19. That Julius Caesar also belongs to 1599 is shown, not only by its links with Henry V. but also by an allusion to it in John Weever's Mirror of Martyrs, a work written two years before its publication in 16o1, and by a notice of a performance on Sept. 21, 1599, by Thomas Platter of Basle in an account of a visit to London. This was the first of Shakespeare's Roman plays, and, like those that followed, was based upon Plutarch's Lives as translated from the French of Jacques Amyot and published by Sir Thomas North in 1580.
20. It is reported by John Dennis, in the preface to The Comi cal Gallant (1702), that The Merry Wives of Windsor was writ ten at the express desire of Elizabeth, who wished to see Falstaff in love, and was finished by Shakespeare in the space of a fort night. A date at the end of 1599 or the beginning of 1600, shortly after the completion of the historical Falstaff plays, would be the most natural one for this enterprise, and with such a date the evidence of style agrees. The play was entered in the Sta tioners' Register on Jan. 18, 1602. The First Quarto of the same year gives a surreptitious text, which was replaced by that of the First Folio. The Windsor setting makes it possible that The Merry Wives was produced within the castle, and perhaps with the assistance of the children of Windsor chapel in the fairy parts. The plot has its analogies to various incidents in Italian novelle and in English adaptations of these.
21. As You Like It was one of the plays "stayed" from publi cation in 1600, and cannot therefore be later than that year. Some trifling bits of evidence suggest that it is not earlier than 1599. The plot is based upon Thomas Lodge's romance of Rosalynde (159o), and this in part upon the pseudo-Chaucerian Tale of Gamelyn.
22. Twelfth Night may be placed about i600--or, since it quotes part of a song included in Robert Jones's First Book of Songs and Airs (i600), and is recorded by John Manningham to have been seen by him at a feast in the Middle Temple hall on Feb. 2, 1602. The principal source of the plot was Barnabe
Riche's "History of Apolonius and Silla" in his Farewell to Mili tary Profession ( I 581).
23. A play of Hamlet was performed, probably by the Cham berlain's men, for Henslowe at Newington Butts on June 9, 1594.
There are other references to it as a revenge-play, and it seems to have been in existence in some shape as early as 1589. It was doubtless on the basis of this that Shakespeare constructed his tragedy. There is an allusion in Hamlet to the rivalry between the ordinary stages and the private plays given by boy actors, which points to a date not earlier than the revival of the plays at Paul's, which was probably in 1599, and another, to an inhibi tion of plays on account of a "late innovation," may also be explained by the revival rather than by the Essex rising of 1601, since the play is mentioned in a manuscript note by Gabriel Harvey, probably written before the death of Essex. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on July 26, 1602. The First Quarto was printed in 1603 and the Second Quarto in These editions contain texts whose differences from each other and from that of the First Folio constitute one of the most diffi cult of Shakespearian problems. The First Quarto is certainly surreptitious. Its title-page records performances in the Univer sities of Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere, as well as in Lon don. The ultimate source of the plot is to be found in Scandina vian legends preserved in the Historia Danica of Saxo Grammat icus, and transmitted to Shakespeare or his predecessor through the Histoires Tragiques (157o) of Francois de Belleforest (see