Note 715 — ACT IV. SCENE I.
Reading edition
go by, old Jeronimo] A quotation from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, which was written probably about 1590. The words are spoken by Hieronimo to himself:
“King. Who is he that interrupts our business?
Hier. Not I: Hieronimo, beware, go by, go by.”
Dodsley’s Old Plays, vol. iii. p. 163. new ed. Though this expression, and other lines of The Spanish Tragedy, are so often ridiculed by contemporary writers, the play possesses no ordinary merit. Coleridge (see his Literary Remains, vol. ii. p. 129) thought that some passages of it were written by Shakespeare. We know (from Henslowe’s MSS.) that Ben Jonson made “adycions” to it in 1601 and 1602.