[2] See Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 1921. Article headed “Hamlet and History.”
[3] See Sidelights on Shakespeare by H. Dugdale Sykes. (The Shakespeare Head Press, Stratford-upon-Avon. 1919.)
[4] The theory that the handwriting of this “addition” to the play of Sir Thomas More is the same handwriting as that of the Shakspere signatures, is, I do not hesitate to say, one of the most absurd propositions ever advanced even in Shakespearean controversy.
[5] See Sonnet 144.
[6] It is only necessary to read the life of John Florio in the Dict. of National Biography or the Encyc. Brit. to appreciate the absurdity of this attempt to find him in Shakespeare’s Falstaff. An almost equally silly attempt has been made by another sapient critic to identify him with Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Now no two characters could be more dissimilar than those of Falstaff and Holofernes, yet Florio according to one wiseacre was the prototype of the former, and according to another wiseacre of the latter! But there is no limit to the absurdities which are symptomatic of the rabies Stratfordiana.
[7] English Literature. An Illustrated Record (1903), pp. 199, 200, 202. Italics mine.
[8] So says that distinguished Shakespearean scholar, Mr. Fleay, who points out that in the previous year the theatres were closed owing to the plague.
[9] Sir E. Maunde Thompson, in Shakespeare’s Handwriting, p. 26.
[10] So far, that is, as Sir Sidney’s Life of Shakespeare is, or purports to be, biographical, and setting aside the “fanciful might-have-beens.”
[11] She so appears in the Quarto, and also in the Folio in certain places (II. 1 and IV. 1, e.g.) where, as in other passages, the play seems to have been imperfectly revised.