THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WITH A LIFE OF THE POET, EXPLANATORY FOOT-NOTES, CRITICAL Harvard Edition. BY THE REV. HENRY N. HUDSON, LL.D IN TWENTY VOLUMES. VOL. XV. BOSTON, U.S.A. GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 1899 822.33 203177 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1881, by HENRY N. HUDSON, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. ATZ KING LEAR. LIBR FIRS IRST heard of through an entry at the Stationers', dated November 26, 1607, and reading as follows: “A book called Mr. William Shakespeare's History of King Lear, as it was played before the King's Majesty at Whitehall, upon St. Stephen's night at Christmas last, by his Majesty's Servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bankside." This ascertains the play to have been acted on the 26th of December, 1606. Most likely the play had become favourably known on the public stage before it was called for at the Court. On the other hand, it contains divers names and allusions evidently borrowed from Harsnet's Declaration of Popish Impostures, which appeared in 1603. This is all the positive information we have as to the date of the writing. There are, however, several passages in the play itself, referring, apparently, to contemporary events, and thus indicating still more nearly the time of the composition. Of these it seems hardly worth the while to note more than one. In Act I., scene 2, Gloster says, "These late eclipses in the Sun and Moon portend no good to us: though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects." A great eclipse of the Sun took place in October, 1605, and had been looked forward to with dread as portending evil; the more so, because an eclipse of the Moon occurred within the space of a month previous. And John Harvey had, in 1588, published a book wherein, with "the wisdom of nature," he had reasoned against the common belief, that such natural events were ominous of disaster, or had any moral significance whatever. To all which, add that in November, 1605, the dreadful secret of the Gunpowder Plot came to light, so that one at all superstitiously inclined might well say that "nature finds itself |