Note 172 — SCENE III.
Reading edition
The epithet black does not agree with Sir Kenelm Digby's "Discourse touching the Cure of Wounds by the Power of Sympathy," 4th edition, 1664, p. 104: "I told her sundry stories upon this subject; as that of the Queen of Ethiopia, who was delivered of a white boy; which was attributed to a picture of the Blessed Virgin, which she had always near the tester of her bed, whereunto she bore great devotion. I urged another, of a woman who was brought to bed of a child all hairy, because of a portrait of St John the Baptist in the wilderness, where he wore a coat of camel's hair."
Perhaps the original reading is the true one, and the corruption lies in the former line. I would read—
"It works upon that which is not as yet: The little Ethiop infant would have been Black in his cradle, had he not been first White in the mother's strong imagination."
The compositor's eye might have caught had not from the following line—a very common accident. Without this emendation we have too much of not and had not in the course of three verses.—Steevens's note (altered.) [Cartwright and Digby probably derived the story of the Ethiop mother and her white offspring from a common source; but Digby's work was not published till several years after Cartwright's death.]