So does he mean a jakes-farmer, who might be called a jakes handler? Ie someone who empties privies, a specialist in smells. Must be said, can’t find any support for “handle” = “handler”, so one might need to imagine a misprint and it’s all a bit sketchy. But I bet it’s to do with smells.

How about : It’s widely believed in the period that “A long Nose … may be some advantage to the Sence of smelling”. Jakeses famous for, above all, their smells, so that sounds like it should be a connection. Next ex is of a “trade” that a deformity fits you to do, so this one might be too.

On a harder look, you’re entirely right! No obvious trace of jakes handles or anything like them in EEBO.

“To the washers stopple, must be a stemme of yron as bigge as a curten rod, strong and euen and perpendicular.” So perhaps it's that...

Right here! Sir John Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), STC 12772, describes his new invention, the flushing toilet. It specifies what sounds like a long handle to control the flow of water into the toilet bowl:

“The Elizabeth edge”, he concludes, “could be crossed, contested, or ceded—regardless of the Stuart king’s opinions to the contrary.”

And yet, Aidan argues after close analysis, plays are slippery things: these four texts appear to invoke “Elizabeth as an edge who repels the forces of Catholicism, but as contemporary audiences knew, edges do permit a certain level of two-way traffic.”

All these Stuart plays, Aidan suggests, to an extent try to “use the last Tudor monarch to present a triumphalist view of England’s Protestantism and to encourage stronger forms of popular anti-Catholicism” – an idea of Elizabeth as a weapon. These are not Elizabethan versions of Elizabeth.

(There is also a lovely section on one of my favourite good bad early modern plays, Daubridgcourt Belchier’s irresistibly titled Hans Beer-Pot his Invisible Comedy of See Me and See Me Not.)

Aidan uses this construction of Elizabeth to read principally four different Stuart dramatic representations of her – Heywood’s If You Know Not Me; Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon; Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII; and Sampson’s The Vow Breaker.

Aidan’s essay is anchored by a Stuart rhyme which functioned as Elizabeth’s most popular epitaph, widespread in manuscript and also carved at least twelve London churches. It goes: