"The King and the Beggar-maid" is a 16th-century broadside ballad that tells the story of an African king, Cophetua, and his love for the beggar Penelophon (Shakespearean Zenelophon). The story has been widely referenced and King Cophetua has become a byword for "a man who falls in love with a woman instantly and proposes marriage immediately". Story Cophetua is an African king known for his lack of sexual attraction to women. One day, looking out of a palace window, he witnesses a young beggar, Penelophon, "clad all in grey". Struck by love at first sight, Cophetua decides that he will either have the beggar as his wife or commit suicide. Walking out into the street, he scatters coins for the beggars to gather and when Penelophon comes forward, he tells her that she is to be his wife. She agrees and becomes queen, and soon loses all trace of her former poverty and low class. The couple lives "a quiet life during their princely reign" and are much loved by their people. Eventually they die and are buried in the same tomb. History William Shakespeare mentions the ballad by title in several plays. It is referenced or alluded in Love's Labour's Lost (I, ii, 115 and V. i. 65–85), A Midsummer Night's Dream (IV, i, 65), Romeo and Juliet (II, i, 14), Richard II (V, viii, 80), and Henry IV, part 2 (V, iii, 107), all written in the 1590s. William Warburton believed that John Falstaff's lines in Henry IV, part 2, referencing Cophetua were taken from a now lost play based on the ballad. In Love's Labour's Lost, Armado asks his page Moth, "Is there not a ballad, boy, of 'The King and the Beggar'?", to which Moth responds, "The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since, but I think now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing nor the tune." Ben Jonson also makes reference to the ballad in his play Every Man in His Humour (1598) and William Davenant in The Wits (1634). The oldest version of the tale surviving is that titled "A Song of a Beggar and a King" in Richard Johnson's anthology Crown Garland of Goulden Roses (1612). This was the source of the ballad in the first edition of Francis J. Child's The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1855),