SOURCE: Forey, Margaret. “Cleveland's ‘Square-Cap’: Some Questions of Structure and Date.” Durham University Journal 36, no. 2 (June 1975): 170-79.

[In the following essay, Forey discusses the meaning of the “Calot-Leather-cap” in Cleveland's poem, “Square-Cap,” and the consequent questions of structure and date which it raises.]

In the latest edition of the poems of John Cleveland,¹ the fantastic Caroline, commentaries by earlier editors have been usefully amplified by Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington. It can nevertheless be shown that in one respect the new editors have followed their predecessors into error. The correction with which this article is concerned relates to the meaning of the name ‘Calot-Leather-cap’ in the poem ‘Square-Cap’. A new interpretation is offered which raises, and to some extent answers, several questions about the structure and date of this poem.

The subject of ‘Square-Cap’ is a Cambridge beauty, the speaker's mistress, who turns down a succession of suitors in favour of her celebrator, Square-cap. The second of these suitors is Calot-Leather-cap, scornfully described as a ‘foot-ball noddle’, who attempts to woo the lady by deriving ‘the pedigree of fashion’ from the fact that ‘The Antipodes weare their shoes on their heads’. On this character Morris and Withington comment: ‘The serjeant-at-law. The ‘Calotte’ was the plain skull-cap, or coif, worn over the wig’.² Cleveland's previous editors, J. M. Berdan and George Saintsbury, made essentially the same comment,³ though only Berdan made the point that ‘This verse is scarcely successful as he satirizes, not the inherent characteristics, but the mere external one’. Another flaw in the poem as thus interpreted has passed unremarked: namely, that since Cleveland specifically describes the fifth and last of the suitors as a lawyer, the poem is enfeebled by pointless duplication of the characters satirized.

In fact, as investigation of seventeenth-century legal dress will readily reveal, Cleveland was not here referring to the lawyer's calot at all. The legal calot was a black skull-cap, quite distinct from, though by many later writers confused with, the serjeant's coif. It could at one time be made of silk or velvet, but a decree of 1635 made the latter fabric compulsory. At no time did lawyers wear any form of leather headgear.⁴ It is therefore impossible that Calot-Leather-cap could have been intended as a member of the legal profession.

A much more satisfactory interpretation of the term can be made if ‘Square-Cap’ is read in conjunction with an unpublished poem on the subject of leather calots written by William Strode, Public Orator at the University of Oxford and considered one of its leading poets in the decades before the Civil War. Strode was fond of versifying local current affairs, and among pieces contained in an autograph manuscript in the Bodleian Library is a lively dialogue between a scholar and a shoemaker about the rising price of Spanish leather shoes.⁵ The scholar learns that because ‘Court-conformitants’ have recently been wearing upon their heads the leather which ought to clothe their feet,

                              ‘a Cap which you knew not
Hath raisd the Spanish hide; tis cald Calott’.

After the scholar has compared the calotted head to a football, the shoemaker resumes:

‘This vayne Calott is vayner yet, since they
That neede it least the Fashion most obey;
Thick bushy heads, the greene and fleecy youth,
That would seeme bald before they ar in truth …
Yes, for in Chappell whereas men were bold,
Or in the Presense, to beglove their Mold,
Now from Religion, Duty and from Weather,
Pride keepes their heads Calotted alltogeather’.

Strode's account makes plain that a leather skull-cap had suddenly become the vogue, particularly among young men at court (who wore calots ‘in the Presense’) or attempting to ape court ways (‘Court-conformitants’). Calot-Leather-cap is therefore the Man of Fashion, appropriately satirized for his dress. The relevance of his desire to ‘derive the pedigree of fashion’ becomes obvious for the first time; Square-cap's rivals no longer appear to be duplicated; and Berdan's stricture is found to be groundless.

With this new interpretation in mind it is worth looking more closely at the structure of Cleveland's poem. Of principal interest is his choice of suitors. These are Square-cap, the graduate; Monmouth-cap, the soldier; Calot-Leather-cap, the follower of fashion; the Puritan with his wrought cap; Satin-cap, the clerk in holy orders (though like Square-cap, represented as being still at the university); and the round-capped Lawyer. It might be expected that Cleveland would choose characters to represent, without overlapping, various categories of men selected according to some unifying principle. Certainly in a very similar poem, the anonymous ‘Blew Cap for me’⁶—probably Cleveland's source, as will be shown later—such a unifying principle is immediately obvious: Blew-cap, the Scot, is preferred before a number of suitors of different nationalities. But while it is clear that Cleveland's suitors are intended to represent various professions or occupations, he appears at first sight to have given insufficient thought both to the unity and to the variety of his characters. It is not Calot-Leather-cap who presents a difficulty, for he, like a Jonsonian gull, appears to be free from the necessity of earning a living, and willing to make the pursuit of fashion his whole way of life. The real anomaly is the Puritan, who is labelled not by occupation but by belief. It may also be asked whether any distinction has been made between Satin-cap and Square-cap, for since the square cap was the normal everyday wear of the whole graduate population of the university,⁷ the positions of these two suitors in the academic community could have been precisely the same. On closer inspection, however, these inconsistencies disappear. The Puritan suitor, in spite of his appellation, is presented in terms of his occupation, which is obviously preaching. It is the techniques characteristic of the Puritan preacher, rather than the doctrines to which preacher and congregation alike subscribed, that Cleveland has emphasized in this portrait. He begins with an attack on the Puritan's ‘long-wasted conscience⁸ towards a Sister’ (i.e. his propensity towards sexual licence—a common criticism), but as soon as this suitor has made ‘a Chappell of Ease of her lap’ Cleveland continues

‘First he said grace, and then he kist her.
Beloved, quoth he, thou art my Text,
Then falls he to Use and Application next:
          But then she replied, your Text (Sir) I'le be,
          For then I'm sure you'l ne'r handle me’.

Similar comments can be found in other contemporary satires on Puritan preachers. Departure from the stated text was obviously a well-known feature of their sermons, for Strode likewise made his ‘new Teacher of a Towne’—a savage caricature of the Puritan in the pulpit—use ‘Running Texts, the nam'd forsaken’.⁹ The Use, the practical application of the teaching contained in the text, must also have been particularly favoured by Puritans, for both Strode and Cartwright mention it in this connection.¹⁰ Possibly, therefore, this suitor is intended to represent merely any Puritan clergyman; but it may well be that Cleveland envisaged him more precisely as a lecturer, an unbeneficed clergyman earning his living by preaching, for in the last decades before the Civil War it was for lectureships, rather than livings, that the Puritan clergy could hope, and the only other reference to a wrought cap in Cleveland's poetry sets it firmly on a lecturer's head.¹¹ As for the differentiation between Satin-cap and Square-cap, this is mainly a matter of impression. Satin-cap, who ‘faine would this wench and his fellowship marry’, hopes to

          ‘purchase Induction by Simonie
And offers her money her Incumbent to be’.

The punning on the induction of a new incumbent to a benefice is appropriate to his clerical status, but nevertheless he hopes by concealing his marriage to retain his college fellowship, instead of being forced into a parish. Since he considers money an advantage in his attempt to inveigle the girl away from Square-cap, and also feels it necessary to reassure her about his fellowship, it appears probable that Square-cap himself possesses neither. This impression is strengthened by the final verse, in which the Lawyer exhorts the girl to ‘leave these thred-bare Schollers’ (a colloquial plural which cannot be intended to include Satin-cap, already rejected as decisively as the Lawyer is to be). The tone and pace of the poem, moreover, suggest a youthful speaker. Therefore although Square-cap's position in the university is never specified, it seems likely that Cleveland envisaged him as a young Bachelor or Master of Arts as yet without preferment. The inadequacies found in this selection of suitors are thus more apparent than real.

Not only does a true interpretation of ‘Calot-Leather-cap’ make it possible to justify Cleveland's choice of characters; it also helps to elucidate a problem concerning their order of precedence. The difficulty concerns the first suitor, the only one whose position in the poem does not appear to be arbitrary, for of him Cleveland remarks:

‘And first for the Plush-sake the Monmouth-cap coms,
Shaking his head like an empty bottle …
He tells her that after the death of his Grannam
He shall have—God knowes what per annum’.

The obscure phrase ‘first for the Plush-sake’ puzzled even contemporaries; the two manuscript versions of the poem substitute the weaker but easier reading ‘first of all’,¹² clearly an attempt to bypass a difficulty. Morris and Withington, though with no great conviction, interpret ‘for the Plush-sake’ as ‘looking for comfort’; this implies a pause after ‘first’ and makes ‘the Plush-sake’ not the reason for the soldier's coming first, but the reason for his coming at all. But the natural rhythm of the line requires a break after ‘Plush-sake’, so that the emphasis of resumption falls upon ‘Monmouth-cap’; with the caesura shifted forward the line becomes difficult to say unless the most important word, the suitor's name, is denied its full stress. The implied charms of ‘Apollo's bouncing Girle’ sufficiently account for the arrival of the other suitors; it is surely ‘first’, and not ‘coms’ that Cleveland is explaining in this cryptic phrase. Where contemporaries have been puzzled and editors uncertain, a new interpretation must be put forward with diffidence, but investigation of other contexts in which the word ‘plush’ is used suggests a more plausible answer to this problem can be found. Plush, a rich and costly material¹³ with a pile longer and softer than that of velvet, was used in this period for clothing as well as upholstery. It was associated with luxury, but since to the seventeenth-century mind luxury implied more visual display and less physical comfort than it does in our times, plush seems to have been valued more for its gorgeous appearance than for the feel of the fabric. Cleveland's only other reference to this material certainly uses it in the sense ‘finery’; the disparate match in his ‘A young Man to an old Woman Courting him’ is described as

                    ‘prefacing old rags with plush:
Like Aldermen, or Monster Shreeves,
With Canvas Backs and Velvet Sleeves’.(14)

So also in Jasper Mayne's The City Match, when Plotwell, a young gallant from the Inns of Court, turns merchant, his fellows jeer at him for changing his ‘plush to penny-stone [i.e. penistone]’ and urge him to put on one of his ‘Temple suits’ before accompanying them; he retorts to their mockery with:

‘Well, my conceited Orient friends, bright offspring
O' th' female silkworm and tailor male, I deny not
But you look well in your unpaid-for glory’.(15)

Likewise Jonson in The Magnetic Lady speaks of

‘the better and braver [i.e. more finely-dressed] sort
of your people, plush and velvet outsides! that stick
your house round like so many eminences’,(16)

and though Bacon seats one of the Fathers of Solomon's House upon ‘cushions of a kind of excellent plush’,¹⁷ the occasion is a state visit, the grandeur and solemnity of which are emphasized throughout. Indeed, Bacon's subsequent description of an entourage shod and hatted in velvet, and of horses with trappings of the same, well illustrates the sort of situation and usage with which piled fabrics were associated in this period, and the extent to which they were valued for their visual rather than their tactile effectiveness. One interpretation of ‘for the Plush-sake’ could therefore be ‘because of grand attire’, in which case it would be Monmouth-cap, with his great expectations, who is plushy, rather than the tap-room Venus whom he is pursuing. Certainly the soldier swaggering in fine attire appears in both the life and the literature of this period. Wentworth wrote of new recruits for the Spanish war as ‘entertaining the town with great feathers’,¹⁸ and Strode, once again providing a useful commentary, describes those same recruits in greater detail, with their ‘new white bootes’, copper lace, feathered hats and scarlet breeches.¹⁹ But since Calot-Leather-cap is to follow, whose distinguishing mark is his modish attire, one would prefer to find some other reason than his dress for Monmouth-cap's taking precedence among the suitors.

A further collection of references relating to plush suggests that such a reason is possible to find. Since ‘plush’ was often used to give a general impression of expensive finery, it is easy to see how the word could acquire a wider meaning in which emphasis is laid less on the clothes themselves than on the ability to afford them, and consequently how it could come to stand merely for wealth as such. The beginnings of this process are illustrated by Massinger:

                                        ‘When two heirs quarrel,
The swordmen of the city shortly after
Appear in plush, for their grave consultations
In taking up the difference’.(20)

The association between plush and wealth is still closer in the preface to John Day's The Parliament of Bees, where the author states (speaking in the person of the book itself):

‘I had rather fall into a beadle's hands
That reads, and with his reading understands,
Than some plush Midas that can read no further
But “Bees? whose penning?”’.(21)

That ‘plush’ has quite altered its meaning in this work becomes even more obvious later on, when a character is introduced by the name of Polypragmus the Plush Bee, and described as a wealthy spendthrift, intent on conspicuous consumption.²² In this context ‘plush’ can only be taken as a synonym for ‘wealthy’. The same can be said of Polypragmus' own use of the word, when he fears that a neighbour may be daring to ‘vie expense’ with him and asks in the course of his enquiries ‘And what plush bees sit at this flesh-fly's table?’, for he is reassured at once when he learns that his rival feasts ‘None but poor lame ones and the ragged rabble’. Evidently these are the antithesis of what he means by ‘plush’. It is thus clear that this word was sometimes used figuratively to represent wealth in general; I am not, however, aware of any instance other than that suggested by Morris and Withington where ‘plush’ was used in the sense ‘comfort’. Moreover the idea of wealth fits what we are subsequently told about Monmouth-cap, who stands to inherit ‘God knowes what per annum’. The interpretation also provides a plausible reason for his taking precedence over the other suitors; it is not unknown for money to procure a place at the head of a queue. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Cleveland's usage was a common one; this, together with the fact that the syntax of his coined phrase is a little odd, explains why contemporaries found difficulty here. ‘For the sake of plush’, which is what his expression can be expanded to, would most naturally be taken to mean ‘seeking or expecting plush’, which is not appropriate in this context: Monmouth-cap is not aiming at an heiress, but coming first because of his own wealth. However, in spite of the slight awkwardness of Cleveland's structure here, the interpretation of ‘plush’ as ‘wealth’ appears the best-founded and most plausible; and the line surely means that because of his riches the soldier was the first suitor to appear.

The discovery of the true significance of Calot-Leather-cap is obviously relevant also to any discussion of the date of ‘Square-Cap’. This, however, is a topic that has not previously received much attention, and it is not with the leather calot that investigation of it needs to begin. The most useful starting-point is the relationship which similarities of subject-matter, stanza-form, structure and wording show to exist between ‘Square-Cap’ and the ballad ‘Blew Cap for me.’ Unless one is to postulate a third piece on the same lines of which no trace now remains, it must be assumed that one of these poems is modelled on the other, and there can be little doubt that ‘Blew Cap’ is the original.²³ In the first place, the structure of the anonymous poem is comparatively crude.²⁴ The emphasis in ‘Blew Cap’ on the novelty of the ditty may be discounted, but the clumsiness of the long-winded introduction would be surprising in a poem written in imitation of ‘Square-Cap’. Cleveland, by making the speaker one of the suitors, and by incorporating the mistress in the drinking scene, has produced a much better integrated and more effective poem. His greater use throughout of the present tense,²⁵ as well as the involvement of his speaker in the fate of succeeding suitors, gives ‘Square-Cap’ an immediacy and dramatic quality entirely lacking in the other poem, in which the wooing is distanced first by being made a song within a song, and then by being presented as a past and decisively concluded event:

‘they gang'd to the Kirk, & were presently marry'd’.

It is hard to imagine that anyone writing in imitation of Cleveland's poem would regress to a structure so much less effective than his. In the second place, ‘Blew Cap’ was published with a sub-title indicating that it was to be sung ‘To a curious new Scottish tune called Blew-cap’. This would be surprising if it were a parody of an existing English poem in the same distinctive metre. It may therefore be assumed, in the absence of external evidence about the order of composition, that ‘Blew Cap’ is the earlier of the two pieces.

As far as the composition of the anonymous ballad is concerned, enough evidence exists to date it fairly precisely. The action of the ‘ditty’ takes place in Falkland, commencing at the time of a royal visit. This can only refer to Charles' visit to Scotland in the summer of 1633. He reached Falkland in July, but returned to England before the end of the month.²⁶ Towards the end of the following March ‘Blew Cap for me’ was entered to Thomas Lambert in the Stationers' Register.²⁷ The ballad was therefore composed sometime between the middle of July 1633 and the later part of March 1634. One may assume it to have been the work of someone travelling in Charles' train,²⁸ since this would not only explain how its author came to be cognizant of the curious Scottish tune, but would also account for the otherwise pointless reference to the royal visit. It is possible that Cleveland encountered the ballad before Thomas Lambert did, but at all events his imitation of it cannot have been written before the late summer of 1633, at the very earliest.

‘Square-Cap’ itself was published in 1647,²⁹ which provides a terminus ad quem for its composition. The fourteen-year period from 1633 to 1647 can, however, be narrowed further, for it is hardly likely that this light-hearted poem with its Cambridge setting was written after Cleveland had left Cambridge in the early days of the Civil War. By the end of 1643 Cleveland was with the King at Oxford, and fighting with a vitriolic pen for the Royalist cause; he never again wrote for a Cambridge audience,³⁰ and we may surely assume that ‘Square-Cap’ belongs to the placid years that he had left behind.

At this point we may return to consideration of the leather calot, for if it were known over what period this cap was fashionable further light would of course be thrown on the date of Cleveland's poem, particularly since the Man of Fashion is likely to have been characterized by the very latest mode, and since the paucity of literary references to the fashion, which has led to its being overlooked altogether by historians of costume, suggests that it was short-lived. But unfortunately, Strode's ‘Dialogue on the Calott’, though evidently written when the fashion was still a novelty, is of little assistance here, for the most that can be said about this poem is that it was probably written after 1630 and before the middle of 1637.³¹ It is possible, however, that Strode and Cleveland are not the only writers to refer to this fashion in headgear. A third work, and this time one that can be precisely dated, may also contain a reference to the leather calot. In Ben Jonson's The Magnetic Lady, which was licensed and first performed in October 1632,³² there is a reference to ‘The wearing the Callot’ which has not so far received an adequate explanation, but which can be satisfactorily interpreted in terms of the fashion which Strode describes.

The speech in question is spoken by one Bias, a character whose position and occupation are relevant to this discussion. Bias is a ‘Sub-Secretary’, a term which is explained by various passages describing him throughout the play. We are first told that he is

                                                                      ‘A Vi-politique!
Or a sub-aiding Instrument of State!
A kind of a laborious Secretary
To a great man! (and likely to come on)
Full of attendance! and of such a stride
In business politique, or oeconomick,
As, well, his Lord may stoope t'advise with him’.

Another speaker comments:

‘I ha' seene him waite at Court, there, with his Maniples
Of papers, and petitions’,

while a third, a lawyer, adds

                                                                      ‘Hee is one
That over-rules tho', by his authority
Of living there; and cares for no man else:
Neglects the sacred letter of the Law;
And holds it all to be but a dead heape,
Of civill institutions: the rest only
Of common men, and their causes, a farragoe,
Or a made dish in Court; a thing of nothing’.(33)

Later in the play, explaining his unwillingness to follow a course of action of which his employer might disapprove, Bias himself explains:

                                                  ‘I have to commend me
Nought but his Lordships good opinion;
And to't my Kallygraphy, a faire hand,
Fit for a Secretary’.(34)

It is Bias' occupation which is under discussion in the passage which leads up to his brief mention of the calot. Sir Moth has recommended Bias as one who can

                                                                                                                                            ‘doe
His turnes there: and deliver too his letters,
As punctually, and in as good a fashion,
As ere a Secretary can in Court’,

to which Ironside replies incredulously

‘Why, is it any matter in what fashion
A man deliver his letters, so he not open 'hem?’

Bias answers him with a lengthy exposition of his own expertise in treading the corridors of power:

‘Yes, we have certaine precedents in Court,
                                                                                                                        … wee
(That tread the path of publike businesses)
Know what a tacit shrug is, or a shrinke;
The wearing the Callot; the politique hood:(35)
And twenty other parerga, o' the by,
          You Seculars understand not’.(36)

Herford and Simpson's annotation of this passage shows the customary confusion between the two forms of legal headgear and identifies the calot with the coif of the serjeant-at-law. This is, as has been shown, a false identification; moreover, the sense of this passage makes it impossible that Jonson can have been referring here to the legal calot. Bias himself is not a lawyer, but a secretary, whose good hand-writing constitutes his only professional qualification. His contempt and disregard for the law have been expressly stated. It is not plausible that he should include among the necessary skills of his way of life the attainment of high rank in the legal profession. It may furthermore be noted that even if the sense of the passage did not preclude such an interpretation, Jonson's own usage on other occasions would make it questionable. It is plain from several passages that Jonson considered the gown and coif, not the calot, as the lawyer's distinctive attire. The word ‘coif’ itself he avoids, preferring to deflate his lawyers with the rather less dignified ‘biggen’ or ‘night-cap’³⁷ but in this period these terms were interchangeable,³⁸ and it is clearly to the coif that he is referring. His habitual usage there supports what is so strongly suggested by the context of Bias' speech, that Jonson was not here referring to the legal calot.

The discovery of the fashion of leather calots makes possible another interpretation which was not available to Herford and Simpson. As Strode's poem makes plain, ‘The wearing the Callot’ started at court; consequently it must at one time, particularly before the fashion spread among ‘Court-conformitants’, have been the mark of those who moved in the right circles, knew the right pass-words, could pull the right strings. This provides exactly the sort of sense required in this context, and fits both Jonson's epithet ‘the politique hood’³⁹ and his classification of calot-wearing with ‘parerga’ (i.e. minor matters). There seems every reason to suppose that it was to the fashionable leather calot that Bias was here referring.

If this argument be accepted, then to the dates already discussed can be added one more of importance. In the autumn of 1632 the vogue for leather calots was sufficiently established for Jonson to be able to assume that an audience would be aware of it, though possibly at this time it was still confined to court circles. Strode's poem, written when calots had spread to Oxford, may well be somewhat later than The Magnetic Lady, since the fashion evidently continued for at least a year: Cleveland cannot have written ‘Square-Cap’ before the autumn of 1633 at earliest. However, for the reasons already given it seems likely that Cleveland's poem was, like Strode's, written when the fashion was still enough of a novelty to be remarkable. Even allowing for the slower spread and less rapid demise of fashions in the seventeenth century than in the present day, one would hardly expect that if Cleveland had written ‘Square-Cap’ in, let us say, 1637, he could have found nothing more modish for his Man of Fashion to wear than the skull-cap that had come into favour half a decade before. For ‘Square-Cap’, as much as for ‘A Dialogue on the Calott’, a date not far removed from 1632 seems the most probable.

At this point some interest begins to attach to various events in Cleveland's own career. He became a graduate, entitled to the square cap, in 1631; at the end of March 1634 he was elected to a fellowship at St. John's College, and some time between 1635 and 1637 gained further preferment when he obtained the post of Rhetoric Reader.⁴⁰ He was thus in the same position as the Square-cap of the poem, that of a young graduate without a fellowship, from 1631 to March 1634: a period which accords well with the dates of the references in Jonson and Strode, and which overlaps by some six or seven months the period during which ‘Square-Cap’ could have been composed. It is both a feasible and a tempting supposition that Cleveland encountered the newly-written ‘Blew Cap’ as soon as it was published, or even before, and that he parodied it in ‘Square-Cap’ at a time when an impecunious young graduate like the speaker could readily engage his sympathy and imagination—either because he was still one himself, or because he had left the ranks of such graduates recently enough to be able to identify with them easily. ‘Square-Cap’ would thus have been written either late in 1633 or sometime in 1634.

Unless further information about the leather calot becomes available, this final conclusion must remain conjecture. It is possible, however, that now the existence of this fashion has been made known, other references to it in the literature of the time may be noticed, and the period during which it flourished may be more precisely established. Meanwhile the discovery of the true significance of Calot-Leather-cap has done much more than rectify our understanding of a single phrase; it has provided a pointer towards the date of Cleveland's ‘Square-Cap’, and revealed that what earlier appeared a somewhat clumsy and slapdash piece of work is in fact a rationally constructed poem.

Notes

1. The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. B. Morris and E. Withington, Oxford, 1967; henceforth referred to as Cleveland, Poems.

2. Cleveland, Poems, p. 44, and commentary, p. 135.

3. The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. J. M. Berdan, Yale, 1911, p. 217; Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. G. Saintsbury, iii (1921), 34.

4. The principal definition of ‘calot’ in O.E.D. is ‘a plain skull-cap’, but failure to realize that lawyers wore both a skull-cap and a coif has led to the inclusion of a further definition, ‘coif of a serjeant-at-law’, which has doubtless occasioned much of the subsequent confusion. The two articles were in fact quite distinct. The calot, or skull-cap, was associated in the earlier part of the seventeenth century mainly with judges, who wore it over the coif. The coif itself was a bonnet-like article made of white silk or linen. See A. Pulling, The Order of the Coif, 1897, pp. 14-15, 230; W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A History of Legal Dress in Europe, 1963, pp. 51, 58-61, 64-7, 70-73, etc.

5. MS. C.C.C. 325, fol. 109^v; the following quotations, however, are taken from pp. 150-153 of my Oxford B.Litt. thesis, ‘A Critical Edition of the Poetical Works of William Strode, excluding The Floating Island’ (henceforth referred to as Strode, ‘Poems’), a copy of which is deposited in the Bodleian Library. A complete edition of the poetical works is in progress.

6. Printed in An Antidote against Melancholy, 1661, p. 29, and in The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. C. Hindley, 1873, i, 100. The latter contains the earlier text, for the ballad which it reprints was ‘Printed at London for Thomas Lambert’, to whom it was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1643 (E. Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1877, reprinted N.Y. 1950, iv, 289).

7. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, A History of Academical Dress in Europe, 1963, pp. 112-3, 116, 121, 127, 129, 194.

8. Explained by Morris and Withington, who cite another instance of this expression, as an easy or loose conscience.

9. Strode, ‘Poems’, p. 169.

10. Ibid.; W. Cartwright, Plays and Poems, ed. G. B. Evans, Madison, 1951, p. 482.

11. Cleveland, Poems, p. 53. On the harrying of the Puritan clergy and the rise of lecturers, see C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 1964, chaps. 2, 3.

12. Cleveland, Poems, p. 43.

13. J. E. T. Rogers records prices for plush in the 1620's and 1630's ranging from 10/- to 23/- a yard; these may be compared with other textile prices such as, for instance, 1/2 a yard for fustian, 2/6 for kersey, 4/1 for serge and 5/4 for penistone, a kind of frieze (A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vi (1887), 554-6).

14. Cleveland, Poems, p. 19.

15. The City Match, I, iv (Old English Plays, ed. R. Dodsley, rev. W. C. Hazlitt, xiii (1875), 217-9).

16. Works, ed. Herford and Simpson, vi, 509.

17. Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. Ellis and D. Heath, iii (1857), 155.

18. The Earl of Strafford's letters and despatches, ed. W. Knowler, 1739, i, 21-2.

19. Strode, ‘Poems’, pp. 83-5.

20. The Guardian, I, i, 275 (Plays, ed. A. Symons, Mermaid Series, n.d., ii, 196).

21. The Parliament of Bees, 1641, ‘The Book to the Reader’ (ed. A. Symons, in Nero and other plays, ed. H. P. Horne et al., Mermaid Series, 1888, p. 216).

22. Ibid., pp. 225-9.

23. Morris and Withington also conclude this, but give no reasons (Cleveland, Poems, p. 134).

24. The earlier version (see note 6) begins:

    ‘Come hither, the merri'st of all the nine,
              come, sit thee down by mee, and let us be jolly,
    And in a full cup of Apollo's wine
              wee'll drowne our old enemy, mad melancholy:
    Which when wee have done, wee'll betweene us devise
    A dainty new ditty with art to comprise;
    And of this new ditty the matter shall be—
    Gif ever I have a man, Blew-cap for me.

    There lives a blithe Lasse in Faukeland towne,
              and shee had some suitors, I wot not how many;
    But her resolution she had set downe,
              that shee'd have a Blew-cap gif e're she had any:
    An English man when our good king was there,
    Came often unto her, and loved her deere:
    But still she replide, “Sir, I pray let me be,
    Gif ever I have a man, Blew-cap for me”.’

    Compare this with Cleveland's opening verse:

    ‘Come hither Apollo's bouncing Girle,
              And in a whole Hippocrene of Sherry
    Let's drink a round till our braines do whirle,
              Tuning our pipes to make our selves merry:
    A Cambridge-Lasse, Venus-like, borne of the froth
              Of an old half-fill'd Jug of Barley broth,
              She, she is my Mistris, her Suiters are many,
              But shee'l have a Square-cap if ere she have any.’

25. In both poems tenses are confused, but in spite of using the past tense in his refrain (‘still she replied’; perhaps unthinkingly taken over from ‘Blew Cap’), Cleveland gives an overall impression of present time.

26. The king entered Scotland on 12th June, and Edinburgh three days later, where he remained till setting out on progress on 1st July. He was back in Edinburgh by 18th July, for on that date he left it to return to England (S. R. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, vii (1884), 281, 290; J. H. Burton, History of Scotland, vi (1876), 90).

27. See note 6.

28. In spite of its theme and setting, there can be little doubt that the ballad was written by an Englishman for an English audience: a number of accents are assumed in successive verses, but the framework of the poem is not in dialect; and when Scottish speech is attempted in the last verse the speaker expressly disclaims familiarity with the tongue:

    ‘I ken not weele whether it were Lord or Leard;
    They caude him some sike a like name as I heard’.

    It may also be noted that the English suitor is the first to arrive; naturally an English audience would expect their own countryman's fortunes to be given a position of importance. This may explain why Cleveland felt that his own first suitor should be singled out in some way.

29. In The Character of a London Diurnall … Fifth Edition, 1647.

30. Cleveland, Poems, pp. xvi-xviii, 116.

31. Strode, ‘Poems’, pp. lix-lxiii. Although both poems contain witticisms about shoes and footballs, these jokes are sufficiently obvious in this context to have been made independently; it is hardly likely that Strode's long, detailed discussion of the calot owes anything to Cleveland's passing reference, and equally unlikely that Cleveland knew Strode's poem, which was not in general circulation (Strode, ‘Poems’, pp. lxiv-lxv).

32. Works, ed. Herford and Simpson, ix, 253, where the earliest known reference to the play is also cited, from a letter dated 20th September, 1632: ‘Ben Jonson … hath written a play against next terme called the Magnetick Lady’.

33. Works, ed. Herford and Simpson, vi, 525.

34. Ibid., vi, 556.

35. Modernizing editors substitute a comma for the semi-colon in the line. On Jonson's punctuation, see ibid., ix, 48-51.

36. Ibid., vi, 526-7.

37. The lawyer in The Magnetick Lady is described as

                        ‘dedicate to his profession …
    So much he loves that Night-cap! the Bench-gowne!
    With the broad Guard o' th' back! These shew a man
    Betrothed unto the study of our Lawes’

    (ibid., vi, 523-4);

    in The Staple of News Picklock, the Man of Law, says

                        ‘it were a piece
    Worthy my night-cap, and the Gown I weare’

    (ibid., vi, 368);

    while in Volpone the advocate Voltore is told ‘get you a biggen, more: your braine breakes loose’ (ibid., v, 126)—advice aimed at his occupation, as can be seen from Jasper Mayne's The City Match (ed. cit., p. 288):

                        ‘one whom the good
    Old man, his uncle, kept to th' inns-of-court,
    And would in time ha' made him barrister,
    And rais'd him to his satin cap and biggon’.

38. Cf. several references in O.E.D. to a ‘coif or night-cap’ and one to a ‘coif or biggen’. All three words implied a close-fitting cap or hood, often tied with strings under the chin. ‘Biggen’ was often used of a child's cap (the headgear, rather like a modern baby's bonnet, seen in so many child portraits of this period), but could also refer to adult caps that were bonnet-like (cf. ‘a man biggined with a hood’, quoted in O.E.D.). Shakespeare gives some impression of the social connotations of the word in Prince Hal's reflection that monarchs sleep less soundly than

                        ‘he whose brow with homely biggen bound
    Snores out the watch of night’

    (2 Hen. IV, IV, v, 26-7).

    Herford and Simpson, confusing coif and calot, erroneously explain Jonson's ‘biggen’ as ‘a skull-cap of lawn or silk worn by lawyers’ (Works, ix, 731), though they correctly identify it with the ‘night-cap’ in the two references quoted above.

39. ‘Politique’ (ie. appertaining to a politician) presents no difficulty, but ‘hood’, which is not appropriate to a calot, needs some explanation. Probably Bias is implying that the calot takes the place of an academic hood for those who graduate at court and become Masters of Politics, for a few lines earlier he has stated that

                                                      ‘the Arts
    And Sciences doe not directlier make
    A Graduate in our Universities’

    than the court-craft which he proceeds to specify brings preference at court.

40. Cleveland, Poems, pp. xv-xvi.