The date of the writing of the Secunda Pastorum and, ipso facto, of the flourishing of the “Wakefield Master,” has been variously given from “the fourteenth century or even earlier” to “the reign of Henry VI or Edward IV” the more usual dates centering about Wat Tyler's Rebellion, 1381, or the first decade of the fifteenth century. The basis of these widely differing datings has been found in the implications of various social allusions in the plays, and one of these allusions, that to horned head-dress, has been used very diversely. This fact, coupled with the fact that Professor Oscar Cargill has claimed that “there seem to be no allusions in the (Wakefield) cycle which may positively refer to any events after 1355,” led me to undertake the present study. As a result I am here proposing a date definitely later than the ones commonly chosen and advocated. Let us turn first to the evidence offered by the costume passages in the plays.

The Conflict of Conscience, a morality play by Nathaniel Wood, was printed in London, 1581, in a black-letter quarto. This is the only known edition of the work; it appeared, however, in two issues. The first of these gives the name of “Frauncis Spera” on the title-page and in the Prologue, and at the end of the piece the Nuntius announces that Philologus, the character representing the Italian, Francesco Spiera, had committed suicide. The second issue does not mention the name of the historical prototype of the chief character in the drama, and in it the Nuntius announces that Philologus had been reconverted to Protestantism before his death.

Thomas Deloney's four novels are generally praised for their vigor of style and their realism. Indeed, his modern editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, in singling out for commendation “his faithful and sympathetic rendering of commonplace human life,” insists that in Deloney is to be found “the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel.” Not infrequently, however, Deloney's “commonplace human life” yields to high-flown and altogether improbable romances of earls and ladies, princes and princesses, kings and queens, just as his ordinary familiar prose style at times is embellished with all the euphuistic tricks he was capable of imitating. In particular his apparently casual references to strange birds, queer beasts, and other wonders of nature and to historical and mythological characters give a surprising air of learning; and the notes of his various editors suggest that he was acquainted with such authors as Boccaccio, Belieforest, Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, and Cornelius Nepos.

On Several occasions the present writer would have found a list of play manuscripts dating from 1558 to 1700 a convenience while working in the field. These manuscripts, impressive in number and in the possibilities for study which they offer, have never been catalogued with the care which has been lavished upon play publications. The manuscripts listed in Appendix N of E. K. Chambers' Elizabethan Stage are limited to those of plays provedly composed before 1616; and the notes concerning manuscripts interspersed in W. C. Hazlitt's Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays are incomplete and frequently vague. The list of manuscripts which follows has been compiled after a reëxamination of the catalogues of museums and university libraries, and application by mail to the curators of such collections as those at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Exhaustiveness is not claimed; but the lists already existing are considerably supplemented, and in a number of instances it has been possible to supply the precise location of manuscripts which were known but unlocated by Chambers or which have changed ownership since the time of Hazlitt.

Of Shakespeare's awareness of the living currents of literature about him, the late Sir Walter Raleigh had this to say:

The date of the Q text of Much Ado About Nothing is fixed by external evidence within fairly narrow limits. The only quarto edition of the play was registered for publication on August 23, 1600, after having been noted as “to be staied” on a fly-leaf of a volume of the Stationers' Register under date of August 4, with no year attached but closely following another entry dated May 27, 1600, and therefore presumably of the same year. The title does not appear in Meres's list of 1598, although of course there is the ever-present question of the mysterious Love's Labour's Won mentioned by Meres, with which, however, no attempts have been made to identify Much Ado in recent years. These facts apparently fix the date of writing of the play as between shortly before September 7, 1598, when Meres's work was registered, and August 4, 1600. That it was not immediately before the last-mentioned date is evident from the inclusion of As You Like It in the same list with Much Ado as “to be staied.” Touchstone is a rôle of the type intended for Robert Armin, who superseded Will Kemp as clown of the Chamberlain's Men, while Kemp is known to have played Dogberry. The writing, staging, and popularizing of As You Like It therefore intervened between that of Much Ado and August 4, 1600. Kemp seems to have left the company early in 1599. These facts tend to date Much Ado in the fall or winter of 1598–99, and this is today the generally accepted date.

Almost every nineteenth-century critic has declared one or more of the leading characters of Much Ado in some respects unconvincing or at least distasteful. Chambers, moreover, finds in the play as a whole “inconsistency of purpose” and “the chiaroscuro of melodrama”; and Schücking asks why Shakespeare makes his characters “behave as irrationally” as do the characters in Much Ado. Lawrence explains the apparent inconsistencies of the plot as the outcome of Shakespeare's close adherence to the old popular tale that was his ultimate source; but in Much Ado Shakespeare did make bold departures from Bandello and Belleforest in the Hero-Claudio romance, and, furthermore, replaced two insipid minor characters with the vigorous Benedick and the glib and pungent Beatrice. Stoll explains these difficulties rather as the outcome of dramatic convention, and declares that Hero's public repudiation “is a matter of Elizabethan art and taste rather than of character”; but Stoll neither makes clear how Elizabethan “art” demanded the interpolation of such an incident, nor cites similar interpolations in other plays. These two explanations, therefore, seem hardly satisfactory, and this study proposes to examine the problem in the light of Elizabethan culture and ideals. Why is Claudio, though clearly intended as a hero, so mercenary in his wooing, so apparently malicious in publicly defaming Hero, and so fickle in accepting another bride? Why does Hero passively accept such treatment?

In a recent article in the Review of English Studies Mr. R. B. McKerrow opens the question of the use of the 1577 or the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles as a source for 2 Henry VI and gives it as his judgment that the Contention is based on the first edition. In making a study of this question, I have compared in detail the original editions of both the 1577 and the 1587 versions of the history with the Folio texts of 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI instead of with the Quartos, since in my opinion the Folios are the earlier. Such an investigation furnishes distinct evidence that the dramatist used the 1587 Holinshed and not the first edition.

Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

Thomas Middleton's Game at Chesse (1624), expressing the national hatred of Spaniard and Jesuit alike, was played nine days straight before houses packed to suffocation for the first consecutive long run in English theatrical history. With England aroused over the religious wars of the Continent and the return of Prince Charles from his unsuccessful visit to Madrid in quest of the Spanish Princess, the play appeared as a satirical allegory in the form of a game of chess, in which the English have the White and the Spaniards and Jesuits the Black men. Black secures the treacherous Fat Bishop and the White King's Pawn. Overthrow of the English Church and State seems imminent. The White Knight and the White Duke visit the Black House (Madrid), where their capture is attempted; but they checkmate the Black King and overthrow the Black forces. Its most recent editor has said that “more is known about A Game at Chesse than about any other pre-Restoration play.” Even so, some promising approaches to a fuller understanding have been overlooked.

In 1768 the first batch of certain supposed transcripts from ancient original manuscripts was shown to Messrs. Catcott and Barrett of Bristol and offered for publication by Thomas Chatterton, who alleged that he had copied them from original documents in the muniment room of the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He declared them to be mostly the compositions of one Thomas Rowley, a secular priest of the fifteenth century. Towards the end of 1768 Chatterton communicated with James Dodsley, the famous London bookseller, in the hope of publishing his manuscripts; but Dodsley, after a little hesitation, refused to take up the matter. Then Chatterton attempted to secure Horace Walpole's patronage, (March 1769), and for a moment succeeded; but Walpole, after a little further reflection realized the imposture. In 1770 after some fruitless correspondence with Walpole, Chatterton set out for London in person, to try his fortune; the end came very soon, August 24.

Of all the romantic poets Keats was the most “literary,” in the sense that almost all his work bears the direct impress of his really wide reading. With such a poet, of course, the process of borrowing, whether conscious or unconscious, means a process of transmutation also; hence the special fascination, and endlessness, of the study of Keats's sources. The following notes do not contribute to the interpretation of the poems, but they may add a little to our knowledge of the materials that were floating in his mind.

The year 1825–26, was of very great importance to Carlyle. It marked his emergence from the ethnic or purely humanistic phase of intellectual development, into the phase of transcendental thought. During the year he found for the first time a permanent within the flux. He encountered an unchanging truth through art: “the fiction of the poet,” he said, “is not falsehood but the purest truth.” This culmination is the result of the æsthetic progress traceable through the preceding period.

When, in 1892, Galdós startled Spanish literary circles by his decision to turn dramatist, few of either his supporters or his detractors were aware of the fact that as far back as his student days he had already carried on a serious flirtation with the drama. Certainly in the confused discussions which his dramatic appearance as playwright precipitated in the press of Madrid, no more than an occasional passing reference was made to his previous essays at the theater. It seems that only two newspapers gave adequate space to Galdós' early preparation for the career of a dramatist and these reproduced an article by Eusebio Blasco, originally published in France. Because they are pertinent to our discussion, the principal facts in Blasco's article merit repetition.