34. Cymbeline shows a further development than Pericles in the direction of Shakespeare's final style, and can hardly have come earlier. A description of it is in a note-book of Simon Forman, who died in Sept. 1611, and describes in the same book other plays seen by him in 1610 and 1611. But these were not necessarily new plays, and Cymbeline may perhaps be assigned conjecturally to 5609. The masque-like dream in act v. sc. 4 must be an interpolation by another hand. This play also is based upon a widespread story, probably known to Shakespeare in Boccaccio's Decameron (day 2, novel 9), and possibly also in an English book of tales called Westward for Smelts. The historical part is, as usual, from Holinshed.
35. The Winter's Tale was seen by Forman on May 15, 1611, and as it clearly belongs to the latest group of plays it may well enough have been produced in that or the preceding year. A docu ment amongst the Revels Accounts, also now cleared of the impu tation of forgery, gives Nov. 5, 1611, as the date of a performance at court. The play is recorded to have been licensed by Sir George Buck, who began to license plays in 1607. The plot is from Robert Greene's Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Doras tus and Fawnia ( I 588) .
36. The wedding-masque in act iv. of The Tempest has suggest ed the possibility that it may have been composed to celebrate the marriage of the princess Elizabeth and Frederick V., the elector palatine, on Feb. 14, 1613. But the document amongst the Revels Accounts gives the precise date of Nov. 1, 1611, for a per formance at court. Sylvester Jourdan's A Discovery of the Ber mudas, containing an account of the shipwreck of Sir George Somers in 1609, was published about Oct. 161o, and this or some other contemporary narrative of Virginian colonization probably furnished the hint of the plot.
37. It may now be accepted as a settled result of scholarship that Henry VIII. is the result of collaboration, and that one of the collaborators was Fletcher. There is no good reason to doubt that the other was Shakespeare, although attempts have been made to substitute Philip Massinger. The inclusion, however, of the play in the First Folio must be regarded as conclusive against this theory. There is some ground for suspicion that the collaborators may have had an earlier work of Shakespeare before them, and this would explain the reversion to the "history" type of play which Shakespeare had long abandoned. His share ap pears to consist of act i. scc. 1, 2; act ii. scc. 3, 4; act iii. sc. 2, 11. 1-203 ; act v. sc. I. The play was probably produced in 1613, and originally bore the alternative title of All is True. It was
being performed in the Globe on June 29, 1613, when the thatch caught fire and the theatre was burnt. The principal source was Holinshed, but Hall's Union of Lancaster and York, Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the Church, and perhaps Samuel Rowley's play of When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), appear also to have contributed.
38. The tale of the First Folio dramas is now complete, but an analysis of The Two Noble Kinsmen leaves no reason to doubt the accuracy of its ascription on the title-page of the First Quarto of 1634 to Shakespeare and John Fletcher. This appears to have been a case of ordinary collaboration. There is sufficient resemblance between the styles of the two writers to render the division of the play between them a matter of some difficulty; but the parts that may probably be assigned to Shakespeare are acts i. scc. I-4, ii. ; iii. 1, 2; V. I, 3, 4. Fletcher's morris-dance in act iii. sc. 5 is borrowed from that in Beaumont's Mask of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn, given on Feb. 20, 1613, and the play may perhaps be dated in 1613. It is based on Chaucer's Knight's Tale.
Shakespeare's writings outside the field of drama are not numerous. The narrative poem of Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers' Register on April 18, 1593, and 17 editions, dating from 1593 to 1675, are known. The Rape of Lucrece was entered in the Register on May 9, 1594, and the nine extant editions range from 1594 to 1655. Each poem is prefaced by a dedicatory epistle from the author to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. The subjects, taken respectively from the Meta morphoses and the Fasti of Ovid, were frequent in Renaissance literature. It was once supposed that Shakespeare came from Stratford-on-Avon with Venus and Adonis in his pocket; but it is more likely that both poems owe their origin to the comparative leisure afforded to playwrights and actors by the plague-period of 1592-94. In 1599 the stationer William Jaggard published a volume of miscellaneous verse which he called The Passionate Pilgrim, and placed Shakespeare's name on the title-page. Only two of the pieces included herein are certainly Shakespeare's, and although others may quite possibly be his, the authority of the volume is destroyed by the fact that some of its contents are without doubt the work of Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Barnfield and Bartholomew Griffin. In 1601 Shakespeare con tributed The Phoenix and the Turtle, an elegy on an unknown pair of wedded lovers, to a volume called Love's Martyr, or Rosalin's Complaint, collected and mainly written by Robert Chester.