{230} England's Mourning Garment, 1603, sign. D. 3.

{231} At the same time the Earl of Worcester's company was taken into the Queen's patronage, and its members were known as 'the Queen's servants,' while the Earl of Nottingham's company was taken into the patronage of the Prince of Wales, and its members were known as the Prince's servants. This extended patronage of actors by the royal family was noticed as especially honourable to the King by one of his contemporary panegyrists, Gilbert Dugdale, in his Time Triumphant, 1604, sig. B.

{232a} The entry, which appears in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber, was first printed in 1842 in Cunningham's Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court, p. xxxiv. A comparison of Cunningham's transcript with the original in the Public Record Office (Audit Office—Declared Accounts—Treasurer of the Chamber, bundle 388, roll 41) shows that it is accurate. The Earl of Pembroke was in no way responsible for the performance at Wilton House. At the time, the Court was formally installed in his house (cf. Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1603-10) pp. 47-59), and the Court officers commissioned the players to perform there, and paid all their expenses. The alleged tradition, recently promulgated for the first time by the owners of Wilton, that As You Like It was performed on the occasion, is unsupported by contemporary evidence.

{232b} The grant is transcribed in the New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1877-9, Appendix ii., from the Lord Chamberlain's papers in the Public Record Office, where it is now numbered 660. The number allotted it in the Transactions is obsolete.

{233a} A contemporary copy of this letter, which declared the Queen's players acting at the Fortune and the Prince's players at the Curtain to be entitled to the same privileges as the King's players, is at Dulwich College (cf. G. F. Warner's Catalogue of the Dulwich Manuscripts, pp. 26-7). Collier printed it in his New Facts with fraudulent additions, in which the names of Shakespeare and other actors figured.

{233b} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps in his Outlines, i. 213, cites a royal order to this effect, but gives no authority, and I have sought in vain for the document at the Public Record Office, at the British Museum, and elsewhere. But there is no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare and his fellow-actors took, as Grooms of the Chamber, part in the ceremonies attending the Constable's visit to London. In the unprinted accounts of Edmund Tilney, master of the revels, for the year October 1603 to October 1604, charge is made for his three days' attendance with four men to direct the entertainments 'at the receaving of the Constable of Spayne' (Public Record Office, Declared Accounts, Pipe Office Roll 2805). The magnificent festivities culminated in a splendid banquet given in the Constable's honour by James I at Whitehall on Sunday, August 19/29—the day on which the treaty was signed. In the morning all the members of the royal household accompanied the Constable in formal procession from Somerset House. After the banquet, at which the earls of Pembroke and Southampton acted as stewards, there was a ball, and the King's guests subsequently witnessed exhibitions of bear baiting, bull baiting, rope dancing, and feats of horsemanship. (Cf. Stow's Chronicle, 1631, pp. 845-6, and a Spanish pamphlet, Relacion de la jornada del excmo Condestabile de Castilla, etc., Antwerp, 1604, 4to, which was summarised in Ellis's Original Letters, 2nd series, vol. iii. pp. 207-215, and was partly translated in Mr. W. B. Rye's England as seen by Foreigners, pp. 117-124).

{234} At the Bodleian Library (MS. Rawlinson, A 204) are the original accounts of Lord Stanhope of Harrington, Treasurer of the Chamber for various (detached) years in the early part of James I's reign. These documents show that Shakespeare's company acted at Court on November 1 and 4, December 26 and 28, 1604, and on January 7 and 8, February 2 and 3, and the evenings of the following Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday, 1605.

{235} These dates are drawn from a memorandum of plays performed at Court in 1604 and 1605 which is among Malone's manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and was obviously derived by Malone from authentic documents that were in his day preserved at the Audit Office in Somerset House. The document cannot now be traced at the Public Record Office, whither the Audit Office papers have been removed since Malone's death. Peter Cunningham professed to print the original document in his accounts of the revels at Court (Shakespeare Society, 1842, pp. 203 et seq.), but there is no doubt that he forged his so-called transcript, and that the additions which he made to Malone's memorandum were the outcome of his fancy. Collier's assertion in his New Particulars, p. 57, that Othello was first acted at Sir Thomas Egerton's residence at Harefield on August 6, 1602, was based solely on a document among the Earl of Ellesmere's MSS. at Bridgwater House, which purported to be a contemporary account by the clerk, Sir Arthur Maynwaring, of Sir Thomas Egerton's household expenses. This document, which Collier reprinted in his Egerton Papers (Camden Soc.), p. 343, was authoritatively pronounced by experts in 1860 to be 'a shameful forgery' (cf. Ingleby's Complete View of the Shakspere Controversy, 1861, pp. 261-5).

{237} Dr. Garnett's Italian Literature, 1898, p. 227.

{239} Cf. Letter by Mrs. Stopes in Athenaeum, July 25, 1896.

{240} Cf. Macbeth, ed. Clark and Wright, Clarendon Press Series.

{241a} This fact is stated on the title-page of the quartos.

{241b} Sidney tells the story in a chapter entitled 'The pitiful state and story of the Paphlagonian unkind king and his blind son; first related by the son, then by his blind father' (bk. ii. chap. 10, ed. 1590 4to; pp. 132-3, ed. 1674, fol.)

{242} It was edited for the Shakespeare Society in 1842 by Dyce, who owned the manuscript.

{245} Mr. George Wyndham in his introduction to his edition of North's Plutarch, i. pp. xciii-c, gives an excellent criticism of the relations of Shakespeare's play to Plutarch's life of Antonius.

{246} See the whole of Coriolanus's great speech on offering his services to Aufidius, the Volscian general, IV. v. 71-107:

My name is Caius Marcius, who hath done To thee particularly and to all the Volsces, Great hurt and mischief; thereto witness may My surname, Coriolanus . . . to do thee service.

North's translation of Plutarch gives in almost the same terms Coriolanus's speech on the occasion. It opens: 'I am Caius Martius, who hath done to thyself particularly, and to all the Volsces generally, great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my surname of Coriolanus that I bear.' Similarly Volumnia's stirring appeal to her son and her son's proffer of submission, in act V. sc. iii. 94-193, reproduce with equal literalness North's rendering of Plutarch. 'If we held our peace, my son,' Volumnia begins in North, 'the state of our raiment would easily betray to thee what life we have led at home since thy exile and abode abroad; but think now with thyself,' and so on. The first sentence of Shakespeare's speech runs:

Should we be silent and not speak, our raiment And state of bodies would bewray what life We have led since thy exile. Think with thyself . . .

{249} See p. 172 and note 2.

{250} In I. i. 136-7 Imogen is described as 'past grace' in the theological sense. In I. ii. 30-31 the Second Lord remarks: 'If it be a sin to make a true election, she is damned.'

{251a} See p. 255, note I. Camillo's reflections (I. ii. 358) on the ruin that attends those who 'struck anointed kings' have been regarded, not quite conclusively, as specially designed to gratify James I.

{251b} Conversations with Drummond, p. 16.

{251c} In Winter's Tale (IV. iv. 760 et seq.) Autolycus threatens that the clown's son 'shall be flayed alive; then 'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp's nest,' &c. In Boccaccio's story the villain Ambrogiuolo (Shakespeare's Iachimo), after 'being bounden to the stake and anointed with honey,' was 'to his exceeding torment not only slain but devoured of the flies and wasps and gadflies wherewith that country abounded' (cf. Decameron, translated by John Payne, 1893, i. 164).

{253a} Printed in Cohn's Shakespeare in Germany.

{253b} Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, edit. 1612, p. 82 b. The passage begins:

Ye ayres and windes, ye elves of hills, ye brookes and woods alone.

{254} Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xv. 423. In the early weeks of 1611 Shakespeare's company presented no fewer than fifteen plays at Court. Payment of 150 pounds was made to the actors for their services on February 12, 1610-11. The council's warrant is extant in the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. A 204 (f. 305). The plays performed were not specified by name, but some by Shakespeare were beyond doubt amongst them, and possibly 'The Tempest.' A forged page which was inserted in a detached account-book of the Master of the Court-Revels for the years 1611 and 1612 at the Public Record Office, and was printed as genuine in Peter Cunningham's Extracts from the Revels' Accounts, p. 210, supplies among other entries two to the effect that 'The Tempest' was performed at Whitehall at Hallowmas (i.e. November 1) 1611 and that 'A Winter's Tale' followed four days later, on November 5. Though these entries are fictitious, the information they offer may be true. Malone doubtless based his positive statement respecting the date of the composition of 'The Tempest' in 1611 on memoranda made from papers then accessible at the Audit Office, but now, since the removal of those archives to the Public Record Office, mislaid. All the forgeries introduced into the Revels' accounts are well considered and show expert knowledge (see p. 235, note I). The forger of the 1612 entries probably worked either on the published statement of Malone, or on fuller memoranda left by him among his voluminous manuscripts.

{255a} Cf. Universal Review, April 1889, article by Dr. Richard Garnett.

{255b} Harmonised scores of Johnson's airs for the songs 'Full Fathom Five' and 'Where the Bee sucks,' are preserved in Wilson's Cheerful Ayres or Ballads set for three voices, 1660.

{257a} Cf. Browning, Caliban upon Setebos; Daniel Wilson, Caliban, or the Missing Link (1873); and Renan, Caliban (1878), a drama continuing Shakespeare's play.

{257b} When Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida he had formed some conception of a character of the Caliban type. Thersites say of Ajax (III. iii. 264), 'He's grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster.'

{258a} Treasurer's accounts in Rawl. MS. A 239, leaf 47 (in the Bodleian), printed in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1895-6, part ii. p. 419.

{258b} The Merry Devill of Edmonton, a comedy which was first published in 1608, was also re-entered by Moseley for publication on September 9, 1653, as the work of Shakespeare (see p. 181 supra).

{259a} Dyce thought he detected traces of Shirley's workmanship, but it was possibly Theobald's unaided invention.

{259b} The 1634 quarto of the play was carefully edited for the New Shakspere Society by Mr. Harold Littledale in 1876. See also Spalding, Shakespeare's Authorship of 'Two Noble Kinsmen,' 1833, reprinted by New Shakspere Society, 1876; article by Spalding in Edinburgh Review, 1847; Transactions, New Shakspere Society, 1874.

{260} Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1882.

{261} Reliquiae Wottonianae, 1675, pp. 425-6. Wotton adds 'that the piece was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of Pomp and Majesty, even to the matting of the Stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and Garters, the Guards with their embroidered Coats, and the like: sufficient in truth within a while to make greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. Now King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's House, and certain Canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the Thatch, where being thought at first but an idle Smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that vertuous fabrique; wherein yet nothing did perish, but wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle[d] ale.' John Chamberlain writing to Sir Ralph Winwood on July 8, 1613, briefly mentions that the theatre was burnt to the ground in less than two hours owing to the accidental ignition of the thatch roof through the firing of cannon 'to be used in the play.' The audience escaped unhurt though they had 'but two narrow doors to get out' (Winwood's Memorials, iii. p. 469). A similar account was sent by the Rev. Thomas Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, Bart., from London, June 30, 1613. 'The fire broke out,' Lorkin wrote, 'no longer since than yesterday, while Burbage's company were acting at the Globe the play of Henry VIII' (Court and Times of James I, 1848, vol. i. p. 253). A contemporary sonnet on 'the pittifull burning of the Globe playhouse in London,' first printed by Haslewood 'from an old manuscript volume of poems' in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1816, was again printed by Halliwell-Phillipps (i. pp. 310, 311) from an authentic manuscript in the library of Sir Matthew Wilson, Bart., of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire.

{263a} Bodl. MS. Rawl. A 239; cf. Spedding in Gentleman's Magazine, 1850, reprinted in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1874.

{263b} Cf. Mr. Robert Boyle in New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1884.

{264} Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 87.

{265a} Manningham, Diary, March 23, 1601, Camd. Soc. p. 39.

{265b} Cf. Aubrey, Lives; Halliwell-Phillipps, ii. 43; and art. Sir William D'Avenant in the Dictionary of National Biography.

{267} The indenture prepared for the purchaser is in the Halliwell-Phillipps collection, which was sold to Mr. Marsden J. Perry of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., in January 1897. That held by the vendor is in the Guildhall Library.

{268} Shakespeare's references to puritans in the plays of his middle and late life are so uniformly discourteous that they must be judged to reflect his personal feeling. The discussion between Maria and Sir Andrew Aguecheek regarding Malvolio's character in Twelfth Night (II. iii. 153 et seq.) runs:

MARIA. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of puritan.

SIR ANDREW. O! if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.

SIR TOBY. What, for being a puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight.

SIR ANDREW. I have no exquisite reason for 't, but I have reason good enough.

In Winter's Tale (IV. iii. 46) the Clown, after making contemptuous references to the character of the shearers, remarks that there is 'but one puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes.' Cf. the allusions to 'grace' and 'election' in Cymbeline, p. 250, note 1.

{269a} The town council of Stratford-on-Avon, whose meeting-chamber almost overlooked Shakespeare's residence of New Place, gave curious proof of their puritanic suspicion of the drama on February 7, 1612, when they passed a resolution that plays were unlawful and 'the sufferance of them against the orders heretofore made and against the example of other well-governed cities and boroughs,' and the council was therefore 'content,' the resolution ran, that 'the penalty of xs. imposed [on players heretofore] be xli. henceforward.' Ten years later the King's players were bribed by the council to leave the city without playing. (See the present writer's Stratford-on-Avon, p. 270.)

{269b} The lines as quoted by Aubrey (Lives, ed. Clark, ii. 226) run:

Ten-in-the-hundred the Devil allows, But Combe will have twelve he sweares and he vowes; If any man ask, who lies in this tomb? Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.

Rowe's version opens somewhat differently:

Ten-in-the-hundred lies here ingrav'd. 'Tis a hundred to ten, his soul is not sav'd.

The lines, in one form or another, seem to have been widely familiar in Shakespeare's lifetime, but were not ascribed to him. The first two in Rowe's version were printed in the epigrams by H[enry] P[arrot], 1608, and again in Camden's Remaines, 1614. The whole first appeared in Richard Brathwaite's Remains in 1618 under the heading: 'Upon one John Combe of Stratford upon Aven, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had Caused to be built in his Life Time.'

{271} The clumsy entry runs: 'Sept. Mr. Shakespeare tellyng J. Greene that I was not able to beare the encloseing of Welcombe.' J. Greene is to be distinguished from Thomas Greene, the writer of the diary. The entry therefore implies that Shakespeare told J. Greene that the writer of the diary, Thomas Greene, was not able to bear the enclosure. Those who represent Shakespeare as a champion of popular rights have to read the 'I' in 'I was not able' as 'he.' Were that the correct reading, Shakespeare would be rightly credited with telling J. Greene that he disliked the enclosure; but palaeographers only recognise the reading 'I.' Cf. Shakespeare and the Enclosure of Common Fields at Welcombe, a facsimile of Greene's diary, now at the Birthplace, Stratford, with a transcript by Mr. E. J. L. Scott, edited by Dr. C. M. Inglehy, 1885.

{272a} British Magazine, June 1762.

{272b} Cf. Malone, Shakespeare, 1821, ii. 500-2; Ireland, Confessions, 1805, p. 34; Green, Legend of the Crab Tree, 1857.

{272c} The date is in the old style, and is equivalent to May 3 in the new; Cervantes, whose death is often described as simultaneous, died at Madrid ten days earlier—on April 13, in the old style, or April 23, 1616, in the new.

{273} Hall's letter was published as a quarto pamphlet at London in 1884, from the original, now in the Bodleian Library Oxford.

{274} Mr. Charles Elton, Q.C., has been kind enough to give me a legal opinion on this point. He wrote to me on December 9, 1897: 'I have looked to the authorities with my friend Mr. Herbert Mackay, and there is no doubt that Shakespeare barred the dower.' Mr. Mackay's opinion is couched in the following terms: 'The conveyance of the Blackfriars estate to William Shakespeare in 1613 shows that the estate was conveyed to Shakespeare, Johnson, Jackson, and Hemming as joint tenants, and therefore the dower of Shakespeare's wife would be barred unless he were the survivor of the four bargainees.' That was a remote contingency, which did not arise, and Shakespeare always retained the power of making 'another settlement when the trustees were shrinking.' Thus the bar was for practical purposes perpetual, and disposes of Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps's assertion that Shakespeare's wife was entitled to dower in one form or another from all his real estate. Cf. Davidson on Conveyancing; Littleton, sect. 45; Coke upon Littleton, ed. Hargrave, p. 379 b, note I.

{276a} A hundred and fifty pounds is described as a substantial jointure in Merry Wives, III. iii. 49.

{276b} Leonard Digges, in commendatory verses before the First Folio of 1623, wrote that Shakespeare's works would be alive

[When] Time dissolves thy Stratford monument.

{277} Cf. Dugdale, Diary, 1827, p. 99; see under article on Bernard Janssen in the Dictionary of National Biography.

{278a} 'Timber,' in Works, 1641.

{278b} John Webster, the dramatist, made vague reference in the address before his 'White Divel' in 1612 to 'the right happy and copious industry of M. Shakespeare, M. Decker, and M. Heywood.'

{280} The words run: 'Heere lyeth interred the bodye of Anne, wife of Mr. William Shakespeare, who depted. this life the 6th day of August, 1623, being of the age of 67 yeares.

'Vbera, tu, mater, tu lac vitamq. dedisti, Vae mihi; pro tanto munere saxa dabo! Quam mallem, amoueat lapidem bonus Angel[us] ore, Exeat ut Christi Corpus, imago tua. Sed nil vota valent; venias cito, Christe; resurget, Clausa licet tumulo, mater, et astra petet.'

{281} Cf. Hall, Select Observations, ed. Cooke, 1657.

{282} Baker, Northamptonshire, i. 10; New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. 1880-5, pt. ii. pp. 13—15.

{283} Halliwell-Phillipps, Hist. of New Place, 1864, fol.

{284} Wise, Autograph of William Shakespeare . . . together with 4,000 ways of spelling the name, Philadelphia, 1869.

{285} See the article on John Florio in the Dictionary of National Biography, and Sir Frederick Madden's Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere, 1838.

{286} Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps, New Lamps or Old, 1880; Malone, Inquiry, 1796.

{290} Mr. Lionel Cust, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who has ittle doubt of the genuineness of the picture, gave an interesting account of it at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries on December 12, 1895. Mr. Cust's paper is printed in the Society's Proceedings, second series, vol. xvi. p. 42. Mr. Salt Brassington, the librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial Library, has given a careful description of it in the Illustrated Catalogue of the Pictures in the Memorial Gallery, 1896, pp. 78-83.

{291a} Harper's Magazine, May 1897.

{291b} Cf. Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence, iii. 444.

{291c} Numberless portraits have been falsely identified with Shakespeare, and it would be futile to attempt to make the record of the pretended portraits complete. Upwards of sixty have been offered for sale to the National Portrait Gallery since its foundation in 1856, and not one of these has proved to possess the remotest claim to authenticity. The following are some of the wholly unauthentic portraits that have attracted public attention: Three portraits assigned to Zucchero, who left England in 1580, and cannot have had any relations with Shakespeare—one in the Art Museum, Boston, U.S.A.; another, formerly the property of Richard Cosway, R.A., and afterwards of Mr. J. A. Langford of Birmingham (engraved in mezzotint by H. Green); and a third belonging to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who purchased it in 1862. At Hampton Court is a wholly unauthentic portrait of the Chandos type, which was at one time at Penshurst; it bears the legend 'AEtatis suae 34' (cf. Law's Cat. of Hampton Court, p. 234). A portrait inscribed 'aetatis suae 47, 1611,' belonging to Clement Kingston of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, was engraved in mezzotint by G. F. Storm in 1846.

{292} In the picture-gallery at Dulwich is 'a woman's head on a boord done by Mr. Burbidge, ye actor'—a well-authenticated example of the actor's art.

{296a} It is now the property of Frau Oberst Becker, the discoverer's daughter-in-law, Darmstadt, Heidelbergerstrasse 111.

{296b} Some account of Shakespeare's portraits will be found in the following works: James Boaden, Inquiry into various Pictures and Prints of Shakespeare, 1824; Abraham Wivell, Inquiry into Shakespeare's Portraits, 1827, with engravings by B. and W. Holl; George Scharf, Principal Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; J. Hain Friswell, Life-Portraits of Shakespeare, 1864; William Page, Study of Shakespeare's Portraits, 1876; Ingleby, Man and Book, 1877, pp. 84 seq.; J. Parker Norris, Portraits of Shakespeare, Philadelphia, 1885, with numerous plates; Illustrated Cat. of Portraits in Shakespeare's Memorial at Stratford, 1896. In 1885 Mr. Walter Rogers Furness issued, at Philadelphia, a volume of composite portraits, combining the Droeshout engraving and the Stratford bust with the Chandos, Jansen, Felton, and Stratford portraits.

{297} Cf. Gentleman's Magazine, 1741, p. 105.

{298} A History of the Shakespeare Memorial, Stratford-on-Avon, 1882; Illustrated Catalogue of Pictures in the Shakespeare Memorial, 1896.

{299} This was facsimiled in 1862, and again by Mr. Griggs in 1880.

{302} Lithographed facsimiles of most of these volumes, with some of the quarto editions of the poems (forty-eight volumes in all), were prepared by Mr. E. W. Ashbee, and issued to subscribers by Halliwell-Phillipps between 1862 and 1871. A cheaper set of quarto facsimiles, undertaken by Mr. W. Griggs, and issued under the supervision of Dr. F. J. Furnivall, appeared in forty-three volumes between 1880 and 1889.

{303} Perfect copies range in price, according to their rarity, from 200 to 300 pounds. In 1864, at the sale of George Daniel's library, quarto copies of 'Love's Labour's Lost' and of 'Merry Wives' (first edition) each fetched 346 pounds 10s. On May 14, 1897, a copy of the quarto of 'The Merchant of Venice' (printed by James Roberts in 1600) was sold at Sotheby's for 315 pounds.

{304} See p. 183.

{306} Cf. Bibliographica, i. 489 seq.

{308} This copy was described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821 (xxi. 449) as in the possession of Messrs. J. and A. Arch, booksellers, of Cornhill. It was subsequently sold at Sotheby's in 1855 for 163 pounds 16s.

{309a} I cannot trace the present whereabouts of this copy, but it is described in the Variorum Shakespeare of 1821, xxi. 449-50.

{309b} The copy seems to have been purchased by a member of the Sheldon family in 1628, five years after publication. There is a note in a contemporary hand which says it was bought for 3 pounds 15s., a somewhat extravagant price. The entry further says that it cost three score pounds of silver, words that I cannot explain. The Sheldon family arms are on the sides of the volume, and there are many manuscript notes in the margin, interpreting difficult words, correcting misprints, or suggesting new readings.

{309c} It has been mutilated by a former owner, and the signature of the leaf is missing, but it was presumably G G 3.

{310} Correspondents inform me that two copies of the First Folio, one formerly belonging to Leonard Hartley and the other to Bishop Virtue of Portsmouth, showed a somewhat similar irregularity. Both copies were bought by American booksellers, and I have not been able to trace them.

{311} Cf. Notes and Queries, 1st ser., vii. 47.

{312a} Arber, Stationers' Registers, iii. 242-3.

{312b} On January 31, 1852, Collier announced in the Athenaeum, that this copy, which had been purchased by him for thirty shillings, and bore on the outer cover the words 'Tho. Perkins his Booke,' was annotated throughout by a former owner in the middle of the seventeenth century. Shortly afterwards Collier published all the 'essential' manuscript readings in a volume entitled Notes and Emendations to the Plays of Shakespeare. Next year he presented the folio to the Duke of Devonshire. A warm controversy as to the date and genuineness of the corrections followed, but in 1859 all doubt as to their origin was set at rest by Mr. N. E. S. A. Hamilton of the manuscript department of the British Museum, who in letters to the Times of July 2 and 16 pronounced all the manuscript notes to be recent fabrications in a simulated seventeenth-century hand.

{314} The best account of eighteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare is to be found in the preface to the Cambridge edition by Mr. Aldis Wright. The memoirs of the various editors in the Dictionary of National Biography supply useful information. I have made liberal use of these sources in the sketch given in the following pages.

{317a} Mr. Churton Collins's admirable essay on Theobald's textua criticism of Shakespeare, entitled 'The Porson of Shakespearean Critics,' is reprinted from the Quarterly Review in his Essays and Studies, 1895, pp. 263 et seq.

{317b} Collier doubtless followed Theobald's hint when he pretended to have found in his 'Perkins Folio' the extremely happy emendation (now generally adopted) of 'bisson multitude' for 'bosom multiplied' in Coriolanus's speech:

How shall this bisson multitude digest The senate's courtesy?—(Coriolanus, III. i. 131-2.)

{318} A happy example of his shrewdness may be quoted from King Lear, III. vi. 72, where in all previous editions Edgar's enumeration of various kinds of dogs included the line 'Hound or spaniel, brach or hym [or him].' For the last word Hanmer substituted 'lym,' which was the Elizabethan synonym for bloodhound.

{320} Edition of 1793, vol. i. p. 7.

{327a} Cf. the opening line of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet on Shakespeare:

Others abide our question. Thou art free.

{327b} These letters have been interpreted as standing for the inscription 'In Memoriam Scriptoris' as well as for the name of the writer. In the latter connection, they have been variously and inconclusively read as Jasper Mayne (Student), a young Oxford writer; as John Marston (Student or Satirist); and as John Milton (Senior or Student).

{328} Charles Gildon in 1694, in 'Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer's Short View of Tragedy' which he addressed to Dryden, gives the classical version of this incident. 'To give the world,' Gildon informs Dryden, 'some satisfaction that Shakespear has had as great a Veneration paid his Excellence by men of unquestion'd parts as this I now express of him, I shall give some account of what I have heard from your Mouth, Sir, about the noble Triumph he gain'd over all the Ancients by the Judgment of the ablest Critics of that time. The Matter of Fact (if my Memory fail me not) was this. Mr. Hales of Eaton affirm'd that he wou'd shew all the Poets of Antiquity outdone by Shakespear, in all the Topics, and common places made use of in Poetry. The Enemies of Shakespear wou'd by no means yield him so much Excellence: so that it came to a Resolution of a trial of skill upon that Subject; the place agreed on for the Dispute was Mr. Hales's Chamber at Eaton; a great many Books were sent down by the Enemies of this Poet, and on the appointed day my Lord Falkland, Sir John Suckling, and all the Persons of Quality that had Wit and Learning, and interested themselves in the Quarrel, met there, and upon a thorough Disquisition of the point, the Judges chose by agreement out of this Learned and Ingenious Assembly unanimously gave the Preference to Shakespear. And the Greek and Roman Poets were adjudg'd to Vail at least their Glory in that of the English Hero.'

{329a} Milton, Iconoclastes, 1690, pp. 9-10.

{329b} Cf. Evelyn's Diary, November 26, 1661: 'I saw Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, played, but now the old plays began to disgust the refined age, since His Majesty's being so long abroad.'

{330a} Conquest of Granada, 1672.

{330b} Essay on Dramatic Poesie, 1668. Some interesting, if more qualified, criticism by Dryden also appears in his preface to an adaptation of 'Troilus and Cressida' in 1679. In the prologue to his and D'Avenant's adaptation of 'The Tempest' in 1676, he wrote:

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be; Within that circle none durst walk but he.

{332a} Cf. Shakspere's Century of Praise, 1591-1693, New Shakspere Soc., ed. Ingleby and Toulmin Smith, 1879; and Fresh Allusions, ed. Furnivall, 1886.

{332b} Cf. W. Sidney Walker, Critical Examination of the Text of Shakespeare, 1859.

{333} See Notes and Lectures on Shakespeare and other Poets by S. T. Coleridge, now first collected by T. Ashe, 1883. Coleridge hotly resented the remark, which he attributed to Wordsworth, that a German critic first taught us to think correctly concerning Shakespeare. (Coleridge to Mudford, 1818; cf. Dykes Campbell's memoir of Coleridge, p. cv.) But there is much to be said for Wordsworth's general view (see p. 344, note 1).

{334} R. E. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Tercentenary Celebration, 1864.

{335} Thomas Jordan, a very humble poet, wrote a prologue to notify the new procedure, and referred to the absurdity of the old custom:

For to speak truth, men act, that are between Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant, When you call DESDEMONA, enter GIANT.

{338} Essays of Elia, ed. Canon Ainger, pp. 180 et seq.

{340a} Hamlet in 1874-5 and Macbeth in 1888-9 were each performed by Sir Henry Irving for 200 nights in uninterrupted succession; these are the longest continuous runs that any of Shakespeare's plays are known to have enjoyed.

{340b} See p. 346.

{341} Cf. Alfred Roffe, Shakspere Music, 1878; Songs in Shakspere . . . set to Music, 1884, New Shakspere Soc.

{342} Cf. D. G. Morhoff, Unterricht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie, Kiel, 1682, p. 250.

{344} In his 'Essay Supplementary to the Preface' in the edition of his Poems of 1815 Wordsworth wrote: 'The Germans, only of foreign nations, are approaching towards a knowledge of what he [i.e. Shakespeare] is. In some respects they have acquired a superiority over the fellow-countrymen of the poet; for among us, it is a common—I might say an established—opinion that Shakespeare is justly praised when he is pronounced to be "a wild irregular genius in whom great faults are compensated by great beauties." How long may it be before this misconception passes away and it becomes universally acknowledged that the judgment of Shakespeare . . . is not less admirable than his imagination? . . .'

{345} Cf. Wilhelm Meister.

{346a} Cf. Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1894.

{346b} Ibid. 1896, p. 438.

{347} The exact statistics for 1896 and 1897 were: 'Othello,' acted 135 and 121 times for the respective years; 'Hamlet,' 102 and 91; 'Romeo and Juliet,' 95 and 118; 'Taming of the Shrew,' 91 and 92; 'The Merchant of Venice,' 84 and 62; 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' 68 and 92; 'A Winter's Tale,' 49 and 65; 'Much Ado about Nothing,' 47 and 32; 'Lear,' 41 and 34; 'As You Like It,' 37 and 29; 'Comedy of Errors,' 29 and 43; 'Julius Caesar,' 27 and 29; 'Macbeth,' 10 and 12; 'Timon of Athens,' 7 and 0; 'The Tempest,' 5 and 1; 'Antony and Cleopatra,' 2 and 4; 'Coriolanus,' 0 and 20; 'Cymbeline,' 0 and 4; 'Richard II,' 15 and 5; 'Henry IV,' Part I, 26 and 23, Part II, 6 and 13; 'Henry V,' 4 and 7; 'Henry VI,' Part I, 3 and 5, Part II, 2 and 2; 'Richard III,' 25 and 26 (Jahrbuch der Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft for 1897, pp. 306 seq., and for 1898, pp. 440 seq.)

{348a} Jusserand, A French Ambassador, p. 56.

{348b} Cf. Al. Schmidt, Voltaire's Verdienst von der Einfuhrung Shakespeare's in Frankreich, Konigsberg, 1864.

{350a} Frederic Melchior, Baron Grimm (1723-1807), for some years a friend of Rousseau and the correspondent of Diderot and the encyclopedistes, scattered many appreciative references to Shakespeare in his voluminous Correspondance Litteraire Philosophique et Critique, extending over the period 1753-1770, the greater part of which was published in 16 vols. 1812-13.

{350b} Melanges Historiques, 182 ?, iii. 141-87.

{350c} Ibid. 1824, iii. 217-34.

{351a} Very interesting comments on these performances appeared day by day in the Paris newspaper Le Globe. They were by Charles Magnin, who reprinted them in his Causeries et Meditations Historiques et Litteraires (Paris, 1843, ii. 62 et seq.)

{351b} Cf. Lacroix, Histoire de l'Influence de Shakespeare sur le Theatre Francais, 1867; Edinburgh Review; 1849, pp. 39-77; Elze, Essays, pp. 193 seq.; M. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France sous l'Ancien Regime, Paris, 1898.

{352} Cf. Giovanni Andres, Dell' Origine, Progressi e Stato attuale d' ogni Letteratura, 1782.

{353a} Cf. New Shaksp. Soc. Trans. 1880-5, pt. ii. 431 seq.

{353b} Cf. Ungarische Revue (Budapest) Jan. 1881, pp. 81-2; and August Greguss's Shakspere . . . elso kotet: Shakspere palyaja Budapest, 1880 (an account in Hungarian of Shakespeare's Life and Works).

{354} Cf. Macmillan's Magazine, May 1880.

{361} Compiled between 1669 and 1696; first printed in Letters from the Bodleian Library, 1813, and admirably re-edited for the Clarendon Press during the present year by the Rev. Andrew Clark (2 vols.)

{362} See pp. 367-8.

{364} The earliest attempts at a concordance were A Complete Verbal Index to the Plays, by F. Twiss (1805), and An Index to the Remarkable Passages and Words by Samuel Ayscough (1827), but these are now superseded.

{366a} Jordan's Collections, including this fraudulent will of Shakespeare's father, was printed privately by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps in 1864.

{366b} See p. 267.

{367a} Reference has already been made to the character of the manuscript corrections made by Collier in a copy of the Second Folio of 1632, known as the Perkins Folio. See p. 312, note 2. The chief authorities on the subject of the Collier forgeries are: An Inquiry into the Genuineness of the Manuscript Corrections in Mr. J. Payne Collier's Annotated Shakspere Folio, 1632, and of certain Shaksperian Documents likewise published by Mr. Collier, by N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London, 1860; A Complete View of the Shakespeare Controversy concerning the Authenticity and Genuineness of Manuscript Matter affecting the Works and Biography of Shakspere, published by J. Payne Collier as the Fruits of his Researches, by C. M. Ingleby, LL.D. of Trinity College, Cambridge, London, 1865; Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn's College of God's Gift at Dulwich, by George F. Warner, M.A., 1881; Notes on the Life of James Payne Collier, with a Complete List of his Works and an Account of such Shakespeare Documents as are believed to be spurious, by Henry B. Wheatley, London, 1884.

{367b} See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1595-7, p. 310.

{368a} See Warners Catalogue of Dulwich MSS. pp. 24-6.

{368b} Cf. ibid. pp. 26-7.

{369a} See p. 235, note I.

{369b} Cf. Warner's Dulwich MSS. pp.30-31.

{369c} See p. 254, note I.

{370} Most of those that are commonly quoted are phrases in ordinary use by all writers of the day. The only point of any interest raised in the argument from parallelisms of expression centres about a quotation from Aristotle which Bacon and Shakespeare not merely both make, but make in what looks at a first glance to be the same erroneous form. Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, i. 8, that young men were unfitted for the study of political philosophy. Bacon, in the Advancement of Learning (1605), wrote: 'Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded wherein he saith that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy?' (bk. ii. p. 255, ed. Kitchin). Shakespeare, about 1603, in Troilus and Cressida, II. ii. 166, wrote of 'young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy.' But the alleged error of substituting moral for political philosophy in Aristotle's text is more apparent than real. By 'political' philosophy Aristotle, as his context amply shows, meant the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called 'morals.' In the summary paraphrase of Aristotle's Ethics which was translated into English from the Italian, and published in 1547, the passage to which both Shakespeare and Bacon refer is not rendered literally, but its general drift is given as a warning that moral philosophy is not a fit subject for study by youths who are naturally passionate and headstrong. Such an interpretation of Aristotle's language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Erasmus, in the epistle at the close of his popular Colloquia (Florence, 1530, sig. Q Q), wrote of his endeavour to insinuate serious precepts 'into the minds of young men whom Aristotle rightly described as unfit auditors of moral philosophy' ('in animos adolescentium, quos recte scripsit Aristoteles inidoneos auditores ethicae philosophiae'). In a French translation of the Ethics by the Comte de Plessis, published at Paris in 1553, the passage is rendered 'parquoy le ieune enfant n'est suffisant auditeur de la science civile;' and an English commentator (in a manuscript note written about 1605 in a copy of the book in the British Museum) turned the sentence into English thus: 'Whether a young man may bee a fitte scholler of morall philosophie.' In 1622 an Italian essayist, Virgilio Malvezzi, in his preface to his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito, has the remark, 'E non e discordante da questa mia opinione Aristotele, it qual dice, che i giovani non sono buoni ascultatori delle morali' (cf. Spedding, Works of Bacon, i. 739, iii. 440).

{371} Cf. Birch, Letters of Bacon, 1763, p. 392. A foolish suggestion has been made that Matthew was referring to Francis Bacon's brother Anthony, who died in 1601; Matthew was writing of a man who was alive more than twenty years later.

{372} Cf. Life by Theodore Bacon, London, 1888.

{374a} See pp. 4, 77, 127.

{374b} See p. 126.

{375a} Gervase Markham, Honour in his Perfection, 1624.

{375b} Loseley MSS. ed. A. J. Kempe, p. 240.

{375c} His mother, after thirteen years of widowhood, married in 1594 Sir Thomas Heneage, vice chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth's household; but he died within a year, and in 1596 she took a third husband, Sir William Hervey, who distinguished himself in military service in Ireland and was created a peer as Lord Hervey by James I.

{376a} By kind permission of the Marquis of Salisbury I lately copied out this essay at Hatfield.

{376b} In 1588 his brother-in-law, Thomas Arundel, afterwards first Lord Arundel of Wardour (husband of his only sister, Mary), petitioned Lord Burghley to grant him an additional tract of the New Forest about his house at Beaulieu. Although in his 'nonage,' Arundel wrote, the Earl was by no means 'of the smallest hope.' Arundel, with almost prophetic insight, added that the Earl of Pembroke was Southampton's 'most feared rival' in the competition for the land in question. Arundel was referring to the father of that third Earl of Pembroke who, despite the absence of evidence, has been described as Shakespeare's friend of the sonnets (cf. Calendar of Hatfield MSS. iii. 365).

{377a} Cf. Apollinis et Musarum [Greek text], Oxford, 1592, reprinted in Elizabethan Oxford (Oxford Historical Society), edited by Charles Plummer, xxix. 294:

Comes Post hunc (i.e. Earl of Essex) South- insequitur clara de stirpe Dynasta Hamp- Iure suo diues quem South-Hamptonia toniae. magnum Vendicat heroem; quo non formosior alter Affuit, ant docta iuuenis praestantior arte; Ora licet tenera vix dum lanugine vernent.

{377b} Historical MSS. Commission, 7th Report (Appendix) p. 521b.

{378} Peele's Anglorum Feriae.

{379} Cal. of the Duke of Rutland's MSS. i. 321. Barnabe Barnes, who was one of Southampton's poetic admirers, addressed a crude sonnet to 'the Beautiful Lady, The Lady Bridget Manners,' in 1593, at the same time as he addressed one to Southampton. Both are appended to Barnes's collection of sonnets and other poems entitled Parthenophe and Parthenophil (cf. Arber's Garner, v. 486). Barnes apostrophises Lady Bridget as 'fairest and sweetest'

Of all those sweet and fair flowers, The pride of chaste Cynthia's [i.e. Queen Elizabeth's] rich crown.

{380} See p. 233, note 2.

{383a} The original letter is at Hatfield. The whole is printed in Historical Manuscripts Commission, 3rd Rep. p. 145.

{383b} The quotation is a confused reminiscence of Falstaff's remarks in I Henry IV. II. iv. The last nine words are an exact quotation of lines 190-1.

{383c} Sidney Papers, ii. 132.

{383d} See p. 175.

{385a} See Nash's Works, ed. Grosart, v. 6. The whole passage runs: 'How wel or ill I haue done in it I am ignorant: (the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe): only your Honours applauding encouragement hath power to make me arrogant. Incomprehensible is the height of your spirit both in heroical resolution and matters of conceit. Vnrepriuebly perisheth that booke whatsoeuer to wast paper, which on the diamond rocke of your judgement disasterly chanceth to be shipwrackt. A dere louer and cherisher you are, as well of the louers of Poets, as of Poets them selues. Amongst their sacred number I dare not ascribe my selfe, though now and then I speak English: that smal braine I haue, to no further vse I conuert saue to be kinde to my frends, and fatall to my enemies. A new brain, a new wit, a new stile, a new soule will I get mee to canonize your name to posteritie, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption. Of your gracious fauer I despaire not, for I am not altogether Fames out-cast . . . Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown, from whence these my idle leaues seeke to deriue their whole nourishing.'

{385b} The complimentary title of 'Amyntas,' which was naturalised in English literature by Abraham Fraunce's two renderings of Tasso's Aminta—one direct from the Italian and the other from the Latin version of Thomas Watson—was apparently bestowed by Spenser on the Earl of Derby in his Colin Clouts come Home againe (1595); and some critics assume that Nash referred in Pierce Pennilesse to that nobleman rather than to Southampton. But Nash's comparison of his paragon to Ganymede suggests extreme youth, and Southampton was nineteen in 1592 while Derby was thirty-three. 'Amyntas' as a complimentary designation was widely used by the poets, and was not applied exclusively to any one patron of letters. It was bestowed on the poet Watson by Richard Barnfield and by other of Watson's panegyrists.

{386} Two manuscript copies of the poem, which has not been printed, are extant—one among the Rawlinson poetical manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, and the other among the manuscripts in the Inner Temple Library (No. 538). Mr. John S. Farmer has kindly sent me transcripts of the opening and concluding dedicatory sonnets. The first, which is inscribed 'to the right honorable the Lord S[outhampton]' runs:

Pardon, sweete flower of matchles poetrye, And fairest bud the red rose euer bare, Although my muse, devorst from deeper care, Presents thee with a wanton Elegie. Ne blame my verse of loose unchastitye For painting forth the things that hidden are, Since all men act what I in speeche declare, Onlie induced with varietie. Complaints and praises, every one can write, And passion out their pangs in statlie rimes; But of loues pleasures none did euer write, That have succeeded in theis latter times.

Accept of it, deare Lord, in gentle parte, And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.

The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and the manuscript ends with a second sonnet addressed by Nash to his patron:

Thus hath my penne presum'd to please my friend. Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo's eye. No, Honor brookes no such impietie, Yet Ovid's wanton muse did not offend. He is the fountaine whence my streames do flowe— Forgive me if I speak as I was taught; Alike to women, utter all I knowe, As longing to unlade so bad a fraught. My mynde once purg'd of such lascivious witt, With purified words and hallowed verse, Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse. That better maie thy grauer view befitt. Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write Or for attempting banish me your sight.

THO. NASH.

{388a} Daniel's Certaine Epistles, 1603: see Daniel's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 216 seq.

{388b} See Preface to Davies's Microcosmos, 1603 (Davies's Works, ed. Grosart, i. 14). At the end of Davies's Microcosmos there is also a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liberation (ib. p. 96), beginning:

Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord, From the deep seas of danger and distress. There like thou wast to be thrown overboard In every storm of discontentedness.

{390} 'Amours of J. D.' were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier's suggestion that J. D. was a misprint for M. D., i.e. Michael Drayton, who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the title of Amours. That word was in France the common designation of collections of sonnets (cf. Drayton's Poems, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv).

{391} See note to p. 88 supra.

{393a} The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber's Transcript of the Registers of the Stationers' Company.

{393b} Arber, ii. 124.

{393c} Ib. ii. 713.

{393d} A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer, Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking another occupation (cf. Arber's Transcript, ii. 213).

{393e} Cf. Bibliographica, i. 474-98, where I have given an account of Blount's professional career in a paper called 'An Elizabethan Bookseller.'

{394a} Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting between dedicator and dedicatee. 'When I bring you the book,' he advises Blount, 'take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give nothing.' Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron's love 'both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.'

{394b} One gave an account of the East India Company's fleet; the other reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London.

{395a} Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527.

{395b} Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in 1605; two in 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (i.e. the Sonnets); three in 1610 (i.e. Histrio-mastix, or the Playwright, as well as Healey's translations); two in 1611; one in 1612; three in 1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624. The last was a new edition of George Chapman's Conspiracie and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron, which Thorpe first published in 1608.

{395c} They were Wits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams (anon.), by R. West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library); Chapman's Byron, and Jonson's Masques of Blackness and Beauty.

{395d} Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom were successful in launching one or two with or without the author's sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken particular care with Jonson's books, but none of Jonson's works fell into Thorpe's hands before 1605 or after 1608, a minute fraction of Jonson's literary life. It is significant that the author's dedication—the one certain mark of publication with the author's sanction—appears in only one of the three plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in Byron. One or two copies of Thorpe's impression of All Fools have a dedication by the author, but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe's edition of Chapman's Gentleman Usher has any dedication.

{397} Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all, on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.'s [i.e. possibly Richard Stafford's] 'Epistle dedicatorie' before his Heraclitus (Oxford, 1609) was inscribed 'to his much honoured father S. F. S.' An Apologie for Women, or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion . . . by W. H. of Ex. in Ox. (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to 'the honourable and right vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.' This volume, published in the same year as Shakespeare's Sonnets, offers a pertinent example of the generous freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of books of the day.

{398} In the volume of 1593 the words run: 'To the noble and valorous gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted Michael Drayton.'

{399a} In 1610, in dedicating St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as 'a desired citie sure in heaven,' and assigns to 'St. Augustine and his commentator Vives' a 'savour of the secular.' In the same year, in dedicating Epictetus his Manuall to Florio, he bombastically pronounces the book to be 'the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as Nature greatest in the least; as Homer's Ilias in a nutshell; in lesse compasse more cunning.' For other examples of Thorpe's pretentious, half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2.

{399b} The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe's salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither's Abuses Whipt and Stript (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the ironical salutation 'To himselfe G. W. wisheth all happinesse.' It is further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe's dedication to 'Mr. W. H.' in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at a feature common to scores of books. Since his Abuses was printed by George Eld and sold by Francis Burton—the printer and publisher concerned in 1606 in the publication of 'W. H.'s' Southwell manuscript—there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind 'W. H.'s' greeting of Mathew Saunders, but fifty recently published volumes would have supplied him with similar hints.

{400a} Thorpe dedicated to Florio Epictetus his Manuall, and Cebes his Table, out of Greek originall by Io. Healey, 1610. He dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke St. Augustine, Of the Citie of God . . . Englished by I. H., 1610, and a second edition of Healey's Epictetus, 1616.

{400b} Southwell's Foure-fould Meditation of 1606 is a book of excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy having been met with in our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished bibliographer, who in a letter to the Athenaeum, on November 1, 1873, suggested for the first time the identity of 'W. H.,' the dedicator of Southwell's poem, with Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.'

{401} A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy of those poems by Southwell which 'unfained affectionate W.H.' first gave to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page of the manuscript in his own handwriting an 'epistel dedicatorie' which he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter. The words ran: 'To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire, Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of bodie and soule with continwance of worshipp in this worlde. And after Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for ever.'

{403a} A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the Stationers' Company bearing at the required dates the initials of 'W. H.' But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe.

{403b} Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of pretentious bombast which it is difficult to interpret exactly. When dedicating in 1610—the year after the issue of the Sonnets—Healey's Epictetus his Manuall 'to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister John Florio,' Thorpe writes of Epictetus's work: 'In all languages, ages, by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that hath no good sence of this stoick.' In the same year, when dedicating Healey's translation of St. Augustine's Citie of God to the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke's patronage of Healey's earlier efforts in translation thus: 'He that against detraction beyond expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more acceptance.'

{405} This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum edition of 1821 by Malone's disciple, James Boswell the younger, who, like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority. The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators—men like Malone and Steevens—who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the sixteenth century, should have failed to recognise any connection between 'Mr. W. H.' and Shakespeare's personal history is in itself a very strong argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the present century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archaeologists.

{406} James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the Pembroke theory in a volume on Shakespeare's Sonnets which he published in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory without qualification, significantly pointed out in his New Illustrations of Shakespeare in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr. Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there further advanced a claim to identify the 'dark lady' of the sonnets with Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke's mistress. Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title of The Herbert-Fitton Theory: a Reply [i.e. to criticisms of the theories by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the category of popular delusions.

{407} Cf. Sydney Papers, ed. Collins, i. 353. 'My Lord (of Pembroke) himself with my Lord Harbert (is) come up to see the Queen' (Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November 16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, 'Young Lord Harbert, Sir Henrie Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall set the best legge foremost.' Chamberlain's Letters (Camden Soc.), p. 57

{408} Thomas Sackville, the author of the Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates and other poetical pieces, and part author of Gorboduc, was born plain 'Thomas Sackville,' and was ordinarily addressed in youth as 'Mr. Sackville.' He wrote all his literary work while he bore that and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in life, in 1604—at the age of sixty-eight—he became Earl of Dorset. A few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, 'M. [i.e. Mr.] Sackville,' were reprinted with that signature unaltered in an encyclopaedic anthology, England's Parnassus, which was published, wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr. Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his Induction to The Mirror for Magistrates, which was in the original text ascribed, with perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke 'Mr. W. H.' As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no parallel for the latter irregularity.

{409} An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian—none is in the British Museum—shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not, as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.

{410} On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as 'goodman Morley.' A technical defect—the omission of the precise date of the alleged offence—in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of the cause. See Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon, F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.

{411} See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of As You Like It. The countess is said to have added, 'We have the man Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known: she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.' Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words 'Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603' The ink and handwriting are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.

{414} Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after the portrait by Mytens.

{415} It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to consider seriously the suggestion that the 'dark lady' of the sonnets was Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady, who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and bore him a child, has been introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed. Lady Newdegate's recently published Gossip from a Muniment Room, which furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury, and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate's volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare and the supposititious 'Will Herbert' for 'the dark lady's' favours in the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person of that Christian name.

{416} Professor Dowden (Sonnets, p. xxxv) writes: 'It appears from the punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of Shakspere's friend was the same as his own, Will,' and thence is deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.

{418a} Ed. Mayor, p. 35.

{418b} Manningham's Diary, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes's Odes Pastoral sestine 2:

'But women will have their own wills, Alas, why then should I complain?'

{419} Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names, unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.

{420} Barnes's Parthenophil in Arber's Garner, v. 440.

{421a} After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between the graces of his cruel mistress's face and the Graces of classical mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner (the italics are my own):

Why did rich Nature graces grant to thee, Since thou art such a niggard of thy grace? O how can graces in thy body be? Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . . Grant me some grace! For thou with grace art wealthy And kindly may'st afford some gracious thing.

{421b} Cf. Lear, IV. vi. 279, 'O undistinguish'd space of woman's will;' i.e. 'O boundless range of woman's lust.'

{421c} Professor Dowden says 'will to boot' is a reference to the Christian name of Shakespeare's friend, 'William [? Mr. W. H.]' (Sonnets, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon practice of his. The line 'And will to boot, and will in over-plus,' is paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other sonnets as

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5). Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4). Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).

In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the first half with a slight intensification.

{422a} Cf. Barnes's Sonnet lxxiii.:

All her looks gracious, yet no grace do bring To me, poor wretch! Yet be the Graces there.

{422b} Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the 'sightless view' of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the 'centre of his sinful earth' in Sonnet cxlvi.

{423a} The use of the word 'fulfil' in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes's introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above:

Since what she lists her heart fulfils.

{423b} Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: 'You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,' p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: 'Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will, i.e. all desire.'

{425} The word 'Will' is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes's line quoted above:

Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.

{426} Because 'will' by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed Will in the first edition of the sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, i.e. the friend 'Will [? W. H.]' This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication.

{427a} See p. 83 supra.

{427b} The word 'sonnet' was often irregularly used for 'song' or 'poem.' A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson's poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe's Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word 'quatorzain' was the term almost as frequently applied as 'sonnet' to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on 'scaling the skies in lofty quatorzains' in verses before his Passionate Centurie, 1582; cf. 'crazed quatorzains' in Thomas Nash's preface to his edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 1591; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton's Sonnets, 1594.

{428a} See p. 103 supra.

{428b} All Watson's sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson's Poems, 1895.

{429a} In a preface to Newman's first edition of Astrophel and Stella the editor, Thomas Nash, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney's sonnets, exclaimed: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers! for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.' But the effect of Sidney's work was just the opposite to that which Nash anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since.

{429b} With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic.

{429c} Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney's Astrophel. These nine he permanently dropped.

{431} It is reprinted in Arber's Garner, ii. 225-64.

{432a} Arber's Garner, v. 333-486.

{432b} Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1608.

{433a} Dekker's well-known song, 'Oh, sweet content,' in his play of 'Patient Grisselde' (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes.

{433b} Arber's Garner, viii. 413-52.

{433c} There is a convenient reprint of Lodge's Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by Martha Foote Crow, 1896.

{435a} See p. 110, note.

{435b} Arber's Garner, vi. 135-49.

{435c} Ib. v. 61-86.

{435d} Reprinted in Arber's English Scholars' Library, 1882.

{435e} It was licensed for the press on November 19, 1594.

{436a} Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds.

{436b} Sir John Davies's Complete Poems, edited by Dr. Grosart, i. 52-62.

{436c} See p. 128, note.

{437a} Arber's Garner, vii. 185-208.

{437b} Ib. v. 587-622.

{437c} Cf. Brydges's Excerpta Tudoriana, 1814, i. 35-7. One was printed with some alterations in Rosseter's Book of Ayres (1610), and another in the Third Book of Ayres (1617?); see Campion's Works, ed. A. H. Bullen, pp. 15-16, 102.

{437d} Arber's Garner, viii. 171-99.

{438a} See p. 390 and note.

{438b} Practically to the same category as these collections of sonnets belong the voluminous laments of lovers, in six, eight, or ten lined stanzas, which, though not in strict sonnet form, closely resemble in temper the sonnet-sequences. Such are Willobie's Avisa, 1594; Alcilia: Philoparthen's Loving Folly, by J. C., 1595; Arbor of Amorous Deuices, 1597 (containing two regular sonnets), by Nicholas Breton; Alba, the Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, by Robert Tofte, 1598; Daiphantus, or the Passions of Love, by Anthony Scoloker, 1604; Breton's The Passionate Shepheard, or The Shepheardes Loue: set downe in passions to his Shepheardesse Aglaia: with many excellent conceited poems and pleasant sonets fit for young heads to passe away idle houres, 1604 (none of the 'sonets' are in sonnet metre); and John Reynolds's Dolarnys Primerose . . . wherein is expressed the liuely passions of Zeale and Loue, 1606. Though George Wither's similar productions—his exquisitely fanciful Fidelia (1617) and his Faire-Virtue, the Mistresse of Phil' Arete (1622)—were published at a later period, they were probably designed in the opening years of the seventeenth century.

{439a} They were first printed in 1656, seven years after the author's death, in Poems by that famous wit, William Drummond, London, fol. The volume was edited by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew. The best modern edition is that edited by Mr W. C. Ward in the 'Muses' Library (1894).

{439b} Cf. William Browne's Poems in 'Muses' Library (1894), ii. 217 et seq.

{440} Chapman imitated Spenser by appending fourteen like sonnets to his translation of Homer in 1610; they were increased in later issues to twenty-two. Very numerous sonnets to patrons were appended by John Davies of Hereford to his Microcosmos (1603) and to his Scourge of Folly (1611). 'Divers sonnets, epistles, &c.' addressed to patrons by Joshua Sylvester between 1590 and his death in 1618 were collected in the 1641 edition of his Du Bartas his divine weekes and workes.

{441a} Remy Belleau in 1566 brought out a similar poetical version of the Book of Ecclesiastes entitled Vanite.

{441b} There are forty-eight sonnets on the Trinity and similar topics appended to Davies's Wittes Pilgrimage (1610 ?).

{442a} Graphic illustrations of the attitude of Ronsard and his friends to a Greek poet like Anacreon appear in Anacreon et les Poemes anacreontiques, Texte grec avec les Traductions et Imitations des Poetes du XVIe siecle, par A. Delboulle (Havre, 1891). A translation of Anacreon by Remy Belleau appeared in 1556. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's essay, 'Anacreon au XVIe siecle,' in his Tableau de la Poesie francaise au XVIe siecle (1893), pp. 432-47. In the same connection Recueil des plus beaux Epigrammes grecs, mis en vers francois, par Pierre Tamisier (edit. 1617), is of interest.

{442b} Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell' Aquila (1466-1500), Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (d. 1585), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (fl. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi's Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 1770-1782; Dr. Garnett's History of Italian Literature, 1897; and Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, edit. 1898, vols. iv. and vi.) The notes to Watson's Passionate Centurie of Love, published in 1582 (see p. 103, note), to Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, edited by Mr. A. H. Bullen in 1891, and to the Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward in 1894, give many illustrations of English sonnetteers' indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century.

{445} There are modern reprints of most of these books, but not of all. There is a good reprint of Ronsard's works, edited by M. P. Blanchemain, in La Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, 8 vols. 1867; the Etude sur la Vie de Ronsard, in the eighth volume, is useful. The works of Remy Belleau are issued in the same series. The writings of the seven original members of 'La Pleiade' are reprinted in La Pleiade Francaise, edited by Marty-Laveaux, 16 vols., 1866-93. Maurice Seve's Delie was reissued at Lyons in 1862. Pierre de Brach's poems were carefully edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris (2 vols., Paris, 1862). A complete edition of Desportes's works, edited by Alfred Michiels, appeared in 1863. Prosper Blanchemain edited a reissue of the works of Louise Labe in 1875. The works of Jean de la Taille, of Amadis Jamyn, and of Guillaume des Autels are reprinted in Tresor des Vieux Poetes Francais (1877 et annis seq.) See Sainte-Beuve's Tableau Historique et Critique de la Poesie Francaise du XVIe Siecle (Paris, 1893); Henry Francis Cary's Early French Poets (London, 1846); Becq de Fouquieres' OEuvres choisies des Poetes Francais du XVIe Siecle contemporains avec Ronsard (1880), and the same editor's selections from De Baif, Du Bellay, and Ronsard; Darmesteter et Hatzfeld's Le Seizieme Siecle en France—Tableau de la Litterature et de la Langue (6th edit., 1897); and Petit de Julleville's Histoire de la Langue et de la Litterature Francaise (1897, iii. 136-260).

THE END