larly marked, wherein it differs from all the quartos, and appears in other respects to have been printed from the issue of 1615, with an occasional reference to some other authority. In the folio, however, several passages, comprising in all just fifty lines, are unaccountably omitted. Of these five editions, Mr. Collier, who has carefully collated them, pronounces the first, that of 1597, "beyond all dispute the most valuable for its readings and general accuracy ;" and we concur with him therein.-The only other certain contemporary notice of this play is in Meres' Palladis Tamia, 1598, where he mentions it in witness of Shakespeare's excellence in Tragedy.

As to the date of the composition we have nothing firm to build upon other than what has been stated above. Malone assigned the writing to 1593, and Chalmers to 1596; though their reasons for doing so are either not given, or such that they had better been withheld. To our judgment, the internal evidence, the abundance of rhymes, the frequent passages of elaborate verbal trifling, the general smooth-flowing current of the verse, and the comparative uncompactness of logical texture, make strongly in favor of the earlier date. In all these respects a comparison of Richard II with the First Part of Henry IV, which latter, even as it now stands, could not have been written later than 1597, will, we think, satisfy almost any one that the former must have preceded by several years. And an argument of considerable force to that effect might be made out from another sort of evidence. The first four books of Daniel's History of the Civil Wars, three of which are wholly taken up with the closing passages of Richard's government and life, were originally published in 1595. Daniel was himself a star, not indeed of the first magnitude, nor, perhaps, of the second, but yet a star in that matchless constellation of wits contemporary with Elizabeth and James I, which has since made England the brightness of the whole earth. Shakespeare and Daniel are known to have been personally acquainted, and the latter was a man of too high and pure a taste not to have rel

ished the offspring of his friend's unapproachable genius. Being, moreover, himself a writer of plays, and an aspirant for dramatic honors, it is scarce to be supposed that he would be away from the theater when "the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage" was making the place glorious with his "Delphic lines."

The poem and the play in question have several passages so similar in thought and language as to argue that one of the authors must have drawn from the other; though this of itself will by no means conclude which way the obligation ran. But there is another sort of resemblance more pertinent to the matter in hand. Shakespeare, in strict keeping with the scope and purpose of his work, makes the queen in mind, character, and deportment a fullgrown woman, whereas in fact she was at the time only twelve years old, having been married when she was but eight;—a liberty of art every way justifiable in an historical drama, and such as he never scruples to take when the proper ends of dramatic representation can be furthered thereby. With Daniel, however, the plan of his work, no less than the bent of his mind, caused him to write for the most part with the historical accuracy of a chronicle, insomuch that the fine deep vein of poetry that was in him had not fair play, being overmuch hampered and clogged by the stiffness and rigidity of literal truth. Yet he makes a similar departure from fact in case of the queen, representing her very much as she is in the play;-a thing for which the only hint of authority has been discovered is a sentence in Froissart's description of the marriage: "As I have been informed, it was a goodly sight to see her behavior; for all that she was but young, right pleasantly she bare the port of a queen.' The point, then, is, that such a departure from historical truth, however justifiable in either case, seems more likely to have been original in the play than in the poem: in the one it grew naturally from the purpose of the work and the usual method of the workman; in the other its cause appears to be rather in the force of example: in short, Shakespeare was more apt

to do it, because, artistically speaking, it ought so to be; Daniel, because it had been so done with success. And it is considerable that Daniel pushes this divergence even further than Shakespeare; in which excess we may easily detect the influence of a model: for what proceeds by the reason and laws of art naturally stops with them; but in proceeding by the measure of examples and effects such is not the case; and hence it is that mere imitation is so apt to "overstep the modesty of nature.” To all which if we add, what may be safely added, that both this and the other resemblances are such withal as would naturally result from the impressions of the stage, the whole seems to make at least something of probability for the point in question. There was certainly one and perhaps two other plays in Shakespeare's time on the subject of Richard II. This we learn unmistakably from the Diary of Dr. Simon Ferman. Under the date of April 30, 1611, he gives a particular account of a play called Richard II, which he had just seen at the Globe Theater. The leading events of the play as there stated are as follows: "How Jack Straw was suddenly stabbed at Smithfield Bars by Walworth, the mayor of London, and he and his whole army overthrown: How the duke of Gloucester and others, crossing the king in his humors about the duke of Ireland and Busby, were glad to fly, and raise a host of men; and when Ireland came by night with three hundred men to surprise them, they, being warned thereof, kept the gates fast, and would not suffer him to enter the castle; so he went back with a fly in his ear, and was afterwards slain in battle by the earl of Arundel: That when Gloucester and Arundel came to London with their army the king went forth to meet them, and gave them fair words, promising them pardon, and that all should be well, if they would discharge their army; and after they had done so, having bid them all to a banquet, he betrayed them, and cut off their heads, because they had not the pardon under his hand and seal: How the duke of Lancaster privily contrived to set them all by the ears, and to make the nobility envy the king, and

mislike his government; whereby he made his own son king, which was Henry Bolingbroke: And how Lancaster asked a wise man whether himself should ever be king; and being told that he should not, but his son should, he hanged the man for his labor, lest he should speak thereof to others." From this account it is clear the play could not have been Shakespeare's, though performed at the theater for which he had so long been used to write. It should be observed that Forman says nothing distinctly about the deposing of the king; which event he would hardly have failed to make special mention of, had it been represented in the play. This brings us to a strange matter of state that took place in the year 1601. In Lord Bacon's papers concerning "the treason of Robert, earl of Essex," we meet with the following statement, being a part of what was charged against Sir Gilly Merrick: "That the afternoon before the rebellion, Merrick, with a great company of others that afterwards were all in the action, had procured to be played before them The Play of Deposing King Richard the Second. Neither was it casual, but a play bespoken by Merrick. And not so only, but when it was told him by one of the players that the play was old, and they should have loss in playing it, because few would come to it, there were forty shillings extraordinary given to play it, and so thereupon played it was. So earnest he was to satisfy his eyes with the sight of that tragedy, which he thought soon after his lordship should bring from the stage to the state."

That this may have been the same play witnessed by Forman ten years later is indeed possible, but appears, to say the least, rather improbable. Whether, granting it not to have been that, it was Shakespeare's Richard II, or a third play on the same subject, that has not elsewhere been heard of, is a question not very likely to be solved. Malone conjectured that the "new additions" of 1608 formed a part of the play as originally written, but were left out of the first two quartos from fear of offending the queen, to whose ears the deposing of monarchs was a very

ungrateful theme, especially after the part she had in deposing from both crown and life her enchanting and illstarred kinswoman, the witty and beautiful Mary of Scotland. Her sensitive jealousy on this score appears in that Hayward all but incurred a prosecution in 1599 for his First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV, wherein the deposing of Richard II was set forth. So that, allowing the deposition-scene to have been originally a part of Shakespeare's play, we have here sufficient reason for its being omitted in the printed copy of 1597. Nor do the new additions themselves yield any argument or indication of having been written at a later period than the rest of the play. All which being considered, it does not well appear but that Shakespeare's Richard II may have been the play referred to in the state paper quoted above. To this the chief, if not the only objection is, that the one there spoken of is called an "old play"; whereby, however, we need understand no more than that the play had lost the charm of novelty; a thing which, considering the marvelous fertility of the time in dramatic productions, might well enough come about in the course of four or five years. And it is worth remarking withal, that the players could afford to call the play an old one, since this gave them the chance of an extra forty shillings. So that, upon the whole, the objection in hand cannot pass for much. Our own judgment therefore is, though we claim nothing better than fragile probabilities for its basis, that Shakespeare's Richard II was written before 1595; that it was the play referred to in the trial of Essex and his accomplices; and that for reasons of state the deposition-scene was withheld from the press till some time after the accession of James I, when all apprehensions on that score were done away.

The leading events, the manners, and all the persons of this drama, except the queen, its whole substance, movement, and interest, are purely historical, with only such heightening of effect, such vividness of coloring, and such vital invigoration as poetry can add without anywise