In April a play of Troylus and Cressida, by Dekker and Chettle, was written; no doubt an opposition play to some revival of Shakespeare's older one on the same subject.
The Chamberlain's men acted A Warning for Fair Women about this time. This play appears to me to come from the hand of Lodge.
In this year The Passionate Pilgrim, "by W. Shakespeare," was imprinted by Jaggard. It contains two of the Sonnets, two other Sonnets from Love's Labour's Lost, and one other poem from the same play by Shakespeare. The remaining poems, as far as they are known, are by Barnefield and other inferior authors. There is not a vestige of reason for reprinting this book as Shakespeare's.
In the spring Shakespeare's company left the Curtain and went to act at the Globe. This was a newly erected building on Bankside, made partly of the materials of the old Theater, which had been removed by Burbadge at the beginning of the year. One of the first plays performed in it was Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour, the chief actors in which were Burbadge, Hemings, Phillips, Condell, Sly, and Pope. Kempe, Beeston, Duke, and Pallant had left the company, and did not act at the Globe. But Shakespeare's name is also absent in this list, and this fact, coupled with that of the libellous nature of this "comical satire," and Jonson's leaving the Chamberlain's men immediately after it to continue his strictures on Dekker, &c., at Blackfriars with the Children of the Chapel, makes it exceedingly probable that the disagreement which eventuated in the "purge" given by Shakespeare to Jonson mentioned in The Return to Parnassus had already arisen. It would lead to too long a digression to do more than touch on this stage quarrel here. I can only say that it lasted till 1601; that Jonson and Chapman on the one side at Blackfriars, and Shakespeare, Marston, and Dekker on the other, at first at the Globe, Rose, and Paul's, afterwards at the Fortune, kept up one continual warfare for more than three years. Not one of their plays during this time is free from personalities and satirical allusions; nor, indeed, are most comedies of Elizabeth's time; it is only because the allusions have grown obscure and uninteresting to us, that we fail to see that the Elizabethan comedy is eminently Aristophanic. It is not till the reign of James that we find the comedy of manners and intrigue at all generally developed.
Another play produced after the opening of the Globe was Henry V., and soon after in this year As You Like It.
Somewhere about this time an attempt was made to get a grant to "impale the arms of Shakespeare with those of Arden," ignotum cum ignotiore. The grant was not obtained.
At this Christmas the Chamberlain's men gave three performances at Court, viz., on 26th December at Whitehall, on 5th January 1599-1600 and on 4th February at Richmond.
Shrovetide, February 4. The play performed at Court was probably The Merry Wives of Windsor. This play is assigned by tradition to a command of the Queen, who wished to see Falstaff represented in love, and is said to have been written in a fortnight. It was probably an adaptation of the old Jealous Comedy of 1592, and is more likely to have come after than before Henry V., in which Shakespeare had failed, according to his implied promise in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV., to continue the story with Falstaff in it. It stands apart altogether from the historical series.
March 6. The Chamberlain's men acted "Oldcastle" before their patron, Lord Hunsdon, and foreign ambassadors at Somerset House. This could not have been Shakespeare's "Falstaff," for the obnoxious name of Oldcastle would certainly not have been revived before such an audience; nor could it have been the Sir John Oldcastle, which belonged to another company; it may have been The Merry Devil of Edmonton.