a greasy redd night capp, one mouldy glove, a hair combe with hare and then a troth left[1] etc I had soe much of [[these]] that I remember not what followed in the french[2]
I remembr one thing more which offended me extreamly; though \in the contrairy/ he in the reading of it seemed in particular to be pleased with it as excellent good. which was he made the yong Galants speake their misfortuns by a comparaison of the Sea, wherin they enterchanged all the Sea Termes one could nomber.[3]
*and tell them of the nasty thing which for shame servants know by therin[4]
Folio 220 verso
After the reading of this play, he put the Question to me \well!/ don’t \you/ find this play as full as any of the French Comedies?
I remember alsoe that he said to me in an Entertaine[5]that for his part he only studdied to be a Womans Doctor, which he hoped to be at end of 7 yeares for soe long he was resolved to stay abroad.
[1] Broken betrothal.
[2] This is Richard Rhodes’s Flora’s Vagaries (performed 1663 in London; the play was printed in London in 1670). In the play, the conventional Otrante, torn between her duty to her father Grimani and her desire for freedom, is counseled by her cousin (Flora) to elope with her lover Francisco. (Francisco cannot obtain consent from Grimani to marry Otrante). Otrante subsequently is abducted from her father’s garden by the villainous Francisco, and she is rescued by Lodovico, with whom she later intrigues to elope. Lodovico, however, is not a virtuous gentleman, but often drunk, singing bawdy songs, his pockets full of ‘brass money and false dice, . . .an Antidote against the Pox . . .and a Syrings’. In act five there is the ransacking of a house by two thieves where they discover the ‘coal hole . .. a pewter piss-pot, a brimmer . . .and a little greasie red Cap and Glove’. See Richard Rhodes, Flora’s Vagaries. A Comedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal, By His Majesties Servants (London: William Cademan, 1670), 64; See Nancy Eileen Copeland, Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women’s Comedy and the Theatre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 27-28.
[3] This is in the second act of Flora’s Vagaries, where Lodovico and Alberto are comparing their lovers Otrante and Flora. Alberto asked, ‘say the thing be as I guess, what swap will you take ‘twixt my Mistress and yours? come, a match’. Lodovico replies: ‘Nay, an it were so, I wou’d not be such a fool as to change bottoms. Mine is a lusty Vessel, richly laden, well man’d and arm’d, yours but a little pinnace, a smart Saylor, I think but of no great Service’. Alberto then counters, ‘She carries a Chace-Gun in her fore-Castle, makes Searoom where er’e she rides . . .And when her Powder and Shot’s spent, she’ll close ye up to handy blows so lightly, I saw her once boarding the Butler’s face, she clapt on all her grapling Irons together, down went the Main-mast, all the Sayls were rent, she ee’n almost quite spoly’d his upper deck, at last the fellow made a lucky shot, hit her ‘twixt wind and water, turn’d up her keel and got off”. Rhodes, Flora’s Vagaries, 26.
[4] It is possible that coal-hole was slang for anus, much as a bunghole was.
[5] Entretien.