at Stationers' Hall, May 14, 1594. But beyond the fact that the history of Lear is the subject of this play, it has no further interest for us except perhaps as showing the difference in workmanship between the common playwright and the great master in the craft, when they had to deal with the same human motives and passions.

In the Gesta Romanorum (ed. Madden, p. 44) a story is told of the Emperor Theodosius which resembles the first scene of this play, and in Camden's Remaines (ed. 1605, p. 182) it is stated on the authority of an anonymous writer that Ina, King of the West Saxons, put his daughters' love to the same test.

The date of Shakespeare's Lear can be ascertained with a greater degree of precision than that of most of his plays. It was first published in quarto in 1608, and two editions were printed in that year, with a title-page which appears to have been intended to emphasize the difference between the Lear of Shakespeare and the above-mentioned play. That of the earlier is as follows:

'M. William Shak-speare: / HIS / True Chronicle Historie of the life and / death of King LEAR and his three / Daughters. / With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne / and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his / sullen and assumed humor of /TOM of Bedlam: / As it was played before the Kings Maiestie at Whitehall vpon / S. Stephans night in Christmas Hollidayes. / By his Maiesties seruants playing vsually at the Gloabe / on. the Bancke-side. / LONDON, / Printed for Nathaniel Butter, and are to be sold at his shop in Pauls Church-yard at the signe of the Pide Bull neere / St. Austins Gate. 1608. /'

The title-page of the other edition coincides verbally with this, but instead of the imprint 'London, &c.,' it has only 'Printed for Nathaniel Butter, 1608.'

Some editors have stated that there were three quarto editions of 1608; but for this there is no evidence, as is shown in the Preface to vol. viii. of the Cambridge Shakespeare, P. xiii.

The entry at Stationers' Hall is dated 26 Nov., 1607, and

contains the same statement that the play was acted at Whitehall before the King 'vpon St. Stephans night at Christmas last,' that is, on the 26th of December, 1606. Here we have therefore an inferior limit for the date of the play. The superior limit is supplied by the publication of Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, to which Shakespeare was indebted for the names of many of the devils in Edgar's speeches, as is shown by the quotations in the notes. This was published in 1603. If, therefore, we regard the 26th of December, 1606, as the date of its first performance, as seems not unlikely, the tragedy of King Lear must have been written between 1603 and the end of 1606.

Another circumstance has been noticed as pointing to the date of this play, but it is well not to lay too much stress upon it. In iv. 6. 226 the folios read:

'Seek him out

Upon the English party,'

where the quartos have 'British.' Now, by a royal proclamation issued Oct. 20, 1604, the names of England and Scotland were merged in the general title of Great Britain; and therefore it might be inferred that the line as it stands in the folios was written before Oct. 1604, and that it was corrected before the play was printed in 1608. But it is at least as likely that Shakespeare, writing not long after 1604, while the change was still fresh, and before the word 'British' had become familiar in men's mouths, may inadvertently have written 'English' and subsequently changed it to 'British.' In the last line of Act iii. Scene 4, he had done the same with regard to the familiar line of the old ballad, 'I smell the blood of an Englishman,' and therefore it is on the whole probable that Lear was written after and not before the proclamation of James I in 1604.

We are helped forward another step in determining the date by a passage in Gloucester's speech (i. 2. 96, &c.), 'These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us.' By those who observed the signs in the air and sky the great

eclipse of the sun, which took place in October, 1605, had been looked forward to with apprehension as the precursor of evil, especially as it was preceded by an eclipse of the moon within the space of a month. In arguing against such apprehensions, John Harvey, of King's Lynn, who reasoned with the 'wisdom of nature,' in his book called A Discoursive Probleme concerning Prophesies, printed in 1588, wrote as follows (p. 119):—

'Moreouer, the like concourse of two Eclipses in one, and the same month, shal hereafter more euidently in shew, and more effectually in deed, appeere, Anno 1590. the 7. and 21. daies of Iuly: and Anno 1598. the 11. and 25. daies of February; and Anno 1601. the 29. day of Nouember, and 14. of December: but especially, and most notably Anno 1605. the second day of October, when the sunne shall be obscured aboue 11. digits, and darknes appeere euen at midday, the Moone at the very next full immediately preceding hauing likewise beene Eclipsed. Wherfore as two Eclipses in the space of one month, are no great strange nouities, so if either they, or an huge fearefull Eclipse of the Sunne were to iustifie or confirme this oracle: the author therof should haue staied his wisedome vntill after the foresaid yeere of Christ, 1605. when so rare a spectacle shall be seene, or the yeeres 1606. 1607. or 1608. immediately following, when so mightie an Eclipse shall so perlously rage.'

Reading this in connexion with the speech of Gloucester which has been referred to and with what Edmund, the sceptic of the time, subsequently (i. 2. 120, 124, 125) says, 'O, these eclipses portend these divisions,' and, 'I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read this other day, what should follow these eclipses,' it can scarcely be doubted that Shakespeare had in his mind the great eclipse, and that Lear was written while the recollection of it was still fresh, and while the ephemeral literature of the day abounded with pamphlets foreboding the consequences that were to follow. If we imagine further that in Gloucester's words, 'machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our

graves,' there is a reference to the Gunpowder Plot of Nov. 5, 1605, we have another approximation to the date. But without insisting too much upon this, it is, I think, highly probable that Shakespeare did not begin to write King Lear till towards the end of the year 1605, and that his attention may have been directed to the story as a subject for tragedy by the revival of the older play above mentioned, which was published in the same year.

Having now reduced the period of composition to the narrow limits between the end of 1605 and Christmas, 1606, any attempt to assign the date more exactly must be purely conjectural and derived from internal evidence. It would be difficult to fix the precise season to which the storm in the third act is appropriate. Various indications in the previous act seem to point to the winter; such as the Fool's speech (ii. 4. 45), 'Winter's not gone yet, if the wild geese fly that way,' though of course this had also another meaning. Again, the signs of the gathering storm are wintry, 'the bleak winds do sorely ruffle,' ''tis a wild night'; but Lear's apostrophe is addressed to a violent summer tempest, and so Kent describes it. And in accordance with this all the colouring of the fourth act is of the summer. Lear is seen

'Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With hor-docks, hemlocks, nettles, cuckow-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.'

'Search every acre in the high-grown field,' points to July, and we must not insist too much upon strict botanical accuracy, for this would be late for cuckoo-flowers, as well as for the samphire-gathering in a subsequent scene, which generally takes place in May. Perhaps Shakespeare began the play in the winter of 1605 and finished it in the summer of 1606, while the fields were still covered with the unharvested corn, and the great storm of March was still fresh in his recollection.

In the low estate of English literature which followed the Restoration of the Stuarts, King Lear suffered the humiliation

of being adapted for the stage by Nahum Tate, who shares with Nicholas Brady the honour which belongs to the metrical version of the Psalms. That Tate should have done this is not surprising, for he was poet laureat and a worthy successor to Shadwell; but that for a hundred years the English playgoing public should have known Shakespeare's Lear only through the travesty of Tate, which Garrick acted and of which Johnson approved, is a significant fact, as showing the degradation of taste and the absolute dominion of mediocrity in literature.

It has been objected to the editions of Shakespeare's plays in the Clarendon Press Series that the Notes are too exclusively of a verbal character, and that they do not deal with æsthetic or, as it is called, the higher criticism. So far as I have had to do with them, I frankly confess that æsthetic notes have been deliberately and intentionally omitted, because one main object of these editions is to induce those for whose use they are expressly designed to read and study Shakespeare himself, and not to become familiar with opinions about him. Perhaps too it is because I cannot help experiencing a certain feeling of resentment when I read such notes that I am unwilling to intrude upon others what I should myself regard as impertinent. They are in reality too personal and subjective, and turn the commentator into a showman. With such sign-post criticisms I have no sympathy. Nor do I wish to add to the awful amazement which must possess the soul of Shakespeare when he knows of the manner in which his works have been tabulated and classified and labelled with a purpose after the most approved method like modern tendenzschriften. Such criticism applied to Shakespeare is nothing less than a gross anachronism. But the main objection I feel to æsthetic notes is that they are beside the scope and purpose of these books as vehicles of instruction and education. They would interfere with the independent effort of the reader to understand the author, and would substitute for that effort a second-hand opinion acquired from another which, both as reards method and result, is vastly inferior in educational value.