Six years ago in this journal, John Cutts published a very amusing tale from Uranus and Psyche (British Museum Ad. MS. 40145, foll. 140r-141v) that involved a kind of doubling of the standard ‘bed-trick,’ in which not only did the wife, in the usual manner, secretly take the place of the woman with whom her husband had an assignation, but the husband also secretly yielded his place to a friend, and so unwittingly arranged his own cuckolding. Mr. Cutts merely intended to present an interesting development of the theme that Shakespeare had used in All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, but I think in doing this he has uncovered for us the source of the main plot of James Shirley's comedy, The Gamester.

Near the end of the bacchanalian revels aboard Pompey's galley in Antony and Cleopatra (II.vii), Shakespeare introduces the only song in his play. As Enobarbus places Antony, Pompey, and Caesar hand in hand—presumably to dance as well as to join in the refrain—a boy comes forward to sing:

Come, thou monarch of the vine,
Plumpy Bacchus with pink eyne!
In thy fats our cares be drown'd,
With thy grapes our hairs be crown'd.

A curious and perhaps unique use in English of the word. sixain may be observed in a book published in 1561, fourteen years before the earliest citation of the word in the OED. Among the preliminaries (sig. A4r-v) of an English translation from Henry Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalips (STC 4061) is found a poem of twenty-six four-line stanzas with the heading ‘A Sixain touching the contentes of thys booke.’ As a sample I quote the first two of these stanzas and the last:

Who list to moue his lippes,
and hereon loke and rede:
In thys Apocalyppes,
these thynge shall fynde in dede.

There are two important manuscript copies of poems of John Donne resting in public places that so far have apparently gone undetected by Donne scholars. Neither makes any major difference in the text of the poems in question, but each throws a further light on the editorial choices of the man to whom all Donne scholars owe a major debt, Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson, and one gives valuable evidence on the reading of the elisions which plague readers of Donne poems.

The Bentivoglio became the dominant family in Bologna in the fifteenth century, remaining in power until 1506, when Pope Julius II, backed by an army and spiritual sanctions, induced Giovanni II Bentivoglio to flee with his family into exile. Interestingly enough, the Kress Collection in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., possesses magnificent portraits of this Giovanni, and of his wife Ginevra Sforza, painted by Ercole de'Roberti of Ferrara. The Bentivoglio family and its connections, however, is generally neglected by historians of ‘The Italian Renaissance,’ in large measure because Bologna itself is ignored. Yet almost thirty years ago a scholarly study by Cecilia M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna: a study in despotism sought to redress this, providing adequate evidence of the importance of the family for the understanding of Italian politics in the Renaissance period.