5. To the winter season of 1592-93 may also be assigned with fair probability Shakespeare's first experimental comedy, The Comedy of Errors, and if his writing at one and the same time for Pembroke's and for another company is not regarded as beyond the bounds of conjecture, it becomes tempting to identify this with "the gelyous comodey" produced, probably by Strange's men, for Henslowe as a new play on Jan. 5, 1593. The play contains a reference to the wars of succession in France which would fit any date from 1589 to 1594. The plot is taken from the Menaechmi and to a smaller extent from the Amphitruo of Plautus. William Warner's translation of the Menaechmi was entered in the Stationers' Register on June io, 1594. A per formance of The Comedy of Errors by "a company of base and common fellows" (including Shakespeare?) is recorded in the Gesta Grayorum as taking place in Gray's Inn hall on Dec. 28, 6. Titus Andronicus is another play in which many scholars have refused to see the hand of Shakespeare, but the double testi mony of its inclusion in Meres's list and in the First Folio makes it unreasonable to deny him some part in it. This may, however, only have been the part of a reviser, working upon the dialogue rather than the structure of a crude tragedy of the school of Kyd. In fact a stage tradition is reported by Edward Ravenscroft, a late 17th century adapter of the play, to the effect that Shake speare did no more than give a few "master-touches" to the work of a "private author." The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on Feb. 6, 1594, and was published in the same year with a title-page setting out that it had been acted by the companies of Lords Derby (i.e., Strange, who had succeeded to his father's title on Sept. 25, 1593), Pembroke and Sussex. It is natural to take this list as indicating the order in which the three companies named had to do with it, but it is probable that only Sussex's had played the extant version. Henslowe records the production by this company of Titus Andronicus as a new play on Jan. 23, only a few days before the theatres were closed by plague. For the purposes of Henslowe's financial arrangements with the company a rewritten play may have been classed as new. Two years earlier he had appended the same description to a play of Tittus and Vespacia, produced by Strange's men on April i 1, 1592. At first sight the title suggests a piece founded on the lives of the emperors Titus and Vespasian, but there are some grounds, although far from conclusive, for supposing the play to have been an early version of Titus Andronicus. It is difficult to explain the company names on the title-page unless there had been some ver sion earlier than that of 1594. Pembroke's men are known from a letter of Henslowe's to have been ruined by Aug. 1593, and it is to be suspected that Sussex's, who appeared in London for the first time at the Christmas of 1593, acquired their stock of plays and transferred these to the Chamberlain's men, when the companies were again reconstituted in the summer of 1594. Whatever work Shakespeare did on Titus Andronicus may have been accomplished in the interval between these two transactions. The Chamber lain's men were apparently playing Andronicus in June. The stock of Pembroke's men probably included, as well as Titus and Vespasian, both Henry VI. and Richard III., which also thus passed to the Chamberlain's company. The source of the plot is unknown ; there are only slight hints for it in Byzantine chronicles.
7. An old play of The Taming of a Shrew, which can be traced back as far as 1589, was published as acted by Pembroke's men in 1594. In June of that year it was being acted by the Chamber lain's, but more probably in the version by Shakespeare, which bears the slightly altered title of The Taming of the Shrew. This is a much more free adaptation of its original than had been at tempted in the case of Henry VI., and the Warwickshire allusions in the Induction are noteworthy. Some critics have doubted, prob ably with justice, whether Shakespeare was the sole author of The Shrew, and others have assigned him a share in A Shrew, but this theory has no substantial foundation. The origins of the play, which is to be classed as a farce rather than a comedy, are to be found ultimately in widely distributed folk-tales, and more im mediately in Ariosto's I Suppositi (15o9) as translated in George Gascoigne's The Supposes (1566). It may have been Shake
speare's first task for the newly established Chamberlain's com pany of 1594 to furbish up the old farce. Thenceforward there is no reason to think that he ever wrote for any other company.
8. No very definite evidence exists for the date of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, other than the mention of it in Palladis Tamia. It is evidently a more rudimentary essay in the genre of romantic comedy than The Merchant of Venice, with which it has other affinities in its Italian colouring and its use of the inter relations of love and friendship as a theme ; and it may be roughly assigned to the winter of 1594-95. The plot is drawn from vari ous examples of contemporary fiction, especially from the story of the shepherdess Filismena in Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1559). A play of Felix and Philiomena had already been given at court in 1585.
9. Love's Labour's Lost has often been regarded as the first of Shakespeare's plays, and has sometimes been placed as early as 1589. There is, however, no proof that Shakespeare was writing so soon. The characters of Love's Labour's Lost are evidently sug gested by Henry of Navarre, his followers Biron, Longueville and D'Aumont, who has probably been confused with the Catholic League leader, the duc de Maine. These personages would have been familiar at any time from 1591 onwards, but Navarrese his tory of 1578 has also been drawn upon, and the channel of trans mission to Shakespeare is unknown. The absence of the play from the lists in Henslowe's Diary does not leave it impossible that it should have preceded the formation of the Chamberlain's com pany, but certainly renders this less likely; and its lyric character perhaps justifies its being grouped with the other lyric plays of 1594-96. No entry of the play is found in the Stationers' Regis ter, and it is quite possible that the present First Quarto of 1598 was not really the first edition. The title-page professes to give the play as "corrected and augmented" and as given at the Christ mas of 1597. It was again revived for that of 1604. No literary source is known for its incidents.
10. Romeo and Juliet, which was published in 1597 as played by Lord Hunsdon's men, was probably produced somewhat before A Midsummer Night's Dream, as its incidents seem to have sug gested the parody of the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude. An at tempt to date it in 1591 is hardly justified by the Nurse's refer ence to an earthquake 11 years before and the fact that there was a real earthquake in London in 1580. The text of the First Quarto is surreptitious, and was "corrected, augmented and amended" in the Second Quarto of 1599. There had been an earlier play on the subject, but the immediate source used by Shakespeare was Arthur Brooke's narrative poem Romeus and Juliet (1562).
11. Richard II. can be dated with some accuracy by a com parison of the two editions of Samuel Daniel's narrative poem on The Civil Wars Between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York, both of which bear the date of 1595 and were therefore issued be tween March 25, 1595, and March 24, 1596, of the modern reck oning. It is possible that a performance was given before Sir Robert Cecil in Dec. 1595. The second of these editions, but not the first, contains some close parallels to the play. From the first two quartos of Richard II., published in 1597 and 1598, the deposition scene was omitted, although it was clearly part of the original structure of the play, and its removal leaves an obvious mutilation in the text. There is some reason to suppose that this was due to a popular tendency to draw seditious par allels between Richard and Elizabeth ; and it became one of the charges against the earl of Essex and his fellow-conspirators in the abortive emeute of Feb. i6oT, that they had procured a per formance of a play on Richard's fate in order to stimulate their followers. As the actors were the Lord Chamberlain's men, this play can hardly have been any other than Shakespeare's. The dep osition scene was not printed until after Elizabeth's death, in the Third Quarto of 1608.