Pro. 16. In a long motley coat. The customary costume of the stage fool.
Pro. 19. As fool and fight is. Dr. Johnson and later critics have regarded this gratuitous attack upon the stage fool and the stage battle as decisive evidence of the non-Shakespearean authorship of the Prologue, because both fools and fights are very often used by Shakespeare. It is possible that the lines, 14–16, may be an attack upon Samuel Rowley's When you see me you know me. (See Appendix B.)
Pro. 22. Will leave us. Awkward construction. The whole line, 21, is in apposition with opinion. The passage, 17–22, may then be paraphrased: gentle hearers, you must understand that to rank our play with a foolish comedy is, besides forfeiting our intelligence and our reputation for presenting historical truth, to lose us our friends.
Pro. 25, 26. think ye see. see—story are bad rimes. Theobald emends think before ye—story; Heath, think ye see—history. Actually, these rimes indicate merely that the Prologue was written hastily, not that there was an error in the printing.
I. i. S. d. London. An Antechamber in the Palace. The Folio, here as elsewhere, omits any indication of place. Unlike our modern stage with its elaborate sets of scenery, the Shakespearean stage was comparatively bare, with an apron projecting out into the pit. In all probability the authors had no particular place here in mind. If a particular palace must be mentioned, it was presumably that at Greenwich, to which the King, according to Holinshed, returned after the Field of the Cloth of Gold, June, 1520. It could not have been Bridewell, as has been suggested, because that palace was not built until two years later. The question is of no importance.
I. i. S. d. Enter the Duke of Norfolk. Thomas Howard (1443–1524), was created Duke of Norfolk
