In the third volume of E. K. Chambers' Elizabethan Stage is a short notice of Henry Cheke and his Certayne Tragedie written first in Italian, by F. N. B. entituled, Freewyl, and translated into English, by Henry Cheeke. Although Chambers, probably confused by the entry in the Stationers' Register on May 11, 1561, of a book “of Frewill,” quotes the title with John Tysdale as printer, none of the extant copies bears any mention of printer, place or date. It has been assumed in the past that the entry to Tysdale referred to Cheke's translation, but Dr. Harold Stein has pointed out to me that it must actually refer to one of a series of translations from Jean Veron issued by Tysdale at this time, the title in question reading: A most necessary treatise of free will. Cheke's book is listed under 1589 in Herbert's edition of Ames' Typographical Antiquities, but no printer is assigned and no reason given for the date except the statement that the revolt of the Netherlands is referred to in the play, whereas as a matter of fact it is the revolt of Germany from papal authority in the time of Luther. The question has been pretty well settled, however, by Mr. William A. Jackson, who has made a detailed study of the copy in the Pforzheimer collection. He writes me that the book is certainly the work of Richard Jugge and that a comparison of some of the smaller initial blocks in the Cheke volume with the same ones in Eden's translation of Peter Martyr's History of travayle in the west and east Indies, printed by Jugge in 1577, shows that the blocks are noticeably more worn and broken in the latter volume. Cheke's book was presumably printed, therefore, before that date and after 1572, since the dedicatee, Lady Cheynie of Toddington, did not acquire that title until her husband was raised to the peerage as Baron Cheynie of Toddington in 1572. I incline to a date close to the earlier year.