Lastly, Mr. Chalmers, principally because Shakspeare appears to have borrowed some imagery in the fifth act, from Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, which was entered at Stationers' Hall on the 4th of February, 1592, has ascribed the first sketch of Romeo and Juliet to the spring-time of the same year.[357:E]
Now, adopting the opinion of Mr. Tyrwhitt as to Shakspeare's reference to the earthquake of 1580, a little attention to the lines which the poet has put into the month of his garrulous nurse, will convince us that these gentlemen are alike mistaken in their chronological calculations.
The nurse in the first place tells us, that Juliet was within little more than a fortnight of being fourteen years old, an assertion in which she could not be incorrect, as it is corroborated by Lady Capulet, who thinks her daughter, in consequence of this age, fit for marriage. In the next place she informs us that Juliet was weaned on the day of the earthquake, and as she could then stand and run alone, we must conceive her to have been at this period at least a twelvemonth old; and thirdly, and immediately afterwards we are told, with a contradiction which assigns to Juliet but the age of twelve,—
"'Tis since the earthquake now eleven years."
There can be no doubt, therefore, that this miscalculation of eleven for thirteen years, was intended as a characteristic feature of the superannuated nurse, and that, assuming the era of 1580 as the epoch meant to be conveyed in the allusion to the earthquake at Verona, the composition of Romeo and Juliet must be allotted, not to the years 1591, 1592, or 1595, but to the year 1593.
It appears somewhat singular, indeed, that Mr. Malone, contrary to his usual custom, should have given a place in his Chronology, not to the first sketch of this play, but to a supposed completion of it in 1595; more especially when we find, from his own words[358:A], that this, like several other dramas of our bard, was gradually and successively improved, and that, though first printed in 1597, it was not filled up and completed as we now have it, until 1599, when a second edition was published.
Some surprise also must be excited by the reasons which induced Mr. Chalmers to date the first sketch of this tragedy in the spring of 1592. Of these the first, he remarks, "is plainly an allusion to the Faerie Queene, the three first books of which were published in 1590; and which was continually present in our poet's mind; Mercutio, in his airy and satiric speech, cries out,—
"O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies midwife; and she comes,
In shape no bigger than aggat stone