the dramas represented before that sovereign in the Christmas holidays of 1597-1598. At this time, or then very recently, the renowned hero of the Boar's Head Tavern had been introduced as Sir John Oldcastle, but the Queen ordered Shakespeare to alter the name of the character. This step was taken in consequence of the representations of some member or members of the Cobham family, who had taken offense at their illustrious ancestor, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, the Protestant martyr, being disparagingly introduced on the stage; and, accordingly, in or before the February of the following year, Falstaff took the place of Oldcastle, the former being probably one of the few names invented by Shakespeare.

The great dramatist himself, having nominally adopted Oldcastle from a character who is one of Prince Henry's profligate companions in a previous drama, a composition which had been several years before the public, and had not encountered effective remonstrance, could have had no idea that his appropriation of the name would have given so much displeasure. The subject, however, was viewed by the Cobhams in a very serious light. This is clearly shown, not merely by the action taken by the Queen, but by the anxiety exhibited by Shakespeare, in the epilogue to the second part, to place the matter beyond all doubt by the explicit declaration that there was in Falstaff no kind of association, satirical or otherwise, with the martyred Oldcastle. The whole incident is a testimony to the popularity of, and the importance attached to, these dramas of Shakespeare's at their first appearance, and it may be fairly questioned if any comedy on the early English stage was more immediately or enthusiastically appreciated than was the First Part of Henry

IV. Two editions of the latter play appeared in 1598, and, in the same year, there were quoted from it passages that had evidently already become familiar household words in the mouths of the public. Strangely enough, however, the earliest edition that bore the author's name on the titlepage was not published till the following year.

The inimitable humor of Falstaff was appreciated at the Court as heartily as by the public. The Queen was so taken with the delineation of that marvelous character in the two parts of Henry IV, that she commanded Shakespeare to write a third part in which the fat knight should be exhibited as a victim to the power of love. Sovereigns in the olden time, especially one of Elizabeth's temperament, would never have dreamed of consulting the author as to the risk of the selected additional passion not harmonizing with the original conception. Shakespeare's business was to obey, not to indulge in what would have been considered an insolent and unintelligible remonstrance. His intention of continuing the history of the same Falstaff in a play on the subject of Henry V was, therefore, abandoned, and thus we have, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy in which some of the names are adopted from the previous dramas, but the natures of the characters to which those names are attached are either modified or altogether transformed. The transient allusions which bring the latter play into the historical series are so trivial that they would appear to have been introduced merely out of deference to the Queen's expressed wishes for a continuation. The comedy diverges in every other respect from the two parts of Henry IV, and remains, with the induction to the Taming of the

Shrew, the only examples in the works of Shakespeare of absolute and continuous representations of English life and manners of the author's own time.

There is an old tradition which avers that the Merry Wives of Windsor was written, at the desire of the Queen, in the brief space of a fortnight, and that it gave immense satisfaction at the Court. Nor in those days of rapid dramatic composition, when brevity of time in the execution of such work was frequently part of an ordinary theatrical agreement, could such a feat have been impossible to Shakespeare. It could have been no trouble to him to write, and the exceptional celerity of his pen is recorded by several of his friends. Hence, probably, are to be traced most of the numerous little discrepancies which, by a careful analysis, may be detected throughout the works of the great dramatist, and which are seen perhaps more conspicuously in this play than in most of the others. Shakespeare had evidently, as a writer, neither a topographical nor a chronometrical mind, and took small care to avoid inconsistencies arising from errors in his dispositions of localities and periods of time; provided always of course that such oversights were not sufficiently palpable in the action to disturb the complete reception of the latter by the audience. We may rest assured that the poet, when engaged in dramatic writing, neither placed before his eyes an elaborate map of the scenes of the plot; nor reckoned the exact number of hours to be taken by a character in moving from one spot to another; nor, in the composition of each line of verse, repeated the syllables to ascertain if they developed the style of meter it was his duty to posterity to be using at

that special period of his life. Such precautions may best be indefinitely reserved for the use of that visionary personage a scientific and arithmetical Shakespeare.

The earliest notice of the Merry Wives of Windsor, hitherto discovered, is in an entry on the registers of the Stationers' Company bearing date in January, 1602, in which year a catch-penny publisher surreptitiously issued a very defective copy, one made up by some poetaster, with the aid of short-hand notes, into the form of a play. That it was composed, however, before the death of Sir Thomas Lucy in July, 1600, may be safely taken for granted, for it is contrary to all records of Shakespeare's nature to believe that the more than playful allusions it contains to that individual would have been written after the decease of Shallow's prototype; and most probably also before the production of King Henry V in the summer of 1559, the royal command being the most feasible explanation that can be given of the author's change of purpose in the elimination of Falstaff from the action of the latter drama.

The Second Part of Henry IV and the Merry Wives of Windsor are, so far as we know, the only dramas of Shakespeare that are in any way connected with his personal history. They include scenes that could not have been written exactly in their present form if the great dramatist had not entertained an acute grudge against Sir Thomas Lucy. The knight of Charlecote was to be lampooned on the stage, then by far the most effective medium for public irrision, and hence arose the necessity of making Falstaff take his circuitous journeys to the "old pike's" house in Gloucestershire, to a locality within reach of Stratford-on-Avon and Henley-in-Arden, towns

that are faintly veiled under the names of Stamford and Hinckley. Hence also the direct and practically undisguised banter of the Lucys in the Merry Wives, for no one in Warwickshire could possibly have mistaken the allusion to the luces, the fishes otherwise termed pikes, that held so conspicuous a position in the family shield; and hence the rapidity with which the quarrel with Falstaff is dismissed after the object of its introduction had been satisfied. And although it may be consistent with dramatic possibilities that Shallow, when he arrives at Windsor on a mission of complaint to the King, should be welcomed there by an intimate friend, an inhabitant of that town, and at the same time a fellow-sportsman on the Cotswold,—one may be pardoned for suspecting that the Gloucestershire magistrate would not have been transferred to the royal borough if his presence had not been required for the effective illustration of the Charlecote escapade. Be this as it may, there is sufficient outside the region of conjecture to enable us to infer that the poet designed, in his satirical notices of the justice, an individual as well as a general application, and where could the listeners be found that would be likely to appreciate the former? Certainly neither in London nor at the Court, even on the very unlikely supposition that intelligence of the deerstealing affair had reached so far, for Sir Thomas's public life, at the earliest date at which either of the comedies could have been produced, had for many years been reIstricted to the midland counties. It may, therefore, be assumed that the great dramatist had in view representations of his pieces that he knew would be organized at or near Stratford after the termination of their first runs in the metropolis. But although a long-sustained re