part i

. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond's Sonnets xxv. ('What cruel star into this world was brought') and xxxii. ('If crost with all mishaps be my poor life') are pitched in the identical key.

{153a} Sidney's _Certain Sonnets_ (No. xiii.) appended to _Astrophel and Stella_ in the edition of 1598. In _Emaricdulfe_: _Sonnets written by E. C._, 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning 'O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,' even more closely resembles Shakespeare's sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.'s rare volume is reprinted in the _Lamport Garland_ (Roxburghe Club), 1881.

{153b} Even this sonnet is adapted from Drayton. See Sonnet xxii. in 1599 edition:

An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still . . . Thus am I still provoked to every evil By this good-wicked spirit, sweet Angel-Devil.

But Shakespeare entirely alters the point of the lines by contrasting the influence exerted on him by the woman with that exerted on him by a man.

{155} The work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his _Occasional Issues_, 1880, and extracts from it appear in the New Shakspere Society's 'Allusion Books,' i. 169 seq.

{157} W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them made some reputation in Shakespeare's day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 180 _infra_), and there was a William Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called _Chloris_ in 1595. A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter's identity with Willobie's counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has the better claim.

{161} No edition appeared before 1600, and then two were published.

{162} _Oberon's Vision_, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society), 1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth _fetes_, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576.

{163} Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844.

{164} All these details are of Shakespeare's invention, and do not figure in the old play. But in the crude induction in the old play the nondescript drunkard is named without prefix 'Slie.' That surname, although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that the old play was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play that can be associated with Warwickshire.

{165} Mr. Richard Savage, the secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, has generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he lately discovered.

{167} It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598.

{168a} The quarto of 1600 reads Woncote: all the folios read Woncot. Yet Malone in the Variorum of 1803 introduced the new and unwarranted reading of Wincot, which has been unwisely adopted by succeeding editors.

{168b} These references are convincingly explained by Mr. Justice Madden in his _Diary of Master Silence_, pp. 87 seq., 372-4. Cf. Blunt's _Dursley and its Neighbourhood_, Huntley's _Glossary of the Cotswold Dialect_, and Marshall's _Rural Economy of Cotswold_ (1796).

{170} First adopted by Theobald in 1733; cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 257.

{172a} _Remarks_, p. 295.

{172b} Cf. Shakespeare Society's reprint, 1842, ed. Halliwell.

{172c} This collection of stories is said by both Malone and Steevens to have been published in 1603, although no edition earlier than 1620 is now known. The 1620 edition of _Westward for Smelts_, _written by Kinde Kit of Kingston_, was reprinted by the Percy Society in 1848. Cf. _Shakespeare's Library_, ed. Hazlitt, I. ii. 1-80.

{174} _Diary_, p. 61; see p. 167.

{175} Nichols, _Progresses of Elizabeth_, iii. 552.

{176a} Cf. Domestic MSS. (Elizabeth) in Public Record Office, vol. cclxxviii. Nos. 78 and 85; and Calendar of Domestic State Papers, 1598-1601, pp. 575-8.

{176b} Cf. Gilchrist, _Examination of the charges_ . . . _of Jonson's Enmity towards Shakspeare_, 1808.

{177} Latten is a mixed metal resembling brass. Pistol in _Merry Wives of Windsor_ (I. i. 165) likens Slender to a 'latten bilbo,' that is, a sword made of the mixed metal. Cf. _Anecdotes and Traditions_, edited from L'Estrange's MSS. by W. J. Thoms for the Camden Society, p. 2.

{179} This, or some synonym, is the conventional epithet applied at the date to Shakespeare and his work. Weever credited such characters of Shakespeare as Tarquin, Romeo, and Richard III with 'sugred tongues' in his _Epigrams_ of 1595. In the _Return from Parnassus_ (1601?) Shakespeare is apostrophised as 'sweet Master Shakespeare.' Milton did homage to the tradition by writing of 'sweetest Shakespeare' in _L'Allegro_.

{180} A hack-writer, Wentworth Smith, took a hand in producing thirteen plays, none of which are extant, for the theatrical manager, Philip Henslowe, between 1601 and 1603. _The Hector of Germanie_, an extant play 'made by W. Smith' and published 'with new additions' in 1615, was doubtless by Wentworth Smith, and is the only dramatic work by him that has survived. Neither internal nor external evidence confirms the theory that the above-mentioned six plays, which have been wrongly claimed for Shakespeare, were really by Wentworth Smith. The use of the initials 'W.S.' was not due to the publishers' belief that Wentworth Smith was the author, but to their endeavour to delude their customers into a belief that the plays were by Shakespeare.

{181} Cf. p. 258 infra.

{182} There were twenty pieces in all. The five by Shakespeare are placed in the order i. ii. iii. v. xvi. Of the remainder, two--'If music and sweet poetry agree' (No. viii.) and 'As it fell upon a day' (No. xx.)--were borrowed from Barnfield's _Poems in divers Humours_ (1598). 'Venus with Adonis sitting by her' (No. xi.) is from Bartholomew Griffin's _Fidessa_ (1596); 'My flocks feed not' (No. xvii.) is adapted from Thomas Weelkes's _Madrigals_ (1597); 'Live with me and be my love' is by Marlowe; and the appended stanza, entitled 'Love's Answer,' by Sir Walter Ralegh (No. xix.); 'Crabbed age and youth cannot live together' (No. xii.) is a popular song often quoted by the Elizabethan dramatists. Nothing has been ascertained of the origin and history of the remaining nine poems (iv. vi. vii. ix. x. xiii. xiv. xviii.)

{184} A unique copy of Chester's _Love's Martyr_ is in Mr. Christie-Miller's library at Britwell. Of a reissue of the original edition in 1611 with a new title, _The Annals of Great Brittaine_, a copy (also unique) is in the British Museum. A reprint of the original edition was prepared for private circulation by Dr. Grosart in 1878, in his series of 'Occasional Issues.' It was also printed in the same year as one of the publications of the New Shakspere Society. Matthew Roydon in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney, appended to Spenser's _Colin Clouts Come Home Againe_, 1595, describes the part figuratively played in Sidney's obsequies by the turtle-dove, swan, phoenix, and eagle, in verses that very closely resemble Shakespeare's account of the funereal functions fulfilled by the same four birds in his contribution to Chester's volume. This resemblance suggests that Shakespeare's poem may be a fanciful adaptation of Roydon's elegiac conceits without ulterior significance. Shakespeare's concluding 'Threnos' is imitated in metre and phraseology by Fletcher in his _Mad Lover_ in the song 'The Lover's Legacy to his Cruel Mistress.'

{187} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 186.

{188a} There is an admirable discussion of the question involved in the poet's heraldry in _Herald and Genealogist_, i. 510. Facsimiles of all the documents preserved in the College of Arms are given in _Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica_, 2nd ser. 1886, i. 109. Halliwell-Phillipps prints imperfectly one of the 1596 draft-grants, and that of 1599 (_Outlines_, ii. 56, 60), but does not distinguish the character of the negotiation of the earlier year from that of the negotiation of the later year.

{188b} It is still customary at the College of Arms to inform an applicant for a coat-of-arms who has a father alive that the application should be made in the father's name, and the transaction conducted as if the father were the principal. It was doubtless on advice of this kind that Shakespeare was acting in the negotiations that are described below.

{189} In a manuscript in the British Museum (_Harl. MS._ 6140, f. 45) is a copy of the tricking of the arms of William 'Shakspere,' which is described 'as a pattent per Will'm Dethike Garter, principale King of Armes;' this is figured in French's _Shakespeareana Genealogica_, p. 524.

{190} These memoranda, which were as follows, were first written without the words here enclosed in brackets; those words were afterwards interlineated in the manuscript in a hand similar to that of the original sentences:

'[This John shoeth] A patierne therof under Clarent Cookes hand in paper. xx. years past. [The Q. officer and cheffe of the towne]

[A Justice of peace] And was a Baylife of Stratford uppo Avon xv. or xvj. years past.

That he hathe lands and tenements of good wealth and substance [500 li.]

That he mar[ried a daughter and heyre of Arden, a gent. of worship.]'

{191} 'An exemplification' was invariably secured more easily than a new grant of arms. The heralds might, if they chose, tacitly accept, without examination, the applicant's statement that his family had borne arms long ago, and they thereby regarded themselves as relieved of the obligation of close inquiry into his present status.

{192a} On the gravestone of John Hall, Shakespeare's elder son-in-law, the Shakespeare arms are similarly impaled with those of Hall.

{192b} French, _Genealogica Shakespeareana_, p. 413.

{193} The details of Brooke's accusation are not extant, and are only to be deduced from the answer of Garter and Clarenceux to Brooke's complaint, two copies of which are accessible: one is in the vol. W-Z at the Heralds' College, f. 276; and the other, slightly differing, is in Ashmole MS. 846, ix. f. 50. Both are printed in the _Herald and Genealogist_, i. 514.

{194a} _Notes and Queries_, 8th ser. v. 478.

{194b} The tradition that Shakespeare planted the mulberry tree was not put on record till it was cut down in 1758. In 1760 mention is made of it in a letter of thanks in the corporation's archives from the Steward of the Court of Record to the corporation of Stratford for presenting him with a standish made from the wood. But, according to the testimony of old inhabitants confided to Malone (cf. his _Life of Shakespeare_, 1790, p. 118), the legend had been orally current in Stratford since Shakespeare's lifetime. The tree was perhaps planted in 1609, when a Frenchman named Veron distributed a number of young mulberry trees through the midland counties by order of James I, who desired to encourage the culture of silkworms (cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 134, 411-16).

{197a} I do not think we shall over-estimate the present value of Shakespeare's income if we multiply each of its items by eight, but it is difficult to state authoritatively the ratio between the value of money in Shakespeare's time and in our own. The money value of corn then and now is nearly identical; but other necessaries of life--meat, milk, eggs, wool, building materials, and the like--were by comparison ludicrously cheap in Shakespeare's day. If we strike the average between the low price of these commodities and the comparatively high price of corn, the average price of necessaries will be found to be in Shakespeare's day about an eighth of what it is now. The cost of luxuries is also now about eight times the price that it was in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Sixpence was the usual price of a new quarto or octavo book such as would now be sold at prices ranging between three shillings and sixpence and six shillings. Half a crown was charged for the best-placed seats in the best theatres. The purchasing power of one Elizabethan pound might be generally defined in regard to both necessaries and luxuries as equivalent to that of eight pounds of the present currency.

{197b} Cf. Henslowe's _Diary_, ed. Collier, pp. xxviii seq. After the Restoration the receipts at the third performance were given for the author's 'benefit.'

{199a} _Return from Parnassus_, V. i. 10-16.

{199b} Cf. H[enry] P[arrot]'s _Laquei Ridiculosi or Springes for Woodcocks_, 1613, Epigram No. 131, headed 'Theatrum Licencia:'

Cotta's become a player most men know, And will no longer take such toyling paines; For here's the spring (saith he) whence pleasures flow And brings them damnable excessive gaines: That now are cedars growne from shrubs and sprigs, Since Greene's _Tu Quoque_ and those Garlicke Jigs.

Greens _Tu Quoque_ was a popular comedy that had once been performed at Court by the Queen's players, and 'Garlicke Jigs' alluded derisively to drolling entertainments, interspersed with dances, which won much esteem from patrons of the smaller playhouses.

{200} The documents which are now in the Public Record Office among the papers relating to the Lord Chamberlain's Office, were printed in full by Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19.

{202} In 1613 Robert Daborne, a playwright of insignificant reputation, charged for a drama as much as 25 pounds. _Alleyn Papers_, ed. Collier, p. 65.

{203} Ten pounds was the ordinary fee paid to actors for a performance at the Court of James I. Shakespeare's company appeared annually twenty times and more at Whitehall during the early years of James I's reign, and Shakespeare, as being both author and actor, doubtless received a larger share of the receipts than his colleagues.

{204a} Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, i. 312-19; Fleay, _Stage_, pp. 324-8

{204b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 17-19.

{206a} See p. 195.

{206b} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 77-80.

{208} _Accounts of the Revels_, ed. Peter Cunningham (Shakespeare Society), p. 177; _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, iii. 406.

{210a} It was reproduced by the Hakluyt Society to accompany _The Voyages and Workes of John Davis the Navigator_, ed. Captain A. H. Markham, 1880. Cf. Mr. Coote's note on the _New Map_, lxxxv-xcv. A paper on the subject by Mr. Coote also appears in _New Shakspere Society's Transactions_, 1877-9, pt. i. 88-100.

{210b} _Diary_, Camden Soc. p. 18; the Elizabethan Stage Society repeated the play on the same stage on February 10, 11 and 12, 1897.

{210c} Bandello's _Novelle_, ii. 36.

{211a} First published in 1579; 2nd edit. 1595.

{211b} _Hamlet_, III. ii. 109-10.

{213a} On December 31, 1601, the Lords of the Council sent letters to the Lord Mayor of London and to the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex expressing their surprise that no steps had yet been taken to limit the number of playhouses in accordance with 'our order set down and prescribed about a year and a half since.' But nothing followed, and no more was heard officially of the Council's order until 1619, when the Corporation of London remarked on its practical abrogation at the same time as they directed the suppression (which was not carried out) of the Blackfriars Theatre. All the documents on this subject are printed from the Privy Council Register by Halliwell-Phillipps, 307-9.

{213b} The passage, act ii. sc. ii. 348-394, which deals in ample detail with the subject, only appears in the folio version of 1623. In the First Quarto a very curt reference is made to the misfortunes of the 'tragedians of the city:'

'Y' faith, my lord, noveltie carries it away, For the principal publike audience that Came to them are turned to private playes And to the humours of children.'

'Private playes' were plays acted by amateurs, with whom the 'Children' might well be classed.

{214a} All recent commentators follow Steevens in interpreting the 'late innovation' as the Order of the Privy Council of June 1600, restricting the number of the London playhouses to two; but that order, which was never put in force, in no way affected the actors' fortunes. The First Quarto's reference to the perils attaching to the 'noveltie' of the boys' performances indicates the true meaning.

{214b} _Hamlet_, II. ii. 349-64.

{215} At the moment offensive personalities seemed to have infected all the London theatres. On May 10, 1601, the Privy Council called the attention of the Middlesex magistrates to the abuse covertly levelled by the actors of the 'Curtain' at gentlemen 'of good desert and quality,' and directed the magistrates to examine all plays before they were produced (_Privy Council Register_). Jonson subsequently issued an 'apologetical dialogue' (appended to printed copies of the _Poetaster_), in which he somewhat truculently qualified his hostility to the players:

'Now for the players 'tis true I tax'd them And yet but some, and those so sparingly As all the rest might have sat still unquestioned, Had they but had the wit or conscience To think well of themselves. But impotent they Thought each man's vice belonged to their whole tribe; And much good do it them. What they have done against me I am not moved with, if it gave them meat Or got them clothes, 'tis well; that was their end, Only amongst them I am sorry for Some better natures by the rest so drawn To run in that vile line.'

{217} See p. 229, note I, _ad fin_.

{218} The proposed identification of Virgil in the 'Poetaster' with Chapman has little to recommend it. Chapman's literary work did not justify the commendations which were bestowed on Virgil in the play.

{220} The most scornful criticism that Jonson is known to have passed on any composition by Shakespeare was aimed at a passage in _Julius Caesar_, and as Jonson's attack is barely justifiable on literary grounds, it is fair to assume that the play was distasteful to him from other considerations. 'Many times,' Jonson wrote of Shakespeare in his _Timber_, 'hee fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter: As when hee said in the person of _Caesar_, one speaking to him [_i.e._ Caesar]; _Caesar_, _thou dost me wrong_. Hee [_i.e._ Caesar] replyed: _Caesar did never wrong_, _butt with just cause_: and such like, which were ridiculous.' Jonson derisively quoted the same passage in the induction to _The Staple of News_ (1625): 'Cry you mercy, you did not wrong but with just cause.' Possibly the words that were ascribed by Jonson to Shakespeare's character of _Caesar_ appeared in the original version of the play, but owing perhaps to Jonson's captious criticism they do not figure in the Folio version, the sole version that has reached us. The only words there that correspond with Jonson's quotation are Caesar's remark:

Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause Will he be satisfied

(III. i. 47-8). The rhythm and sense seem to require the reinsertion after the word 'wrong' of the phrase 'but with just cause,' which Jonson needlessly reprobated. Leonard Digges (1588-1635), one of Shakespeare's admiring critics, emphasises the superior popularity of Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ in the theatre to Ben Jonson's Roman play of _Catiline_, in his eulogistic lines on Shakespeare (published after Digges's death in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare's _Poems_):

So have I seen when Caesar would appear, And on the stage at half-sword parley were Brutus and Cassius--oh, how the audience Were ravish'd, with what wonder they went thence When some new day they would not brook a line Of tedious, though well laboured, Catiline.

{221} I wrote on this point in the article on Thomas Kyd in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ (vol. xxxi.): 'The argument in favour of Kyd's authorship of a pre-Shakespearean play (now lost) on the subject of Hamlet deserves attention. Nash in 1589, when describing [in his preface to _Menaphon_] the typical literary hack, who at almost every point suggests Kyd, notices that in addition to his other accomplishments "he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Other references in popular tracts and plays of like date prove that in an early tragedy concerning Hamlet there was a ghost who cried repeatedly, "Hamlet, revenge!" and that this expression took rank in Elizabethan slang beside the vernacular quotations from [Kyd's sanguinary tragedy of] _Jeronimo_, such as "What outcry calls me from my naked bed," and "Beware, Hieronimo, go by, go by." The resemblance between the stories of _Hamlet_ and _Jeronimo_ suggests that the former would have supplied Kyd with a congenial plot. In _Jeronimo_ a father seeks to avenge his son's murder; in _Hamlet_ the theme is the same with the position of father and son reversed. In _Jeronimo_ the avenging father resolves to reach his end by arranging for the performance of a play in the presence of those whom he suspects of the murder of his son, and there is good ground for crediting the lost tragedy of _Hamlet_ with a similar play-scene. Shakespeare's debt to the lost tragedy is a matter of conjecture, but the stilted speeches of the play-scene in his _Hamlet_ read like intentional parodies of Kyd's bombastic efforts in _The Spanish Tragedy_, and it is quite possible that they were directly suggested by an almost identical episode in a lost _Hamlet_ by the same author.' Shakespeare elsewhere shows acquaintance with Kyd's work. He places in the mouth of Kit Sly in the _Taming of the Shrew_ the current phrase 'Go by, Jeronimy,' from _The Spanish Tragedy_. Shakespeare quotes verbatim a line from the same piece in _Much Ado about Nothing_ (I. i. 271): 'In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke;' but Kyd practically borrowed that line from Watson's _Passionate Centurie_ (No. xlvii.), where Shakespeare may have met it.

{222} Cf. Gericke and Max Moltke, _Hamlet-Quellen_, Leipzig, 1881. The story was absorbed into Scandinavian mythology: cf. _Ambales-Saga_, edited by Mr. Israel Gollancz, 1898.

{224} Cf. _Hamlet_--parallel texts of the first and second quarto, and first folio--ed. Wilhelm Vietor, Marburg, 1891; _The Devonshire Hamlets_, 1860, parallel texts of the two quartos edited by Mr. Sam Timmins; _Hamlet_, ed. George Macdonald, 1885, a study with the text of the folio.

{226a} Arber's _Transcript of the Stationers' Registers_, iii. 226.

{226b} _Ib._ iii. 400.

{228} Less satisfactory is the endeavour that has been made by Mr. F. G. Fleay and Mr. George Wyndham to treat _Troilus and Cressida_ as Shakespeare's contribution to the embittered controversy of 1601-2, between Jonson on the one hand and Marston and Dekker and their actor friends on the other hand, and to represent the play as a pronouncement against Jonson. According to this fanciful view, Shakespeare held up Jonson to savage ridicule in Ajax, while in Thersites he denounced Marston, despite Marston's intermittent antagonism to Jonson, which entitled him to freedom from attack by Jonson's foes. The appearance of the word 'mastic' in the line (1. iii. 73) 'When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws' is treated as proof of Shakespeare's identification of Thersites with Marston, who used the pseudonym 'Therio-mastix' in his _Scourge of Villainy_. It would be as reasonable to identify him with Dekker, who wrote the greater part of _Satiro-mastix_. 'Mastic' is doubtless an adjective formed without recondite significance from the substantive 'mastic,' _i.e._ the gum commonly used at the time for stopping decayed teeth. No hypothesis of a polemical intention is needed to account for Shakespeare's conception of Ajax or Thersites. There is no trait in either character as depicted by Shakespeare which a reading of Chapman's _Homer_ would fail to suggest. The controversial interpretation of the play is in conflict with chronology (for _Troilus_ cannot, on any showing, be assigned to the period of the war between Jonson and Dekker, in 1601-2), and it seems confuted by the facts and arguments already adduced in the discussion of the theatrical conflict (see pp. 213-219). If more direct disproof be needed, it may be found in Shakespeare's prologue to _Troilus_, where there is a good-humoured and expressly pacific allusion to the polemical aims of Jonson's _Poetaster_. Jonson had introduced into his play 'an _armed_ prologue' on account, he asserted, of his enemies' menaces. Shakespeare, after describing in his prologue to _Troilus_ the progress of the Trojan war before his story opened, added that his 'prologue' presented itself '_arm'd_,' not to champion 'author's pen or actor's voice,' but simply to announce in a guise befitting the warlike subject-matter that the play began in the middle of the conflict between Greek and Trojan, and not at the beginning. These words of Shakespeare put out of court any interpretation of Shakespeare's play that would represent it as a contribution to the theatrical controversy.

{230} _England's Mourning Garment_, 1603, sign. D. 3.

{231} At the same time the Earl of Worcester's company was taken into the Queen's patronage, and its members were known as 'the Queen's servants,' while the Earl of Nottingham's company was taken into the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince's servants. This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his _Time Triumphant_, 1604, sig. B.

{232a} The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham's _Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court_, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham's transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (_Audit Office_--_Declared Accounts_--Treasurer of the Chamber, bundle 388, roll 41) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. _Cal. State Papers_, Dom. 1603-10) pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that _As You Like It_ was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence.

{232b} The grant is transcribed in the New Shakspere Society's _Transactions_, 1877-9, Appendix ii., from the Lord Chamberlain's papers in the Public Record Office, where it is now numbered 660. The number allotted it in the _Transactions_ is obsolete.

{233a} A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen's players acting at the Fortune and the Prince's players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King's players, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner's _Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts_, pp. 26-7). Collier printed it in his _New Facts_ with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured.

{233b} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his _Outlines_, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable's visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days' attendance with four men to direct the entertainments 'at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne' (Public Record Office, _Declared Accounts_, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable's honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29--the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King's guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow's _Chronicle_, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, _Relacion de la jornada del exc__mo__ Condestabile de Castilla_, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis's _Original Letters_, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was

## partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye's _England as seen by Foreigners_, pp.

117-124).

{234} At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I's reign. These documents show that Shakespeare's company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1605.

{235} These dates are drawn from a memorandum of plays performed at Court in 1604 and 1605 which is among Malone's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was obviously derived by Malone from authentic documents that were in his day preserved at the Audit Office in Somerset House. The document cannot now be traced at the Public Record Office, whither the Audit Office papers have been removed since Malone's death. Peter Cunningham professed to print the original document in his accounts of the revels at Court (Shakespeare Society, 1842, pp. 203 _et seq._), but there is no doubt that he forged his so-called transcript, and that the additions which he made to Malone's memorandum were the outcome of his fancy. Collier's assertion in his _New Particulars_, p. 57, that _Othello_ was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton's residence at Harefield on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere's MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton's household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his _Egerton Papers_ (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be 'a shameful forgery' (cf. Ingleby's _Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy_, 1861, pp. 261-5).

{237} Dr. Garnett's _Italian Literature_, 1898, p. 227.

{239} Cf. Letter by Mrs. Stopes in _Athenaeum_, July 25, 1896.

{240} Cf. _Macbeth_, ed. Clark and Wright, Clarendon Press Series.

{241a} This fact is stated on the title-page of the quartos.

{241b} Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled 'The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his blind son; first related by the son, then by his blind father' (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590 4to; pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.)

{242} It was edited for the Shakespeare Society in 1842 by Dyce, who owned the manuscript.

{245} Mr. George Wyndham in his introduction to his edition of North's _Plutarch_, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of Shakespeare's play to Plutarch's life of Antonius.

{246} See the whole of Coriolanus's great speech on offering his services to Aufidius, the Volscian general, IV. v. 71-107:

My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done To thee particularly and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may My surname, Coriolanus . . . to do thee service.

North's translation of Plutarch gives in almost the same terms Coriolanus's speech on the occasion. It opens: 'I am Caius Martius, who hath done to thyself particularly, and to all the Volsces generally, great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my surname of Coriolanus that I bear.' Similarly Volumnia's stirring appeal to her son and her son's proffer of submission, in act V. sc. iii. 94-193, reproduce with equal literalness North's rendering of Plutarch. 'If we held our peace, my son,' Volumnia begins in North, 'the state of our raiment would easily betray to thee what life we have led at home since thy exile and abode abroad; but think now with thyself,' and so on. The first sentence of Shakespeare's speech runs:

Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment And state of bodies would bewray what life We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself . . .

{249} See p. 172 and note 2.

{250} In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as 'past grace' in the theological sense. In I. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks: 'If it be a sin to make a true election, she is damned.'

{251a} See p. 255, note I. Camillo's reflections (I. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who 'struck anointed kings' have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as specially designed to gratify James I.

{251b} _Conversations with Drummond_, p. 16.

{251c} In _Winter's Tale_ (IV. iv. 760 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that the clown's son 'shall be flayed alive; then 'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp's nest,' &c. In Boccaccio's story the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare's Iachimo), after 'being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,' was 'to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies wherewith that country abounded' (cf. _Decameron_, translated by John Payne, 1893, i. 164).

{253a} Printed in Cohn's _Shakespeare in Germany_.

{253b} Golding's translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, edit. 1612, p. 82 _b_. The passage begins:

Ye ayres and windes, ye elves of hills, ye brookes and woods alone.

{254} _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821, xv. 423. In the early weeks of 1611 Shakespeare's company presented no fewer than fifteen plays at Court. Payment of 150 pounds was made to the actors for their services on February 12, 1610-11. The council's warrant is extant in the _Bodleian Library MS._ Rawl. A 204 (f. 305). The plays performed were not specified by name, but some by Shakespeare were beyond doubt amongst them, and possibly 'The Tempest.' A forged page which was inserted in a detached account-book of the Master of the Court-Revels for the years 1611 and 1612 at the Public Record Office, and was printed as genuine in Peter Cunningham's _Extracts from the Revels' Accounts_, p. 210, supplies among other entries two to the effect that 'The Tempest' was performed at Whitehall at Hallowmas (_i.e._ November 1) 1611 and that 'A Winter's Tale' followed four days later, on November 5. Though these entries are fictitious, the information they offer may be true. Malone doubtless based his positive statement respecting the date of the composition of 'The Tempest' in 1611 on memoranda made from papers then accessible at the Audit Office, but now, since the removal of those archives to the Public Record Office, mislaid. All the forgeries introduced into the Revels' accounts are well considered and show expert knowledge (see p. 235, note I). The forger of the 1612 entries probably worked either on the published statement of Malone, or on fuller memoranda left by him among his voluminous manuscripts.

{255a} Cf. _Universal Review_, April 1889, article by Dr. Richard Garnett.

{255b} Harmonised scores of Johnson's airs for the songs 'Full Fathom Five' and 'Where the Bee sucks,' are preserved in Wilson's _Cheerful Ayres or Ballads set for three voices_, 1660.

{257a} Cf. Browning, _Caliban upon Setebos_; Daniel Wilson, _Caliban_, _or the Missing Link_ (1873); and Renan, _Caliban_ (1878), a drama continuing Shakespeare's play.

{257b} When Shakespeare wrote _Troilus and Cressida_ he had formed some conception of a character of the Caliban type. Thersites say of Ajax (III. iii. 264), 'He's grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster.'

{258a} Treasurer's accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), printed in New Shakspere Society's _Transactions_, 1895-6,

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