William 1564-1616 Shakespeare

12. A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its masque-like scenes of fairydom and the epithalamium at its close, has all the air of having been written less for the public stage than for some courtly wedding ; and the compliment paid by Oberon to the "fair vestal throned by the west" makes it possible that it was a wedding at which Elizabeth was present. Many more or less plausible occasions have been suggested. The wedding of Mary countess of Southampton with Sir Thomas Heneage on May 2, would fit the May-day setting of the plot but a widowed countess hardly answers to the "little western flower" of the allegory, and there are allusions to later events and in particular to the rainy weather of The wedding of William Stanley, earl of Derby, brother of the lord Strange for whose players Shakespeare had written, and Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford, which took place at Greenwich on Jan. 26, 1595, would meet the conditions. But that of Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey, granddaughter of the company's patron Lord Hunsdon, on Feb. 19, 1596, is at least as likely. It has been fancied that Shakespeare was present when "certain stars shot madly from their spheres" in the Kenilworth fireworks of 1575, but if he had any particular recorded entertainment in mind it is more likely to have been the more recent one given to Elizabeth by the earl of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591. There appears to be no special source for the play beyond Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the widespread fairy lore of western Europe.

13. King John has no very clear indications of date, but 1596 seems likely, on account of its style, in spite of the a priori im probability of a play on an independent subject drawn from Eng lish history being interpolated in the middle of the Lancastrian series. It would seem that Shakespeare had before him an old play of the queen's men, called The Troublesome Reign of King John. This was published in 1591, and again, with "W. Sh." on the title-page, in 161i. For copyright purposes King John appears to have been regarded as a revision of The Troublesome Reign, and in fact the succession of incidents in the two plays is much the same. Shakespeare's dialogue, however, owes little or nothing to that of his predecessor.

14. The Merchant of Venice, certainly earlier than July 22, 1598, on which date it was entered in the Stationers' Register, and possibly inspired by the machinations of the Jew poisoner Roderigo Lopez, who was executed in June 1594, shows a con siderable advance in comic and melodramatic power over any of the earlier plays, and is assigned by a majority of scholars to about 1596. The various stories of which its plot is compounded are based upon common themes of folk-tales and Italian novelle. It is possible that Shakespeare may have had before him a play called The Jew, of which there are traces as early as 1579, and in which motives illustrating "the greedinesse of worldly chusers" and the "bloody mindes of usurers" appear to have been already combined. Something may also be owing to Marlowe's play of

The Jew of Malta.

15, 16.

The first part of Henry IV. was published in 1598, the second not until 1600, but both parts must have been in ex istence before the entry of the first part in the Stationers' Register on Feb. 25, 1598, since Falstaff is named in this entry, and a slip in a speech-prefix of the second part, which was not entered in the Register until Aug. 23, 1600, betrays that it was written when the character still bore the name of Sir John Oldcastle. Richard James, in his dedication to The Legend of Sir John Oldcastle about 1625, and Rowe in 1709 both bear witness to the substitu tion of the one personage for the other, which Rowe ascribes to the intervention of Elizabeth, and James to that of some de scendants of Oldcastle, one of whom was probably Lord Cobham. There is an allusion to the incident and an acknowledgment of the wrong done to the famous Lollard martyr in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV. itself. Probably Shakespeare found Oldcastle, with very little else that was of service to him, in an old play called The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been acted by Tarlton and the queen's men at least as far back as 1588, and of which an edition was printed in 1598. Falstaff himself is a somewhat - libellous presentment of the i 5th century leader, Sir John Fastolf, who had already figured in Henry VI.; but pre sumably Fastolf had no titled descendants alive in 1598.

17. A note in the Stationers' Register during Aug. i600 shows that Much Ado About Nothing was in existence, although its publication was then directed to be "stayed." It may plausibly be regarded as the earliest play not included in Meres's list. In 1613 it was revived before James I. under the alternative title of Benedick and Beatrice. Dogberry is said by Aubrey to have been taken from a constable at Grendon in Buckinghamshire. There is no very definite literary source for the play, although some of its incidents are to be found in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Bandello's novelle, and attempts have been made to establish relationships between it and two early German plays, Jacob Ayrer's Die Schone Phoenicia and the Vincentius Ladiszlaus of Duke Henry Julius of Brunswick.

18. The completion of the Lancastrian series of histories by Henry V. can be safely placed in or 'about 1599, since there is an allusion in one of the choruses to the military operations in Ire land of the earl of Essex, who crossed on March 27 and returned on Sept. 28, 1599. The First Quarto, which, in spite of the fact that the play was "stayed" with Much Ado About Nothing, was published in 1600, is a surreptitious text, and does not include the choruses. A genuine version was first published in the First Folio.