Note 422 — SCENE II.

Your Bridewell, &c.] “We have here a curious specimen of the license which ancient writers used to allow themselves of introducing facts and circumstances peculiar to one country into another. Every thing here said of Bridewell is applicable to the house of Correction which goes by that name in London. Changing the names of the duke and his son to those of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, all the events mentioned will be found to have happened in the English Bridewell. The situation of the place is also the same. In the time of Henry the Eighth princes were lodged there; part of it being built in the year 1522, for the reception of Charles the Fifth, whose nobles resided in it. In 1528, Cardinal Campeius had his first audience there; and after Henry’s death, Edward the Sixth, in the seventh year of his reign, 1552, gave to the citizens of London this his palace for the purposes above mentioned. To complete the parallel, it was endowed with land, late belonging to the Savoy, to the amount of 700 marks a-year, with all the bedding and furniture of that hospital. See Stowe’s Survey, Strype’s edit. 1721, vol. i. p. 264. There is also the like anachronism in the First Part of this play, concerning Bethlem Hospital.” Reed.