374 Tucker Brooke, 



Why, she (i.e., Helen) is a pearl, 

 Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, 

 And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants ; 



m Richard II,, IV. i. 281-288: 



Was this face the face 

 That every day under his household roof 

 Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face 

 That like the sun did make beholders wink? 

 Was this the face that fac'd so many follies, 

 And was at last outfac'd by BoHngbroke? 



and ill All's Well that Ends Well, I. iii. 73-/6: 



Countess. Sirrah, tell my gentlewoman I would speak with her; Helen I 



mean. 

 Clozvn. Was this fair face the cause, ciuoth she, 



Why the Grecians sacked Troy?"^ 



Shakespeare introduces an allusion to the expanded version of 

 Faustus in Bardolph's speech in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 

 IV. V. 67 ff. : 



for so soon as I came be^^ond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one 

 of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German 

 devils, three Doctor Faustuses.'^ 



It was natural that the play, particularly in the tawdry later 

 version, should owe a part of its fame to its abundant horseplay. 

 It was thus that Edward Phillips remembered it much later, when 

 he said in his Theatrum Poetarum (1675) : 'Of all that he (Mar- 



°' As late as 1620, Thomas May in The Heir offers another parody: 



'I tell thee, sweet, a face not half so fair 



As thine hath arm'd whole nations in the field. 



And brought a thousand ships to Tenedos, 



To sack lamented Troy.' (HI. i., Hazlitt-Dodsley xi. p. 544) 



^^ The reference is to the punishment of the knights by Faustus' devils 

 in the 1616 version. When Pistol addresses Slender in the first scene with 

 the words, 'How now. Mephistophilus !' the allusion is probably, as 

 Creizenach says, to Slendcr's leanness, which suggests the 'lange, hagere 

 Gestalt' of the stage Mephistophilis. The proverbial hideousness of 

 Mephistophilis is indicated by a passage at the beginning of the third scene 

 cf Randolph's Muses' Looking-Glass (1638) : — 'Enter a Deformed Fcllozv. 

 Def. Pel. Roscius, I hear you've a new play to-day. — Ros. We want you to 

 play Mephistopheles. A pretty natural vizard.' 



