And you will love me, kiss me, and be my secret sweetheart. Your husband will not know. I will give you money, and your husband will not have to betall, to pay for your lodgings or your food.

Alewives are anadromous fish: Born in freshwater, they spend their lives in the ocean, returning annually to their birthplaces to spawn. Until colonial-era dams cut off their migration, hundreds of thousands of alewives would have come pouring into Rogers Lake [Connecticut, USA] every spring – and into other lakes like it along much of the Eastern Seaboard. Farmers used to apply them to their fields as fertilizer, and all along the coast, river herring festivals celebrated their arrival.

A thousand hearts beat happily.

Love for a woman was believed to produce an especially dangerous kind of effeminacy. Following this line of thinking, Musidorus charges that Pyrocles' infatuation threatens to 'womanize' him