Note 209 — NOTE ON SYMBOLS (continued 2)

Soliman and Perseda, I. iv. 47, ‘Enter Basilisco riding of a mule’ ... (71) ‘Piston getteth vp on his Asse, and rideth with him to the doore’; cf. 1 Rich. II (quoted p. 61, n. 3), and for the private stage, Liberality and Prodigality, passim, and Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 968. W. J. Lawrence, Horses upon the Elizabethan Stage (T. L. S. 5 June 1919), deprecates a literal acceptance of Forman’s notice of Macbeth and Banquo ‘riding through a wood’, attempts to explain away the third example here given, and neglects the rest. I think some kind of ‘hobby’ more likely than a trained animal. In the Mask of Flowers, Silenus is ‘mounted upon an artificiall asse, which sometimes being taken with strains of musicke, did bow down his eares and listen with great attention’; cf. T. S. Graves, The Ass as Actor (1916, South Atlantic Quarterly, XV. 175).