To the most high and most virtuous princess, the Lady Elizabeth.

Madam,

These rude and uncomposed airs aspire into your presence, that from your touch they may receive time and laws. If you shall graciously vouchsafe to read them, they will live and breathe. It pleased our renowned Lady, queen Elizabeth, to prefer the learned author to the choice honour of her favourite and to confer with him in his natural language. Neither does that most illustrious name rest on your Highness without a design of Providence, since it speaks in you her piety and early bonds and whatsoever she wore of greater value than her crown. May it please you herein to countenance the parallel. Only accept the endeavours of the unworthy translator and give them admission to your virtuous hand, not valuing the present but receiving the homage, for the authority of your judgement is so pregnant, of so royal and early growth and so hereditary, that verses licensed by your approbation, like sealed measures, are justified against inferior censures by their mark.

Plays are the mirrors wherein men’s actions are reflected to their own view. Which, perhaps, is the true cause that some, privy to the ugliness of their own guilt, have issued out warrants for the breaking all those looking-glasses, lest their deformities recoil and become an eye-sore unto themselves. This dim crystal, sullied with antiquity and a long voyage, will return upon your highness some lines and shadows of that piety to your deceased father, which seats you above the age and beyond your years, which makes you better than your country and higher than your enemies, which lodges you in our eye as our example and in our heart as our treasure.

Be secure, most illustrious princess, you are not so much guarded from flattery by the acts and vigilance of the states as by the transcendence of your own merits. The history of your name shall be an academy, whence obsequious rhetoric shall draw forth encomiums to bleach the defects of unaccomplished queens.

Madam, your virtues command: let your clemency favour the duty of my ambition, which is, to be

The most humble honourer of Your Highness,

Chr. Wase.