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for searching only. 64.4 SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE
Holofernes has been quoting the opening lines of the Bucolica by Baptista Spagnuoli, commonly known as Mantuanus. This favorite of centuries was to be taught in the third form of Canterbury in 1541 (where Marlowe should later have been introduced to him), and Worcester in 154.4, the only instances known to me where the form is stated. Since Stratford is within the diocese of Worcester, and its schoolmasters had to be examined and licensed by the Bishop or his
officers, it may be that the curriculum of the cathedral school was not without its effect upon that of Stratford. Of Mantuan Drayton says,
And when that once Pueriles I had read, And newly had my Cato construed,
In my small selfe I greatly marveil'd then, Amongst all other, what strange kinde of men These Poets were; And pleased with the name, To my milde Tutor merrily I came,
(For I was then a proper goodly page,
Much like a Pigmy, scarse ten yeares of age) Clasping my slender atones about his thigh. 0 my deare master! cannot you (quoth I) Make me a Poet .. .
when shortly he began,
And first read to me honest Mantuan,
Then Virgil: Eglogue:.lo
It will be remembered, too, that Hoole says the usual seventeenth century practice was to put Mantuan in the third form of a six-form school." Mantuan is also prescribed in 1518 by Dean Colet for Paul's, is Iisted at St. Bees in 1583, and at Durham in 1593, but not allocated to a form. Elizabethan references to Mantuan are numerous," showing that he must have been used almost universally, even if the curricula do frequently omit to mention him. Gabriel Harvey in 1581" includes Mantuan as a regular grammar school author. Half a dozen English-printed editions of Mantuan are known between 1569 and 16oo, as well as a couple of editions of G.Turberville's English translation.14 Clearly Mantuan was in great demand.
One of these references has some bearing on the question of the authorship of the early Hamlet. It will be remembered that Nashe in the preface to Menaphon says of the author of this early Hamlet, "if
" a Hebei, J. W., The Works of Michael Drayton, Vol. III, pp. 226-227.
" Hook, New Discovery (166o), pp. 65, 69, 76.
19 See a collection in Furness, Love's Labor's Lost, pp. 144-!go, and another in Mustard, W. P., The Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, pp. 40 if. u See above p. 436. 's A facsimile of the edition of 1567 was published in 1937.
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