The Utopian custom of euthanasia used, quite rightly, to be discussed in terms of classical sources and generally turned on whether Sir Thomas More advocated it personally or not. The fruitfulness of such discussion has its limits, and I find that More scholars have largely dropped the subject. Some new evidence has come to light, however, which raises the question whether More's apparently speculative projection had not in fact some basis in actual practice. An Italian diplomat who visited England during the reign of Mary in 1554, that is twenty-eight years after Utopia was published, stated unequivocally that euthanasia (he does not use the term, of course) was customary among some people in England. He thought it a primitive survival.

I have found two main sources for the text of the report: (1) the various copies of an anonymous manuscript usually called ‘Ritratti del Regno d'lnghilterra’ (2) a book by the Ferrarese diplomat Giulio Raviglio Rosso, I Successi d'lnghilterra dopo la morte di Odoardo sestofno al giunta in quel Regno del Sereniss.

The mystery of John Skelton's Howard connection has never been satisfactorily explained. Indeed, one usually thinks of the Tudor poet (1460?-1529) as a court poet and tutor to Henry VIII rather than as the protégé of the Howard Countess of Surrey who directed her daughters and gentlewomen to honor him with a laurel crown. Of course, the recitation of this apparently biographical incident in which eleven gentlewomen joyfully decked Skelton's brow with laurel, became the basis for Skelton's most autobiographical poem, The Garland of Laurel.

Published October 3, 1523, the usual assumption is that the Countess of Surrey is none other than Elizabeth Howard, née Stafford (d. 1558), the wife of Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey and in due course third Duke of Norfolk (d. 1554).

Among the wives of Henry VIII, only his first and last, Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Parr, possessed both the education and the intelligence to exemplify the Renaissance ideal for a woman born to gentle life. Both Katherines took their religion seriously, and in spite of the papal loyalties of the one and the Protestant proclivities of the other, they belonged to the same tradition of Renaissance religion which J. K. McConica has most recently traced in his study of English humanists. If Katherine of Aragon far surpassed her English namesake by the thoroughness of her education in the Spanish humanism of Isabella's court, Katherine Parr actually wrote and had published two books which proved surprisingly popular. If the breadth of the first Katherine's patronage of Renaissance writers was far more extensive than that of the second, the patronage of the second was more closely related to the course of English religion and politics.

A few years ago Conyers Read wrote that Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner merited more attention than it had received, and the comment could be justly extended to the Queen's religious convictions in general.

As John D. Jump confirms in his recent edition of Tamburlaine, L. Francis Kirkman's 1671 play list has long been regarded as the earliest unambiguous attribution of Tamburlaine to Marlowe. Admittedly, the internal evidence supporting Marlowe's authorship is so strong that virtually no one has felt much need for external confirmation. It may be worthwhile, nevertheless, to move such confirmation back by sixty-two years, to a 1609 work by Joseph Wybarne (M.A., 1606; ordained deacon [Lincoln], May 31, 1607): ‘The New Age of Old Names. By Ios. Wib. Master of Artes of Trinitie Colledge in Cambridge.' On sig. D4V, with ‘Marloe.’ in the margin, Wybarne echoes verbatim I Tamburlaine I.ii.205 ('As far as Boreas claps his brazen wings’).