Though the fears of the English of a fatal | death by imprisonment and famine, and no

+ Record Office, Italian States, January 19, in England forty days after the end of the

tended to refer to this law, it would seem as | in private performances the old name was though they were written between its enact- still retained, and that either the comic ment and the first cases of its execution; scenes were gleaned out of the chronicle and this would make the date of the play plays and presented as a whole, in the manChristmas 1585, or January 1586. The ner lately exhibited by Mr. Mark Lemon, stage was the public critic of current politics; or else the plays sometimes took another and it is entirely in character with Shake- title from their most amusing character, as speare's well-known tolerant spirit, to exhibit Twelfth Night was called Malvolio by the hardship and possible iniquity of a law Charles I. There are indications in the like the one referred to. And the scenes in literature of 1592 of the "old lad of the the play where the Syracusan merchant ap- castle" being a celebrated character on the pears have this note of a didactic intention, stage. Gabriel Harvey uses the phrase in that they are episodical and separable from one of those letters in which Mr. Massey the rest. The recognition of the brothers finds the earliest notice of Shakespeare might have been brought about without the under the name of "the right novice of father's intervention, as one of them was travel- pregnant and aspiring conceit," whom the ling expressly to look for the other. The plot writer salutes with a hundred blessings. was amplified for a purpose; and that pur- Whether this "right novice" is Shakespeare pose was a pathetic exhibition of the in- or not, it is clearly some writer of plays human character of the law. The internal and player, who in some "pelting comedy" evidence to be derived from the diction and had aggrieved Harvey, who, however, proconstruction of the play is all in favour of a tests that he cares little for the attack, and very early origin. It belongs to the period thinks himself quite able to repel it. "He of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Its that least feareth the sword of unjust calumpoetical beauties are in the love scenes, ny yet most dreadeth the scabbard of just which have much in common with the son- infamy, and would gladly avoid the slightest nets. If the play belongs to 1586 it was suspicion of that which he abhorreth. written in the author's twenty-second year. Though the painted sheath be as it is (for It must be considered psychologically cer- it needeth no other painter to portray it), tain that he was as capable of writing this yet never child so delighted in his rattling play when he was twenty-two as he was of baby as some old lads of the castle have writing Othello sixteen years later. Again, sported themselves with their rapping bable; the tradition is well known that The Merry it is the proper weapon of their profession; Wives of Windsor was written at the com- they have used it at large, and will use it at mand of Elizabeth, who prescribed the sub-pleasure, howsoever the patient heal himself ject, and perhaps the time in which it was to be written. Its argument was to be the fat knight Sir John in love, as she had been so well pleased with the character in the two parts in Henry IV. Mr. Knight has proved, with as great certainty as internal evidence generally can afford, that the original Merry Wives, with its very apposite allusions to events which happened in Windsor in 1592, was written for performance before the Queen and her court there at Christmas-tide in 1593. The uncertainty of the Queen's movements in that year, as detailed by Anthony Bacon, explains the reason why the poet had only a fortnight's notice of what was required from him. The tradition proves that the two parts of Henry IV. were in existence in some form or other in 1592. We learn from other sources that in the "first show" of these plays Sir John Falstaff was Sir John Oldcastle; and in the first scene where Falstaff appears in the play as we have it now, Prince Hal calls him "my old lad of the castle." It appears by the story of the Lord Chamberlain's actors entertaining Vereiken, the Archduke's ambassador, with Sir John Oldcastle in 1600, that

The

at their cost." Which being interpreted, is
as follows:-"I do not care for Nash's un-
just calumny; but I should not like to en-
case myself in the infamous garb of an actor.
Yet in spite of its infamy there are old lads
of the castle who are as proud of their paint-
ed plumes and baubles as a baby of his toys.
They will attack us with these edgeless wea-
pons, though they know that we can take our
revenge upon them to their cost."
author of Oldcastle might here be called
"old lad of the castle," just as the author of
Falstaff is called Falstaff in a letter of Sir
Tobie Mathew-" as that excellent author
Sir John Falstaff says, 'I never dealt better
since I was a man.'" Harvey, in Pierce's
Supererogation, a tract which he published
the next year, 1593, calls his antagonist
Nash, "a lusty lad of the castle;" but the
expression does not appear to refer to Nash
in the letter of 1592. In a similar manner
it is possible that when Greene, in his abuse
of Shakespeare already quoted, calls the
actors "buckram gentlemen," he may allude
to Falstaff's famous "men in buckram," and
may mean that the players are no more
gentlemen than the others were men. Again,

Though the fears of the English of a fatal result were not justified,* yet the rigours were still complained of. In January 1583, the English Government received a list of fifteen Englishmen sent from the Inquisition at Rome, into the galleys at Naples and in August information was still coming from Paris about other English prisoners in the same case.

English merchants were still worse off in Spain. In 1585, on the first idea of war between the two countries, Philip laid an embargo upon all English ships, moneys, goods, and debts, discoverable in his dominions, and imprisoned all Englishmen. How this mandate was carried out by Antonia Guevarra at Seville we have an account, dated November 21, 1585, full of complaints of cruel dealings towards merchants and poor mariners, the like whereof was never seen among Christians:-"Having our goods, money, debts, and until our apparel embargoed, and will not give us to eat, but put us among all the Pycros and thieves that are in the city, and if there were a worse prison we should be assured of it." The only hope of the prisoners is in reprisals to be taken on the Spaniards in England.§ Among numerous papers to the same effect is a petition from seven merchants and thirty-one mariners in prison at St. Lucar, who were offered liberty on condition of each giving a bond, in the impossible sum of 3000 ducats, that for each of them a Spaniard in England should be released.|| In the same year an English merchant domiciled twentytwo years in Spain was condemned to death for communicating by letter with England. In consequence of a multitude of such complaints, one of the points to be negotiated with Alva at Ostend that year was thus set forth in the commissioner's instructions:"Art. 17. Ye shall show unto them the great inhumanity offered to our people, trading only in merchandise in Spain and now in Portugal, in that every person, evil disposed to any of our people, and seeking to make profit of the goods of our merchants, or otherwise upon any quarrel, doth use to make some information to the house of the Inquisition, and without any cause justly given doth procure the seizure of any person of our subjects and of their ships and goods, and so the persons of our subjects are taken, imprisoned, tortured, and in the end put to

* See Birch, i. p. 24 and 25.

1583.

death by imprisonment and famine, and no
just cause at all alleged or proved. And by
this manner not only great numbers of our
subjects have been bereaved both of their
lives and goods, but also a great number of
others of our subjects, whose bodies have
not been taken by reason of their absence,
have nevertheless lost their ships and goods,
by reason the persons accused to the In-
quisition have been found in the said ships,
though not belonging to the same. Of
these miserable cruelties our subjects have
of long time grievously complained, and we
have sought by many messages to the King
to have had some redress thereof, which hath
been in some sort promised but never per-
formed. And if this cruel usage by colour
of the Inquisition should continue, it were
of no purpose to have accord for any inter-
course betwixt Spain and us.' And then the
Queen hinted at reprisals:-"For if we should,
by colour of a like Inquisition, suffer the mer-
chants of Spain to be so molested. . . .
. few
or none of them would resort to our countries,
and so all intercourse should stay."

In England the cry for reprisals on the Spaniards, and the Papists who abetted them, waxed louder and louder. Sutcliffe, Dean of Exeter in 1591, declared it to be a matter very equal that every man should be judged by such laws as themselves practise against others, and that the penal laws in England were only parallel to those of Rome and Spain. They count it a matter very absurd to dispute whether the Italian or Spanish laws concerning treason be just or no, and whether they are to be executed or not." The priests sent over into England were regarded as the analogues of the English merchants abroad; and the two classes were in the common language of the day confounded together. Both were traders; both had their merchandise to impart. Not only was the mercantile cipher used to disguise political and religious intelligence, but the metaphor became current in conversation, and soon the metaphor became a practical one. Rome retaliated on English merchants and mariners for the imprisonment and execution of her priests; and England retaliated for the cruelties exercised on her merchants, by new persecutions of those who dealt in Roman ideas. It was not till the Statute 27th Elizabeth (1585) that this retaliation was decreed in "solemn synods" in the manner described by Shakespeare: then it was enacted that every priest found

Record Office, Italian States, January 19, in England forty days after the end of the

Ibid. France, August 8. 1583.

Record Office, Spain, November 21, 1585.
Ibid. January 4, 1587.

Lid. November 21, 1587

session should be condemned and executed
as a traitor.
Many were at once deported;
and four were executed in 1586 under this
Statute. If the lines above quoted were in-

tended to refer to this law, it would seem as | in private performances the old name was though they were written between its enact- still retained, and that either the comic ment and the first cases of its execution; scenes were gleaned out of the chronicle and this would make the date of the play plays and presented as a whole, in the manChristmas 1585, or January 1586. The ner lately exhibited by Mr. Mark Lemon, stage was the public critic of current politics; or else the plays sometimes took another and it is entirely in character with Shake- title from their most amusing character, as speare's well-known tolerant spirit, to exhibit Twelfth Night was called Malvolio by the hardship and possible iniquity of a law Charles 1. There are indications in the like the one referred to. And the scenes in literature of 1592 of the "old lad of the the play where the Syracusan merchant ap- castle" being a celebrated character on the pears have this note of a didactic intention, stage. Gabriel Harvey uses the phrase in that they are episodical and separable from one of those letters in which Mr. Massey the rest. The recognition of the brothers finds the earliest notice of Shakespeare might have been brought about without the under the name of "the right novice of father's intervention, as one of them was travel- pregnant and aspiring conceit," whom the ling expressly to look for the other. The plot writer salutes with a hundred blessings. was amplified for a purpose; and that pur- Whether this "right novice" is Shakespeare pose was a pathetic exhibition of the in- or not, it is clearly some writer of plays human character of the law. The internal and player, who in some "pelting comedy" evidence to be derived from the diction and had aggrieved Harvey, who, however, proconstruction of the play is all in favour of a tests that he cares little for the attack, and very early origin. It belongs to the period thinks himself quite able to repel it. "He of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Its that least feareth the sword of unjust calumpoetical beauties are in the love scenes, ny yet most dreadeth the scabbard of just which have much in common with the son- infamy, and would gladly avoid the slightest nets. If the play belongs to 1586 it was suspicion of that which he abhorreth. written in the author's twenty-second year. Though the painted sheath be as it is (for It must be considered psychologically cer- it needeth no other painter to portray it), tain that he was as capable of writing this yet never child so delighted in his rattling play when he was twenty-two as he was of baby as some old lads of the castle have writing Othello sixteen years later. Again, sported themselves with their rapping bable; the tradition is well known that The Merry it is the proper weapon of their profession; Wives of Windsor was written at the com- they have used it at large, and will use it at mand of Elizabeth, who prescribed the sub- pleasure, howsoever the patient heal himself ject, and perhaps the time in which it was at their cost." Which being interpreted, is to be written. Its argument was to be the as follows:-"I do not care for Nash's unfat knight Sir John in love, as she had been just calumny; but I should not like to enso well pleased with the character in the two case myself in the infamous garb of an actor. parts in Henry IV. Mr. Knight has proved, Yet in spite of its infamy there are old lads with as great certainty as internal evidence of the castle who are as proud of their paintgenerally can afford, that the original Merry ed plumes and baubles as a baby of his toys. Wives, with its very apposite allusions to They will attack us with these edgeless weaevents which happened in Windsor in 1592, pons, though they know that we can take our was written for performance before the revenge upon them to their cost." The Queen and her court there at Christmas-tide author of Oldcastle might here be called in 1593. The uncertainty of the Queen's "old lad of the castle," just as the author of movements in that year, as detailed by Falstaff is called Falstaff in a letter of Sir Anthony Bacon, explains the reason why Tobie Mathew-"as that excellent author the poet had only a fortnight's notice of Sir John Falstaff says, 'I never dealt better what was required from him. The tradition since I was a man.' Harvey, in Pierce's proves that the two parts of Henry IV. were Supererogation, a tract which he published in existence in some form or other in 1592. the next year, 1593, calls his antagonist We learn from other sources that in the Nash, "a lusty lad of the castle;" but the "first show" of these plays Sir John Falstaff expression does not appear to refer to Nash was Sir John Oldcastle; and in the first in the letter of 1592. In a similar manner scene where Falstaff appears in the play as it is possible that when Greene, in his abuse we have it now, Prince Hal calls him "my of Shakespeare already quoted, calls the old lad of the castle." It appears by the actors "buckram gentlemen," he may allude story of the Lord Chamberlain's actors enter- to Falstaff's famous "men in buckram," and taining Vereiken, the Archduke's ambassa- may mean that the players are no more dor, with Sir John Oldcastle in 1600, that gentlemen than the others were men. Again,

"Holla you pampered jades of Asia,
What, can you draw but twenty miles a day,"

and Peele's

"Feed then and faint not, fair Callipolis," it is plain that his allusions would not be so racy in 1598 as in 1590. That the same lines were often alluded to by a series of other dramatists shows that they were kept alive by Shakespeare's irony, which had made them familiar as quotations from the Latin Grammar, not that the plays from which they were taken still kept the stage. If Pistol was extant in 1592, he quite accounts for Greene's wrath on behalf of Marlowe, Peele, and Lodge. The "tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide" was only an angry attempt to pierce Shakespeare with a verse of his own, to hoist the engineer with his own petard, and to retaliate irony for irony.

when Nash in 1592 makes Pierce Penniless | rago. When he quotes, or misquotes, Martalk of "hypocritical Hotspurs that have lowe's God always in their mouths but will give nothing for God's sake," he may be referring to the same players whose illiberality Greene attacked in the same invective; and that Shakespeare took the words to be meant for himself may be suspected from the allusion which he makes to them in Much Ado about Nothing. Once more, the Euphuism of Falstaff is the Euphuism of the first period of Lily's influence, not the entirely transformed Euphuism which was in fashion by 1598, and which Jonson imitates in his Cynthia's Revels. The first Euphuism, as criticised by Sidney and Drayton, consisted in the use of analogies from a fanciful natural history, in the prominent places of a rhetorical or logical composition. Thus Euphues himself (Lily): "Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it spreadeth, yet the violet, the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decayeth." Lodge: "The ruby is discerned by his pale redness; and who hath not heard that the lion is known by his claws? Though Esop's crafty crow be never so deftly decked, yet is his double dealing easily deciphered." Greene: Though the winds of Lepanthos are ever inconstant, the chiserol ever brittle, the polype ever changeable, yet measure not my mind by others' motions; for as there is a topaz that will yield to every stamp, so there is an emerald that will yield to no impression."

Jonson, in Cynthia's Revels, referring to certain old plays whose revival on the Blackfriars stage in 1600 had given great offence, says, "The umbræ or ghosts of some three or four plays departed a dozen years since have been seen walking on your stage here: take heed, . . if your house be haunted with such hobgoblins, 'twill fright away all your spectators quickly." One of these plays was certainly Hamlet. Another was probably Timon; and another, a version of Henry Nash: "As the touch of an VIII. that has only partially reached us, ashen bough causeth a giddiness in the what we have being a still later recension of viper's head, and the bat, lightly struck with 1613, probably made by Fletcher. To these the leaf of a tree, so they [drunkards] being plays Jonson also refers in the words just but lightly sprinkled with the juice of the before those quoted: "feeding their friends hop, become senseless . . . as soon as ever with nothing of their own but what they the cup scaleth the fortress of their nose." have twice or thrice cooked, they should not So Falstaff when he speaks in the king's wantonly give out how soon they had drest vein speaks in the court jargon: "Though it." Though it." It was clearly Shakespeare's method to the camomile, the more it is trodden on the rewrite his old plays, or to add new matter faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is to them on their revival. And, in general, wasted, the sooner it wears. . . .Shall the the dates of the first quartos with the earlier blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and imperfect forms of the plays may be taken eat blackberries? a question not to be asked. as the dates of the revivals, when the players Shall the son of England prove a thief and relaxed their inhibition of publication, and take purses? a question to be asked." This allowed, not indeed the current version, but is the original Euphuism, not the later kind the superseded play, to be printed. It is to be found in Jonson's Every man out of only on a list of plays founded on such a his Humour. Falstaff's Euphuism is only a view as this that we can equalize and make passing joke. The most truly Euphuistic an average of the poet's productiveness. It character in Shakespeare's plays is Polonius, is certain that by 1598 Shakespeare had prowho, under the name of Corambis, properly duced seventeen dramas; this is the numbelongs to the first Hamlet of 1588 or 1589. ber we obtain by adding Pericles and HenA similar suspicion of the early date of ry VI. to the thirteen mentioned by Meres. Henry IV. may be gathered from the quo- Now, considering that he only wrote or retations which make up Pistol's fustian far- wrote twenty more after 1598, in sixteen