1 my departure oute of Brabante: Van der Noot fled Antwerp (in the duchy of Brabant) in the spring of 1567 after a failed Calvinist attempt to take control of the city government. Margaret of Parma had put down the revolt, yet she exercised what would come to seem, in hindsight, a comparatively moderate approach to this and prior Calvinist insurgencies in Antwerp and its environs; when the Duke of Alva replaced her later in the spring, a number of Antwerp’s Protestants sought refuge in England and Germany. More of the Dutch exiles ended up in London than in any other individual European locale.

3–4 as well . . . Antechrist: Van der Noot’s special emphasis on visual hygiene does more than prepare for the carefully disciplined visionary poems to come. The Antwerp Calvinists had a resolute interest in the purification of visual culture, having engaged in an aggressive program of iconoclasm in the years before the crackdown that forced van der Noot to flee to England. The identification of the Roman church or the pope with the Antichrist has a number of pre-Reformation antecedents, and figures in the first of the twenty-five articles of the Lollards (1388).

19 prince: Although van der Noot refers to Elizabeth as a ‘Princesse’ in the dedicatory half-title, the sex-neutral use of the term ‘prince’ was in wide use.

19 blessed and happie: A pleonasm: ‘happie’ here means ‘fortunate’ or ‘blessed’.

20 lineally descended: The assertion is polemical: after all, in 1536, her father, Henry VIII, had declared Elizabeth illegitimate; he reversed himself by the Act of Succession of 1543, which Act Edward VI had attempted to overrule in the Device for the Succession of 1553. There were several claimants at the time of the publication of the Theatre. Henry Hastings still had a few supporters, and more important, the pretensions of Elizabeth’s second cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, had been explicit since the death of her half-sister, Mary Tudor, when Henry II of France declared his son, Francis II, and Mary, his wife, king and queen of England. Even though Mary Queen of Scots had fled to England from Scotland in 1568 and was very much under Elizabeth’s thumb when the Theatre was published, her claims to the English throne had the abiding support of England’s Catholics: the publication precedes the Northern Rebellion by only a few months. Van der Noot’s affirmations of Elizabeth’s sovereignty here have a nervous truculence; they contribute to the general defense against Catholic claims to authority in the Theatre.

28 Neither for that: Continuing a series initiated by ‘not so much for that’ above (19-20).

29 Phœnix . . . singular: Cf. Epigr 5 below. In his account of the mythical phoenix (Natural History 10.2), Pliny the Elder mentions that only one of its kind exists at any time.

37 giuen in your own person: I.e., rather than through an interpreter.

42 measures: This term for dance ‘steps’ reminds us that just as ancient and Early Modern musical theory emphasized the relation between mathematical proportion and ideal musical intervals, so did theoretical writing on dancing describe its gestures and steps as governed by regularities and proportions; see Elyot 1531: K4v-K5r and Nevile 2004.

46 imagerie: Although the term can denote sculpture, van der Noot almost certainly means ‘embroidery’ here. Elizabeth was said to have been fond of embroidery and skilled at it from an early age. Two handsome embroidered bookbindings survive, customarily attributed to her.

55 fained Emblemes: invented images representing moral fables, pictorial allegories. For more on emblems see the Introduction.

56 flatterie or glosing: The phrase is pleonastic. Glosing, cognate with glossing, has a special association with writing.

60–61 Asse tuning of a harp: The ancient proverb ‘The ass with the lyre’ could be used to evoke the incomprehension of the crude and ignorant, and the folly of offering higher things to the debased, as well as a range of simple incongruities. Because Erasmus discusses the provenance and the meanings of the proverb at some length in his Adages, it had special currency among humanists.

66–67 Lamuell . . . Prouerbes: Van der Noot here quotes Proverbs 31:30. Proverbs was frequently understood to consist of three books, since it collects sayings attributed first to Solomon, then to Agur son of Jakeh, and in the final chapter to Lemuel.

79 Prince: Van der Noot here insists on the fact that the term could be used indifferently of a male or female ruler.

86 iewels: Not gemstones per se, but articles of adornment made of precious materials.

89 law and equitie: Van der Noot follows Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, 5) in the conventional distinction between legal justice, administered in England on the authority of custom, maxim, and statute and equity, an extralegal power to bring legal justice, in specific cases, into line with the general principles from which it springs. Van der Noot’s readers would have associated equitable justice with particular (conciliar) courts, and above all the Chancery and the Court of Requests.

89–90 in six or seuen languages: Important as was vernacular translation of the Bible to those committed to church reform, concerned as they were with lay access to scripture, van der Noot’s emphasis here falls on a different matter of linguistic access. He praises ways in which the religious needs of its various ethnic communities were accommodated in cosmopolitan London.

90 The Sacraments . . . Supper: Baptism and the Eucharist are the only two rites recognized as sacraments by the leading theologians of the Reformation.

91–92 Christian discipline: The Protestant reformers were concerned not only with the correction of doctrine and the reform of church polity, but with a reform of discipline, that is, of the methods of doctrinal and moral correction in pastoral practice, especially at the parish level. This orientation to discipline was especially pronounced in the work of Martin Bucer.

92 countrey and nation: While country denotes a group of people originating in a particular place, nation can refer both to an ethnic group and to a confessional sect.

96–97 banishyng . . . Diuell: At 1 John 2:22 the distinguishing feature of the Antichrist is his denial of the divinity of Jesus. The identification of the Antichrist as a son or descendant of Satan derives from the convergence of two other interpretive traditions: that the Antichrist is to be identified with the ‘sonne of perdition’ of 2 Thess 2:3 and that this sonship, an infernal mirror-image of Christ’s divine sonship, is disclosed at Gen 3:15, where God refers to the abiding hostility of the descendants of the serpent to the descendants of Eve.

102–103 Pharao . . . Iezabell: Jeroboam, first king of the breakaway Northern kingdom of Israel, is remembered in 1 Kings for his revival of idolatry (12:28). His successors, of whom Ahab (here ‘Achab’) is said to be the worst (1 Kings 16:30), are regularly condemned for committing the idolatry: ‘and it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he [i.e., Ahab] took to wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshipped him.’ In their iconoclasm, then, the Reformers tax Catholics with committing the sins of Jeroboam; see Luther’s Table-Talk, CLXXV. The gloss to ‘Jezebel’ at this juncture in the Geneva Bible—‘By whose influence he fell into wicked and strange idolatry and cruel persecution’—is relevant, as are John Knox’s references to Mary Tudor as ‘that cursed Jesabell’ (Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, 1558, D6) and his yoking together of Pharoah and Jezebel in his Faythfull admonition of 1554: ‘Remembre brethren, that Goddes vengeaunce plaged not Pharao the fyrst yeare of his tyranny. Neyther dyd the dogges devoure and consume bothe the fleshe and bones of wicked Jezabel when she first erected and set up her Idolatrie’ (F1v-F2).

105–106 Iosua . . . Dauid: A slightly heterogeneous list, although Joshua, Gideon, and David all figure in the Old Testament as great military leaders. An outlier not only in this respect, ‘Judah’ also disrupts the chronology of the list.

109–110 kingdome . . . worlde: In Works and Days, 109-120, Hesiod identifies the reign of Cronos with the Golden Age. In Roman culture, Cronos was conflated with Saturn, and the pleasures of the Cronian Golden Age with the indulgence and social leveling of Saturnalia; Ovid offers classic rendering of the Saturnian Golden Age in Met. I.89-112. In his fourth eclogue, Virgil hails the return of Saturn and Astraea, and with them the return of the Golden Age (Ecl. IV.6).

110 Astrea: According to Ovid (Met. I.149-50) this virgin goddess forsook the earth during the last of the Four Ages, when injustice and impiety asserted themselves. Camden reports that Virgil’s celebration of the return of Astraea in the fourth eclogue, ‘Iam redit virgo’, was applied to Elizabeth ‘in the beginning of her . . . reign’ (Remains, 1605, Z2-Z2v). For more on this mythologization of Elizabeth, see Yates 1947.

124–125 these our most miserable days: The clash between the description, a few lines earlier, of the English present as a Golden Age and, here, of the European present as miserable suggests the peculiar psychological situation of the asylum-seeker; it also evokes a paradox in the self-understanding of the Protestant, who sees himself as a member of both a persecuted minority and a triumphant imperial Church.

128–129 if they . . . other: See Matt 10:23.

134 Frederike: Under the Elector, Frederick III, most of the Palatinate, which had been hospitable to a range of Protestant groups, became a strictly Calvinist enclave within the Holy Roman Empire, though his efforts to suppress Lutheran practices in the Upper Palatinate were only partly successful.

137 Iosias: Josiah, the king of Judah who ‘put down the idolatrous priests’ (2 Kings 23:5), is similarly instanced as a model ruler in the epistle prefatory to the 1570 edition of the Geneva Bible. The comparison of Frederick to Josiah may be especially pointed, since Josiah effected a major reformation not only in his own realm of Judah, but in the kingdom of Israel to the north as well. His fervent iconoclasm would have been an inspiration to the Antwerp reformers: at 2 Kings 23:4, Josiah burns the vessels used in the worship of Baal and carries the ashes to Bethel, the site where Jeroboam had erected his golden calves; at 23:5, he destroys the altar at Bethel.

143 French . . . Dutche: Edward VI granted charters for the founding in London of both Dutch and French churches in 1550.

148–151 How . . . Iahel: Alluding both to the account of Deborah’s advice to Barak on how to defeat the army of Sisera (Judg 4:6-16) and to the story of Jael’s subsequent murder of Sisera (Judg 4:17-21).

151–152 he also . . . daughter: See 1 Sam 19:11-16.

152–154 he deliuered . . . Iudith: As narrated in the apocryphal book of Judith, chapts. 8-16.

154–157 the children . . . Haman: See Esther.

167–168 and that maugre . . . being: ‘and all this despite the defiance of your enemies, who, being, etc.’ The phrase ‘maugre the beard(s) of’ was proverbial, but van der Noot may be playing with beards here, suggesting that Elizabeth is undeterred by the virility of the Catholic princes—the Pope and Philip II of Spain—who opposed her.