CHRONICLE HISTORY OF THE STAGE. INTRODUCTION: GENERAL. THE unflagging interest in everything connected with Shakespeare is manifested by the daily additions to the enormous mass of so-called literature under which his memory groans: no guess is too wild, no hypothesis too absurd, to meet with discussion and support at the hands of dramatic students, and even of the general reading public. Of this literature by far the greater part would have been at once dismissed as valueless, had there existed any trustworthy history of the stage for the period during his career; and yet, however evident it may seem that such a groundwork of fact must be indispensable before the much-debated questions of the chronology of his plays and their bearing on contemporary events could be satisfactorily settled, no such history has yet been written. Malone, and to a much smaller extent Chalmers, gathered a mass of valuable materials which are accessible in the 1821 Shakespeare, edited by Boswell and quoted continually in the present volume as "Variorum;" but they are, from want of any distinct method of arrangemens, extremely difficult to refer to, having neither Index, Contents, nor division under appropriate headings. Mr. Collier used these collections by Malone as the foundation of his "Annals of the Stage," quoted in my work from the second edition of 1879 as "Collier." He added some documents gleaned from the State Papers and the Municipal Records, but unfortunately a much larger number of guesses and forgeries. His knowledge of the subject-matter was considerable; but in order to avoid palpable contradictions Α 0 between ascertained facts and spurious documents inconsiderately and hastily issued, he was compelled to sophisticate even the genuine documents which he used to so great an extent that no statement of his can be accepted as accurate, until on other evidence it has been confirmed. I intended to have pointed out all his swervings from accuracy in this book; but finding that it would have seriously increased the bulk of my work, I have cancelled all such references, except in the first section, which, containing the fewest forged documents, is the most favourable section for Mr. Collier, but at the same time requires, for that very reason, less waste of space in correcting him. Since Collier's book, no attempt until the present has been made to present the stage history of the Tudor-Stuart time with any fulness; it is due to the reader to state what is the scope and method of my work. The Period included is from 1559 to 1642, i.e., the reigns of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. Little exception will probably be taken to my closing at the time of the discontinuance of public acting and the outbreak of the Civil War; but it will almost certainly be objected that I should have given a preliminary sketch of the origin of the Drama. It might be sufficient to answer that I have little new matter to bring forward on earlier times, and that this work has been sufficiently well done by others who felt a greater interest in it than I do; but I have a better answer. The main interest of all students of this period of dramatic literature, the highest outcome of the highest form of imaginative art known in man's history, undoubtedly centres in its culmination in Shakespeare and his environment of mighty contemporaries, many of whom were important enough to have been of chief position in any time not overshadowed by his supereminent greatness. Now, the time included, from the birth of Shakespeare to the death of his latest survivor of eminence, Jonson, is from 1564 to 1637, a period of seventy-four years, exactly divided by the close and beginning of the centuries, thirty-seven years lying in the sixteenth, and thirty-seven in the seventeenth. An addition of five years at each end of this period |