E3 If either lotteryes or lottes

Notes. The first lottery run by the Virginia Company to raise money for their fledgling colony was held from March to July 1612 (see Johnson). It is highly probable that this poem was first circulated some time during those few months, a period in which the lottery-and especially its final drawing-commanded significant public attention in London, and in which the wave of Anglo-Scots violence documented in “They beg our goods, our lands, and our lives” was triggering a spike in anti-Scots sentiment at court and in the capital. The American colony and anti-Scots sentiment had been yoked together before. In Jonson, Chapman and Marston’s 1605 Eastward Ho, Captain Seagull wishes that “a hundred thousand” of the Scots were in Virginia, “for we are all one countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them than we do here” (3.3.42-45).