adams' study of the play in its relation to The Dumb Knight in 1913. There he stated:

When Sir John Harington visited court in 1601, some time after the aborted putsch of the Earl of Essex, he found the Queen still terribly disturbed. She ate little, dressed carelessly, and frowned on all the ladies. Harington wrote to his friend Sir John Portman, ‘I must not say much, even by this trustie and sure messenger; but the many evil plots and designs have overcome all her Highness’ sweet temper. She walks much in her privy chamber, and stamps with her feet at ill news, and thrusts her rusty sword at times into the arras in great rage…. the dangers are over, and yet she always keeps a sword by her table.

Six years ago in this journal, John Cutts published a very amusing tale from Uranus and Psyche (British Museum Ad. MS. 40145, foll. 140r-141v) that involved a kind of doubling of the standard ‘bed-trick,’ in which not only did the wife, in the usual manner, secretly take the place of the woman with whom her husband had an assignation, but the husband also secretly yielded his place to a friend, and so unwittingly arranged his own cuckolding. Mr. Cutts merely intended to present an interesting development of the theme that Shakespeare had used in All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, but I think in doing this he has uncovered for us the source of the main plot of James Shirley's comedy, The Gamester.

Near the end of the bacchanalian revels aboard Pompey's galley in Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii), Shakespeare introduces the only song in his play. As Enobarbus places Antony, Pompey, and Caesar hand in hand—presumably to dance as well as to join in the refrain—a boy comes forward to sing:

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy fats our cares be drown'd,
With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd.

I have noted some errors or ambiguities in authoritative works on Magellan.

1. (1) J. A. Robertson's edition and translation of Pigafetta (Cleveland, 1906) has Captain Barbosa ‘threatening the slave that if he did go ashore, he would be flogged’ (1, 179). But Pigafetta wrote ‘se non andava in terra,’ ‘if he did not go ashore.’ The slave (Enrique de Malacca) was wanted ashore as interpreter. The error is repeated in the reprint of Robertson's text in Charles E. Nowell, Magellan's Voyage Around the World (Evanston, 1962).

2. (2) Nowell omits (p. 104) a sentence of Robertson's translation concerning the Patagonian giant: ‘He had a bow and arrows in his hand.’ He also obscures Pigafetta's text by turning Robertson's parentheses into brackets, and thus excluding three phrases. These should now read: ‘(but not of cedar),’ Nowell, page 119; ‘(with the pardon of cosmographers, for they have not seen it),’ Nowell, page 128; ‘(the king's men),’ Nowell, page 138.

Deh le mie belle donne & amorose,
Datemi il uer per uostra cortesia,
Non è chiara tra uoi la donna mia,
Come è '1 Sol chiar tra tutte 1' altre cose?
5 Mirate il uolto, & uedrete le rose,
In bianca neue rider tutta uia:
Et per le perle e i rubini aprir la uia,
A i bei pensier, che in lei bontate pose.

Modern biographers of Thomas Lodge have presented a remarkably clear record of his activities, both as writer and physician. However, the period of Lodge's second exile still remains obscure. Although Lodge's biographers agree that because of his Catholicism he fled to the continent during the first decade of the seventeenth century, none has been able accurately to record these years abroad. For example, Lodge's recent scholarly biographer, Charles Sisson, says that this second exile may have begun as early as May 8, 1604. But this statement is inaccurate, for on January 9, 1605/06 Lodge was indicted in London for recusancy, along with Ben Jonson and Edmund Boulton. Professor Sisson also argues that ‘Lodge was allowed to return [to England] early in 1611, as appears from an Act of the Privy Council of 28 January 1611, protecting him from indictment for recusancy, and from the letter dated 17 January 1611 in which he expressed his thanks to Sir Thomas Edmondes for help in bringing about his repatriation.’ But Lodge had returned to London as early as September 21, 1609 as will appear below.

A curious and perhaps unique use in English of the word. sixain may be observed in a book published in 1561, fourteen years before the earliest citation of the word in the OED. Among the preliminaries (sig. A4r-v) of an English translation from Henry Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalips (STC 4061) is found a poem of twenty-six four-line stanzas with the heading ‘A Sixain touching the contentes of thys booke.’ As a sample I quote the first two of these stanzas and the last:

Who list to moue his lippes,
and hereon loke and rede:
In thys Apocalyppes,
these thynge shall fynde in dede.

Two small nuggets of information have come to light which would not seem important in themselves did not their implications touch on matters of more general interest concerning music and literature in the Renaissance. At any rate, it seemed to me that they deserve more than a footnote. Both are connected one way or another with Sidney and with Robert Dowland's anthology of English and continental lute-songs, A Musicall Banquet (1610).

One of the composers represented in A Musicall Banquet, along with John Dowland and Giulio Caccini, is Daniell Batchelar. Batchelar's contribution is a setting of a poem by the Earl of Essex, ‘To plead my faith’ (No. VI).

In his recent translation of the letters of Michelangelo, E. H. Ramsden devotes some space to a discussion of three letters to Luigi del Riccio, the artist's friend and banker at Rome, letters primarily concerned with the setting to music, evidently by Jacques Arcadelt, of one of his poems. The first letter (no. 215: II, 16-17) is somewhat enigmatic in its wording, but the evident meaning is that Del Riccio is to find someone to compose a musical setting of an enclosed poem. The second and third letters (nos. 216 and 217: II, 17-18) indicate that Del Riccio gave this commission to Arcadelt and that the resultant madrigal was sufficiently pleasing to Michelangelo and to others within Michelangelo's artistic circle to move him to reward the composer with a gift of money or of satin or silks. None of the three letters is dated, but Ramsden, on the basis of internal evidence, suggests May or June 1542 for all three.

There are two important manuscript copies of poems of John Donne resting in public places that so far have apparently gone undetected by Donne scholars. Neither makes any major difference in the text of the poems in question, but each throws a further light on the editorial choices of the man to whom all Donne scholars owe a major debt, Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson, and one gives valuable evidence on the reading of the elisions which plague readers of Donne poems.

The Bentivoglio became the dominant family in Bologna in the fifteenth century, remaining in power until 1506, when Pope Julius II, backed by an army and spiritual sanctions, induced Giovanni II Bentivoglio to flee with his family into exile. Interestingly enough, the Kress Collection in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., possesses magnificent portraits of this Giovanni, and of his wife Ginevra Sforza, painted by Ercole de'Roberti of Ferrara. The Bentivoglio family and its connections, however, is generally neglected by historians of ‘The Italian Renaissance,’ in large measure because Bologna itself is ignored. Yet almost thirty years ago a scholarly study by Cecilia M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna: a study in despotism sought to redress this, providing adequate evidence of the importance of the family for the understanding of Italian politics in the Renaissance period.