40 grace favour

41 Have done Enough

45 Islington whitepot a fattening dish made of milk, eggs, and sugar, and shaped like a hopper (the vat in which hops were infused); hence ‘hopperarse’ hopperarse big bum (see 10.31) 45-6 barley pudding a kind of sausage

46 broiled carbonado meat or fish, scored and grilled

47 avoid, Mephistophilus! A catchphrase popularized by Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (though it never appears in the play itself).

48 Mother Miniver-Cap Margery’s fashionable cap is evidently trimmed with miniver, i.e. ermine.

49 partlets collars

49-50 pishery-pashery gaudy clothes See 1.123-4 and 158, where Eyre uses the term as a synonym for ‘fuss’; here, as at 11.39-40, he means more specifically Margery’s fashionable attire.

50 flews flaps (of Margery’s French hood) whirligigs toys, specifically spinning tops; perhaps a reference to Margery’s hooped skirt.

50-1 rub, out of mine alley an expression from bowls; the rub is an obstruction caused by an uneven playing surface (see Hamlet’s ‘ay, there’s the rub’), and the alley is where the game is played.

51 Sultan Soliman Suleiman I the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1520-66; known to Dekker’s audiences as a stage tyrant, dramatized in Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda (c. 1590).

52 Tamburlaine an Asian conqueror (Timur or Tamerlane, 1336-1405); again known to Dekker’s audiences as a stage tyrant, dramatized in Christopher Marlowe’s play of the same name (1587).

54 frolic jolly freebooters pirates, with a pun on ‘bootmakers’ and ‘freemen’ (i.e. free of a guild)

1 fact deed, course of action

15 Diocletian a fourth-century Roman Emperor, notorious for persecuting Christians - hence a comically inappropriate nickname for the King. The first part of Deloney’s Gentle Craft takes place under Diocletian’s reign; Crispianus, the prince disguised as a shoemaker, marries his daughter. hump! Here, and at line 26, an exuberant exclamation - perhaps a call to raise glasses.

17 pie magpie

19 younker mere youth

22 Tamar Cham ruler of China, sometimes identified with Tamburlaine (known also as Timur Khan, i.e. Lord Timur); familiar to Dekker’s audiences from a now lost play acted in 1596 in which he evidently sported a luxuriant beard, as suggested also by Benedick’s offer in Much Ado About Nothing to fetch ‘a hair off the great Cham’s beard’ (2.1.233-4).

28 danced . . . sheets See note to 16.78-9.

29 get beget

33 Apollo a symbol of youthful male beauty

40 spend give up (i.e. ‘over my dead body¹)

41 traitor, Lincoln? (Q3; traytor? Lincolne, Q1)

45 degenerous degenerate

46 Desertless undeserved

54 want lack

67 India’s ed. (Indians Q1)

75 offend offend against

88 bride spouse; ‘bride’ was used of both sexes at this time.

130 Leadenhall a familiar landmark in Dekker’s London; Deloney and John Stow both credit the historical Simon Eyre with founding it.

142 Sometimes formerly

148 ALL. . . Majesty (Q3; All. God saue your maiesty all shoomaker, Q1)

157 patent letters patent, i.e. royal licence

171-84 These lines are an unconventional mixture of prose and poetry. They may be, as Parr suggests, a sign of incomplete revision in Dekker’s manuscript; nevertheless, the sudden transitions into verse at lines 174 and 183 lend an unusual music to Eyre’s memories, as well as underlining his fairytale-like upward social mobility.