Shakspeare and His Times [Vol. 1 of 2] / Including the Biography of the Poet; criticisms on his genius and writings; a new chronology of his plays; a disquisition on the on the object of his sonnets; and a history of the manners, customs, and amusements, superstitions, poetry, and elegant literature of his age

by Nathan Drake

[661:A] British Bibliographer, No. XII. p. 7.

[661:B] Ibid. p. 5. 7.

[663:A] British Bibliographer, No. XII. p. 3, 4.

[663:B] Reed's Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 31.

[663:C] Epistle prefixed to Greene's Menaphon.

[663:D] Foure Letters and certaine Sonnets, 1592.

[663:E] Censura Literaria, vol. ix. p. 47.

[664:A] In the Apologie of Dorrell, dated 1596, and annexed to the second edition, he tells us, that "this poetical fiction was penned by the author at least for thirty and five yeares sithence." "If there was sufficient ground for this assertion," remarks Mr. Haslewood, "it fixes the time of the composition about 1561, and supposing the author then, as seems reasonable to presume, to have attained his twenty-first year, it places the time of his birth, as conjecturally fixed by Mr. Ellis, at 1540. However, some doubt arises whether this inference is not contradicted by the preface of 1594; which describes the author not only as 'a scholar of very good hope,' but also as a 'young man,' who, desirous of seeing the fashions of other countries, had, 'not long sithence,' departed voluntarily in Her Majesty's service. Here the most enlarged meaning bestowed on the expression 'not long sithence,' can neither explain the sentence that calls him a 'scholar of very good hope,' nor that of a 'young man,' whereby they shall be terms applicable to a person who had written thirty years before, and from the above inference might have been then in the fifty-fourth year of his age. It is probable the preface may be relied on; otherwise the author's departure from this country will be found too remote for the term of any voluntary engagement, civil or military, that could be attached to foreign service. Dorrell's subsequent anachronism may be ascribed to inadvertency: to a zealous, but hurried attempt to parry the attack of the critic, by the supposed youth of the writer; and by fixing the composition at a period sufficiently early to prevent an unfavourable comparison with more recent productions." British Bibliographer, No. XIV. p. 242.

[664:B] The term hexameter is here meant to designate stanzas consisting of six lines.

[664:C] Ritson dates this fourth impression 1609, but Mr. Haslewood 1605: see Brit. Bibliogr., No. XIV. p. 241.