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Register on October 20th, 1597; and an anonymous quarto edition was printed in the same year as lately acted" [Mr. Collier notes, that it was evidently brought out in great haste, there being two mistakes on the title-page]; this was succeeded in the following year by another quarto edition bearing the author's name. This has been thought by some to show that "Richard III. was produced very shortly before its publication in 1597;" but the date given above is proved to be more correct, as well by the mention in Weever and other considerations urged above, as by the fact that the drama was always a popular one, and doubtless frequently acted; by the numerous editions of the play in Shakespeare's life-time (cf. Q, 1602, "Newly augmented," &c.; Q4, 1605, &c.); and by the following supposed allusions :

"He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber

To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass," &c.

i. I, 12-17.

Mr. J. G. Matthews (letter to the Academy, Dec. 12th, 1874) compares one of Marlowe's songs: Fair Wench! &c., &c. :

I am not fashioned for these amorous times,
To court thy beauty with lascivious rhymes,
I cannot dally, caper, dance, and sing," &c.

We may also compare, with the same extract, the following passage from The Mirrour of Magistrates, 1594:—

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God Mars laid by his lance, and took his lute,
And turned his rugged frowns to smiling looks."

Mr. Fleay (Shakespeare Manual, pp. 20, 21), speaking of Locrine, 1595, says :—

"The wooing of Eshild, Act iv. Sc. 1, seems to be imtated from Richard III. i. 2;

and

'Methinks I see both armies in the field,'

echoes I think there be six Richmonds in the field.'"

"Now do I play the touch,

To try if thou be current gold indeed."-iv. 2, 8, 9.

Compare the following passage in A Warning for Fair Women, 1589:—

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"Now is the hour come

To put your love unto the touch, to try
If it be current, or base counterfeit."

Speaking of the play, from which this last extract is made, Mr. Collier says: "its resemblance to Shakespeare's plays is not merely verbal; the speeches of Anne Sandus, the repentant wife, are Shakespearian in a much better sense. But for the extreme rarity of this tragedy, it might ere now have been attributed to Shakespeare" [quoted by J. Rees, in Shakespeare and the Bible (Claxton and Co., Philadelphia, 1876)].

Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps points out that Marstone's Fawne (printed 1606 "as divers times presented") contains a curious reference to our drama, viz.:

"A foole, a foole, my coxcomb for a foole."

The same eminent Shakespearian scholar thinks that the turbulent character of this play, as we now have it, is due to an older one; and Mr. Fleay has "no doubt that it was originally written by G. Peele, left unfinished by him, completed and partly corrected by Shakespeare as we have it in the quartos, and that Shakespeare afterwards altered it into the shape in which it was printed in the folio." (Shakespeare Manual, p. 30; and Macmillan's Magazine, Nov. 1875). For the difference between the quarto and folio editions see also the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1875-76, vol. i., where are remarks by Messrs. Spedding, Pickersgill, Delius, and Aldis Wright.

The date assumed for this play, namely, 1593 or 1594, may be supported by the following considerations :

:

There are many signs of comparatively early work; for instance, the prologue-like speech with which the play opens; the scenes (σrixoμvoiai) where the triology of the common lamentation of the women (ii. 2 and iv. 1) alternates like a chorus, dramatic truth being sacrificed to the lyric or epic form, and to conceits in the style of the pastoral Italian poetry (see Gervinus, ut supra, p. 259); the overstraining of many of the characters; and the analysis of motive sometimes exhibited. [Compare Guesses at Truth, pp. 418—421, where Augustus Hare argues that the fact that Richard III. boldly acknowledges his deliberate wickedness, instead of endeavouring to palliate or excuse it like Edmund or Iago, shows that Shakespeare wrote our drama in his youth; "we may discern," he says, "the contrast between the youth and the mature manhood of the mightiest intellect that ever lived upon earth; a contrast almost equally observable in the difference between the metre and the diction of the plays" in which these characters above-mentioned occur.]

And yet there is a perceptible improvement upon the works which preceded it; the play has more dramatic unity than the three historical plays which it succeeds, historical truth is more regarded, the style and versification (see below) are later, and some of the characters are more marked ; while as to the marvellous creation, after whom the piece is named, each succeeding generation, since the time when Burbage entranced the theatre-goers of Elizabeth's days, has testified its admiration for him, whom Goldsmith calls "the maddening monarch."

Prof. Ward quotes from Oechelhäuser (Essay über Richard III. in Jahrbuch, vol. iii., 1868) the felicitous expression that this play marks "the significant boundary-stone which separates the works of Shakspere's youth from the immortal works of the period of his fuller splendour."

As to the various metrical tests, this play shows that they

cannot be relied upon without modifying them by other evidence; for the "double-ending test" (even if we make allowance for the great length of the play) places the play at a date relatively too late; the "rhyme test," too, does not give quite satisfactory results.

[Note, that the lines i. 2, 228, 229

"Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?"

recur, with variations, in Titus Andronicus, ii. 1, 82, 83,

"She is a woman, therefore may be woo'd,
She is a woman, therefore may be won;

and in 1 Henry VI., v. 3, 77, 78,

"She's beautiful, and therefore to be woo'd,
She is a woman, therefore to be won."]

This play must, of course, be considered in connection with the play entitled The Taming of a Shrew; and it may at once be stated that few persons will be found (especially after Mr. Fleay's paper in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions, vol. i.) to think that Shakespeare wrote the whole of the comedy as it appeared in the folio edition, and fewer still to attribute to him, as Pope did, the whole of the quarto edition; while we cannot for a minute suppose that any will support the view, which the late Mr. Hickson advanced (in the first vol. of Notes and Queries, pp. 194, 227,

D

345), that the Taming of a Shrew was written after, and in imitation of, Shakespeare's play.

The recorded facts as to the quarto play must be carefully borne in mind; they are as follows: (cp. Appendix, p. 183). It was entered at Stationers' Hall in 1594, in which year also a quarto edition ["as it was sundry times acted by the Earle of Pembrook his servants "] appeared; two years afterwards (1596) another was brought out; and, it may be added, as Malone pointed out, that there is a contemporary allusion to the work [or to its relative] in Sir J. Harrington's Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596, where mention is made of The Booke of Taming a Shrew. The next notice is on the 22nd of Jan. 1607, when Burby the publisher transferred to N. Ling his right to this play and to Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost; shortly afterwards, Ling brought out the third quarto of the Taming of a Shrew (1607); and in the same year he transferred his copyrights to John Smythick. This publisher, though he brought out editions of two of the dramas he had acquired, took no steps with regard to the others, until in 1623 he was induced to join in the publication of the first folio edition of Shakespeare's works. One more fact must be added (and that a remarkable one); in 1631, Smethwicke brought out a quarto edition, which was not a reproduction of Ling's publication, but a copy of the folio play.

One of the first questions which presents itself after a careful perusal of these facts is this: how came Burby, Ling, and Smethwicke, in 1607, to think that The Taming of a Shrew was Shakespeare's? That they thought so is evident from the entry of 22 Jan. 1606—7. Nay, we will go a step further back, and assuming that Burby acquired the copyright at about the same time that he became possessed of Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet, say in 1597, let the question be altered to this: How came Burby, in 1597 or thereabouts, to think The Taming of a Shrew Shakespeare's?