Owing to the existence of the quarto of 1597, Meres' testimony lacks its usual value in the determination of the date of the production of Romeo and Juliet. But the question arises, To which version of the tragedy did he refer that in which Shakespeare was originally concerned, or that which was "newly corrected, augmented, and amended," but which was not published (at least with any approach to completeness or correctness) until the year after the appearance of the Palladis Tamia? In my judgment, and without a doubt, he had in mind the play as it last came from Shakespeare's hand. For, aside from the great probability that he knew that only in this form was the tragedy properly Shakespeare's, the supposition that he referred to the augmented and amended version is not only in harmony with the facts which bear upon this question, but, like the

*

"I cannot conclude without referring to the lawless manner in which dramatic literary property is pillaged throughout this country by small travelling stars and insolvent managers. Short-hand writers visit the performances, take down the dramas, and hawk them for sale among irresponsible managers and actors, who are willing to risk the performance, relying on their own worthlessness to escape legal consequences.

"The success I have met with in my endeavors to please the public has aroused some natural jealousies, and I must submit to detraction and abuse. I do not place any great literary value on my works; they may be very poor things; but, poor as they are, they are mine, the sweat of my brow, the bread of my family. Is it probable that, while dramatic works so humble and worthless as mine are thus treated, dramatic authors of greater merit will arise, and sacrifice their lives, hopes, and aspirations to found and create an American drama? I am, sir, yours truly, DION BOURCICAULT.

"New York, April 21, 1860."

Here we have a play made by one of the most popular English dramatists of this day in just the mode that was adopted by his great predecessor — the adaptation of a popular story to the stage by throwing it into a dramatic form, and by adding new scenes and new characters, as well as by modifying the old We see the rivalry of theatrical managers and their desire to keep to themselves the text of the plays which they produce, that they may not lose the attraction of novelty. We see their precautions defeated in the case of a very successful play by the means of short-hand reporters, and the whole of the coveted work reproduced, -scenes, characters, and language, -except the substitution and interpolation of certain passages by an inferior hand. So little have the essential habits and customs of the theatre changed in two hundred and sixty years. And I may here opportunely add that the writing of plays by many hands, and the remodelling of old plays, goes on just as it did aforetime. The Maid's Tragedy, as it was played a year or two ago by Matilda Heron, was first written by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, then recast by Mr. Macready and Sheridan Knowles, and finally again modified by Mr. Bourcicault. And I have myself known five pens to be employed at once upon a new play which it was desired to produce in haste. - This Note has a bearing not only upon the Introduction to this play, but upon those to Hamlet and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and upon the Essay on the Authorship of King Henry the Sixth.

middle note in an inverted and widely-distributed chord in music, it harmonizes and binds together what would otherwise be discordant, or at least disconnected: as we shall see.

It has been already mentioned in these introductory remarks that the title page of the first quarto designates the play as one that had been "often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the Right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his Servants." Malone first observed that this statement bore upon the date of the production of the play. The company of which Shakespeare was a member had for patron Henry, Lord Hunsdon, who was Lord Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth; and they therefore styled themselves the Lord Chamberlain's Servants. But having, as Malone remarks, become attached to him, not as Lord Chamberlain, but as a peer of the realm, at his death, in July, 1596, they naturally fell under the patronage of his son and successor in the title. He, however, did not succeed at once to his father's post of Chamberlain of the Queen's household, that office having been conferred upon Lord Cobham. But six weeks after his death, (in March, 1596-7,) the new Lord Hunsdon was appointed his successor. Therefore from July, 1596, to April, 1597, Shakespeare's company were not the Lord Chamberlain's Servants, but Lord Hunsdon's; and Malone consequently concluded that Romeo and Juliet must have been produced during that period. To this conclusion it has been objected by Mr. Collier that "though the tragedy was printed in 1597, as it had been acted by Lord Hunsdon's Servants, it does not follow that it might not have been played some years before by the same actors, when calling themselves the Lord Chamberlain's Servants."

There is also another fact inconsistent with Malone's opinion that the tragedy was produced in 1596, the significance of which was first pointed out by Tyrwhitt. It is the speech of the Nurse (Act I. Sc. 3) about Juliet's age and weaning.

"But as I said,

On Lammas eve at night shall she be fourteen;
That shall she, marry; I remember it well.

'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years;
And she was wean'd."

Upon this Tyrwhitt remarked, "There is no such circumstance,

* Variorum of 1821, Vol. II. p. 345.

I believe, mentioned in any of the novels from which Shakespeare may be supposed to have drawn his story; and therefore it seems probable that he had in view the earthquake which had really been felt in many parts of England in his own time, viz., on the 6th of April, 1580.* Upon mature reflection, Malone saw that this conjecture (in itself more than probable) is supported by Shakespeare's "frequent allusions to the manners and usages of England, and to the events of his own time, which he has described as taking place wherever his scene happens to lie;" and, to reconcile the inconsistency between Tyrwhitt's deduction and his own, he suggested that " Shakespeare might have laid the foundation of this play in 1591, and finished it at a subsequent period." But the supposition that this tragedy had been acted some years before its publication in 1597 is irreconcilable, I think, with the fact that it was then manifestly published in the greatest possible haste. For the edition of that year was printed from two fonts of type, and probably, as Mr. Collier himself remarks, by two printers; and it bears upon its face all the marks of confused hurry.† And for the haste in which it was brought out there must have been some special reason ; for, as to the story of Romeo and Juliet, that had been known to the London public for years, and was accessible in half a dozen shapes. Indeed, there is little or no ground for doubt that the performances referred to upon the title page of the first quarto took place between July, 1596, and April, 1597, and that that publication was the hasty effort to obtain the benefit of thegreat applause "which those performances had elicited. Equally untenable is Malone's opinion that Shakespeare began Romeo and Juliet in 1591, and finished it in 1596. In his day plays were rapidly written, or rewritten, to supply an immediate demand; and he was manifestly one of the most business-like as well as prolific of play-wrights. That any dramatist of his period, and he of all, kept a play "on the stocks" five years is so extremely improbable as to be believed only upon positive and trustworthy testimony. But, on the contrary, that in 1591 Shakespeare and one or more other "practitioners for the stage" composed a Romeo and Juliet in partnership, and that in 1596 Shakespeare "corrected, augmented, and amended" it, making * See Stowe's Chronicle and Gabriel Harvey's letter in the Preface to Spenser's works, fol. 1679.

† John Danter's device bears the motto - notably appropriate on the title page of this publication - "Aut nunquam aut nunc.”

it to all intents and purposes entirely his own, and tl at it then met with such great success that an unscrupulous publisher obtained as much as he could of it by hook or by crook, and had the deficiencies supplied as well as could be by bits from the play of 1591, and, when that failed, by poets as unscrupulous as himself, is entirely accordant with the practices of that day, and reconciles all the facts in this particular case; even the two, that the play contains a reference which indicates 1591 as the year when it was written, and that in 1596 it was published in haste to take advantage of a great and sudden popularity.* This I believe to be the history of its production and its publication.

The true text of Romeo and Juliet is found in the folio of 1623, which, however, differs from that of the quarto of 1599 and two subsequent quartos (one dated 1609 and the other without date) only by the accidents of the printing office, to which they were all exposed, and in the reparation of which they all assist each other, though the folio seems to have suffered most from typographical corruption. The undated quarto, which was collated by Steevens, is especially useful in the correction of printers' errors. The text of the folio and the later quartos is generally sound, and, when unsound, easy of restoration by the means just named, or by conjecture; but it is deformed with several important corruptions, which have given much trouble to editors. and commentators. The readings of the quarto of 1597 have been adopted by most editors much oftener than is warranted by their merit, or by the importance of that edition. Even were there external and internal evidence to show that that version of the play was authentic, and that it was all Shake

*The age attributed to Juliet has some bearing upon the question above examined. The Nurse says of her, "She hath not seen the change of fourteen years." But in Brooke's poem Capulet says, "Scarse saw she yet full XVI yeres." This is the reading of the edition of 1562, according to Mr. Collier's reprint in Shakespeare's Library. It is possible that in one of the two other editions, 1582 and 1587, (one of which Shakespeare would have been likelier to use than the earliest impression) there may have been the very easy misprint, by transposition, 'XIV yeres.' On such points as this he followed very closely the text in hand of the novelists and chroniclers whose works he dramatized; and the probability of some such error is the greater from the fact that in Paynter's prose tale the father gives Juliet yet two years more, saying, “she is not yet attayned to the age of xviii yeares." But, if no such error were made, it would seem as if Shakespeare reduced Juliet's age to the very lowest point at which girls are marriageable in England, that he might accommodate it to the garrulous Nurse's characteristic reference to the earthquake.

speare's, the substitution of its readings for those of the revised and augmented text, except in extraordinary instances of confusion and difficulty, would be an assumption of editorial prerogative that could not be justified at the bar of criticism; hardly at that of morals. If there be any one right more indefeasible than all others, it is that of an author over what he has written. Publishers and politicians may disregard it; but by men of letters it should be loyally respected.

The period of the action of Romeo and Juliet is determined for those who seek historical accuracy in that regard by the ancient tradition that the events on which it is based took place in the time of Bartholomeo della Scala - 1303. But for all poetic and dramatic purposes it may be attributed to any time in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century; and a similar latitude may be exercised in the costuming of its personages. The works of Giotto and his contemporaries furnish the costume of the earliest period in question; and those of his successors, either on canvas or in illuminated books, engravings of which are easily accessible, give the dress of later times. For the period immediately preceding that at which the play was written, which may well be adopted as that of the play, because the action only needs to be removed from modern associations, Vecelli's work, before cited, is authority.

[Since this play was prepared for the press Professor Tycho Mommsen's Shakespeare's Romeo und Julia, Eine Kritische Ausgabe des Überlieferten Doppeltextes, &c., (Oldenburg, 1859,) has reached me. Had it been published earlier, it would have saved me much toil; for the learned professor prints the two texts of 1597 and 1599 opposite each other, with a notation at the foot of the page of the minutest variation in other editions. But my having in German is such a younger brother's revenue that I am obliged to postpone to a season of greater leisure the task of reading the very elaborate prolegomena to Herr Mommsen's work. A glance through it, however, emboldens me to say that, however interesting and instructive its microscopic view of the ancient texts might prove to me, it would produce no appreciable effect upon the text of this edition.]