is, that Hamlet was written at the earliest in 1601, and The Tam ing of the Shrew perhaps came from his pen not very long afterwards." The other reason is as follows. In The pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissill," which was written by Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton, in 1599, one of the persons says,- -"I will learn your medicines to tame shrews." In July, 1602, Dekker received payment of Henslowe for a play he was then writing, entitled A Medicine for a curst Wife." From whence Mr. Collier conjectures, "that Shakespeare produced his Taming of the Shrew soon after Patient Grissill had been brought upon the stage, and as a sort of counterpart to it; and that Dekker followed up the subject in the summer of 1602 by his Medicine for a curst Wife, having been incited by the success of Shakespeare's play at a rival theatre." There is much ingenuity, perhaps some force, in these reasons; but surely not enough to stand against the internal evidence of the play; which is to strong to admit of the belief that the whole could have been written by Shakespeare at that time. Mr. Gollier is sensible of this, and therefore supposes that some parts of the play must have come from another hand; a supposition for which there is no authority, save that the assigning so late a date renders it necessary. Our persuasion, therefore, is, that the best parts of the play do not relish much of Shakespeare as he was at the period in question; and that none are so bad but they may well enough have been written by him several years before. And we should much sooner think he wrote it at different times, than that he had any help in writing it then.

That no certain contemporary notice of this play should have come down to us, is the more remarkable forasmuch as we have several such of an earlier play, called The Taming of a Shrew, which was first published in 1594, again in 1596, and a third time in 1607. The title-page of 1594 reads thus: "A pleasant-conceited History, called The Taming of a Shrew: As it was sundry times acted by the right honourable the Earl of Pembroke his servants. Printed at London by Peter Short, and are to be sold by Cuthbert Burbie at his shop at the Royal Exchange. 1594.” Of this play there are, also, three several entries in the Stationers' Books; and Sir John Harrington in his Metamorphosis of Ajax, 1596, says,—“Read the book of Taming a Shrew, which hath made a number of us so perfect that now every one can rule.a shrew in our country, save he that hath her." All which argues the play to have been popular enough. And Shakespeare may have taken the more pains to keep his play out of print, and therefore out of the Stationers' Books, because it was so like one already printed.

The old Taming of a Shrew evidently furnished Shakespeare the plot, order, and incidents of his play, so far as these relate to the Lord, the Tinker, Petruchio, Katharine, and the whole taming process. The scene of the first is at Athens, of the other at

Padua, both of which are represented as famous seats of learning Alphonsus, an Athenian merchant, has three daughters, Kate, Emelia, and Phylema. Aurelius, son to the duke of Sestos, goes in quest of Phylema, Polidor of Emelia: as for Kate, she is such a terrible shrew nobody seems likely to want her; which puts the father upon taking an oath not to admit any suitors to the younger, till the elder be disposed of. Presently one Ferando, hearing of her fame, offers himself as her lover, and proceeds to carry her by storm. The wooing, the marriage, the entertainment of the bride at Ferando's country house, the passages with the tailor and haberdasher, the trip to her father's, and Kate's subdued and pliant behaviour, all follow, in much the same style and strain as in Shakespeare's play. The underplot, however, is quite different. Aurelius and Polidor do not carry on their suits in disguise; though the former brings in a merchant to personate his father, who arrives in time to discover the trick, and lets off plenty of indignation thereat. All the parties being at length married, the play winds up with a wager between the three husbands respecting the obedience of their several wives, and the tamed Kate reads her sisters a lecture on the virtue and sweetness of wifely submission. — The persons and proceedings of the Induction, also, are much the same in both, save that in the first Sly continues his remarks from time to time throughout the play, and finally, having drunk himself back into insensibility, is left where he was found, and upon awaking regards it all as a glorious dream; whereas in Shakespeare this part is not carried beyond the first act.

This close similarity of title, matter, and interest, shows that the Poet had no thought of concealing his obligations; rather, it looks as if he meant to turn the popularity of the old play to the advantage of his company. Nevertheless, excepting a very few lines and phrases imitated or adopted, the dialogue, language, and poetry are all his own: the characters, even when partly borrowed, are wrought out into a much more determinate and specific individuality; and the whole is quickened and permeated with the briskness and vigour of his genius: even in the poorest parts there is a clean evolving of the thought, an energetic directness of style. and a driving right straight at the point, that lift it immeasurably above its model. So that the thing is emphatically a new substance cast in a borrowed mould; and that, too, with as little disturbing as might be of those associations that would be apt to make it tell on the receipts of the theatre. Yet the old play must be owned to have considerable merit: probably few of the Eng.ish dramas then in being should take rank much before it it has occasional blushes of genuine poetry, some force and skill of char acterization, and a good deal of sound stage-effect; though, upon the whole, the style is very stiff, frigid, pedantic, and artificial; and often, in setting out to be humorous, it runs into fla, vulgarity and vapid common-place.

There is no telling with certainty when or by whom the old play was written. Malone conjectured it to be the work of Robert Greene, who died September 3, 1592, at the house of a poor shoemaker near Dowgate. The weight of probability bears strongly in favour of that conjecture. An argument of no mean force has been drawn from the title-page to the Orlando Furioso, which is known to have been Greene's, because it was spoken of as such by a contemporary writer. Both were anonymous, were issued the same year, and by the same publisher; and both are called histories. Knight, after stating this point, asks, Might not the recent death of Greene, the reputation he left behind him, the unhappy circumstances of his death, and the remarkable controversy between Nash and Harvey, in 1592, principally touching Robert Greene,' have led the bookseller to procure and publish these plays, if they were both written by him? It is impossible, we think, not to be struck with the resemblance of these performances, in the structure of the verse, the excess of mythological allusion, the laboured finery intermixed with feebleness, and the occasional outpouring of a rich and gorgeous fancy." And he thereupon quotes from the two plays several passages, a compar ison of which certainly goes to bear out his view.

To our mind this view has been strengthened by an anonymous writer of our own country, who has pointed out a number of passages in The Taming of a Shrew that were evidently copied or taken from Marlowe's Faustus and Tamburlaine. From these the writer himself infers the play to have been by Marlowe. Against this we could start many arguments; but probably all of them would not weigh so much with considerate readers as the judgment of Mr. Dyce, who, after giving his opinion the other way, remarks as follows: "I find enough in The Taming of a Shrew to convince me that it was the work of some one who had closely studied Marlowe's writings, and who frequently could not resist the temptation to adopt the very words of his favourite dramatist. It is quite possible that he was not always conscious of his more trifling plagiarisms from Marlowe, - recollections of whose phraseology may have mingled imperceptibly with the current of his thoughts: but the case was certainly otherwise when he transferred to his own comedy whole passages of Tamburlaine or Faustus."

Marlowe was killed June 1, 1593. Of his Faustus the earliest known edition was in 1604. Henslowe's Diary has several entries concerning it, the earliest of which is dated September 30, 1594. From one of these entries it appears that twenty shillings were paid to Thomas Dekker, December 20, 1597, for making additions to Faustus. The play was also entered in the Stationers' Register January 7, 1601. All which seems to warrant the conclusion that it had not been printed in 1594, when The Taming of a Shrew first came out. So that the author of the latter play, whoever he might be, must have had access to the manuscript of Faustus

And as this was probably written as early as 1588 or 1589, there appears no reason but that the above-mentioned plagiarisms from it may have been made several years before The Taming of a Shrew came from the press. The question, then, rises, who would be more likely to have such a freedom with Marlowe's manuscript, than his admiring friend and fellow-dramatist Robert Greene ?

The upshot of all this argument, so far as regards our present purpose, is, that Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew may have been written before Greene's death. If this be granted, (and it can scarce be denied that the internal evidence makes strongly for as early a date,) then we may not unfairly presume The Taming of the Shrew to have been one of the plays referred to in Greene's "Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance." Part of the passage was quoted in our Introduction to The Two Gentlemen of Verona; but the whole is so remarkable, that it may well enough bear to be quoted again. He is exhorting Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele, “those Gentlemen his quondam acquaintance, that spend their wits in making plays."

"Base-minded men all three of you, if by my misery ye be not warned; for unto none of you, like me, sought those burs to cleave; those puppets, I mean, that speak from our mouths, those antics garnish'd in our colours. Is it not strange that I to whom they all have been beholding, is it not like that you to whom they all have been beholding, shall, were ye in that case that I am now, be both of them at once forsaken? Yes, trust them not; for there is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tigre's heart wrapp'd in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank-verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country. O! that I might entreat your rare wits to be employed in more profitable courses, and let these apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an usurer, and the kindest of them all will never prove a kind nurse; yet, whilst you may, seek you better masters; for it is pity men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude grooms."

That the "upstart crow" meant Shakespeare, is on all hands allowed. And the general opinion is, that the second and third pars of King Henry VI. are the plays in which the Poet more especially drew upon the labours of Greene and his friends. Yet the originals of those plays are not nearly so much in Greene's manner, as the old Taming of a Shrew. This, to be sure, noway infers but they were among the writings meant; for Greene complains of others' grievances as well as his own. But the passage quoted certainly conveys the impression that the writer had himself suffered by the purloining of his plumes; that his own work had been specially invaded. In case of those he seems to have

had little if any cause to complain on his own account, however he might resent a wrong done to his friends; and it is natural te suspect that Shakespeare had remodelled or appropriated some other work in which Greene had a stronger personal interes', and felt himself more nearly touched.

For our own part, though we cannot quite say we believe that Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew was one of the plays referred to in The Groatsworth of Wit, yet we have to admit there are some pretty strong reasons for believing so. And from the early publication of the older play we are apt to suspect that it may have been in a manner superseded on the stage by Shakespeare's in provement upon it; while in turn the printing of that may have served to discourage the acting of this. It is to be further observed that Henslowe's Diary has an entry showing that "the taminge of a shrewe" was performed at Newington Butts, June 11, 1594. Now Henslowe was notoriously careless in the form of his accounts. So that if it be not certain that this entry related to Shakespeare's play, neither is it at all improbable that such was the case. Henslowe's accounts at the time in question were of performances by "my lord admirell men and my lord chamberlen men." The Lord Admiral was the Earl of Nottingham; the Lord Chamberlain's men were the company to which Shakespeare belonged and the title-page of the older play in 1594 reads,

As it was sundry times acted by the right honourable the Earl of Pembroke his servants;" a company quite distinct from both the former.

The most that seems able to be said against so early a date as we have been arguing for, is, that the play was not mentioned by Meres in 1598, and that the express purpose of his list would scarce have allowed him to omit The Taming of the Shrew, had it been in existence then. There is indeed much force in this, as Mr. Collier observes; nor should we well know how to answer it but for the fact that there was then another play, twice printed, well known, with almost the same title, and therefore very liable to be confounded with it. Besides, it were natural enough, in the circumstances, for Meres himself to doubt whether Shakespeare had written any such play, knowing there was one of that name that he did not write. But indeed nothing is plainer than that there might be ever so much mistaking between two performances sc alike in title and all the main points of stage-effect.

It hath been already remarked how Shakespeare varies from his predecessor in the matter of the underplot. Here he has been traced to The Supposes, a play translated from the Suppositi of Ariosto, by Gascoigne, and acted at Grey's Inn in 1566. There he probably found the names of Petruchio and Licio, and learnt how to make Lucentio and Tranio pass off the Pedant for Vincentio. There is no likelihood that the Poet went beyond The Taming of a Shrew for the material of his Induction; since al