Note 1. From Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 1600. “The songs in Summer’s Last Will and Testament,” says Mr. Bullen (Introduction, Lyrics from Elizabethan Dramatists, p. viii.), “are of a sombre turn. We have, it is true, the delicious verses in praise of spring; and what a pleasure it is to croon them over! But when the play was produced it was sickly autumn, and the plague was stalking through the land…. Very vividly does Nashe depict the feeling of forlorn hopelessness caused by the dolorous advent of the dreaded pestilence. His address to the fading summer (Go not hence, bright soul of the sad year) is no empty rhetorical appeal, but a solemn supplication; and those pathetic stanzas, Adieu! farewell, earth’s bliss, must have had strange significance at a time when on every side the death-bells were tolling.” [back]
