It has long been believed that, before Part I of The Faerie Queene was published (in 1590) portions of Books I and II had been seen by Fraunce, Peele, and Marlowe. It is known that Gabriel Harvey had manuscript of The Faerie Queene for criticism before April, 1580; that Raleigh in Ireland and Queen Elizabeth in London passed judgment on some part of the first division before it was put into print; and that a circle of Lodowick Bryskett's friends near Dublin heard Spenser tell his plans for the whole work and also saw “some parcels” of it.

Although Spenser, speaking in the character of Irenæus in the View of the State of Ireland, declares himself as not “professed” in religion, he shows in general such profound interest in religion that his ecclesiastical and theological views have provoked abundant discussion. In examining the question of his religious predilections one might expect to gain further evidence from a careful study of his use of the Scriptures.

Robert Burton has never been known as a commentator on The Faerie Queene and he certainly did not aspire to that honor, but it is my purpose in this article to show that unconsciously he left a valuable set of notes on Spenser's work. Burton was not a critic and his one critical remark about The Faerie Queene sounds oddly to-day, although readers of M. Jusserand's remarks in his Literary History of the English People on Spenser's borrowings from Ariosto will remember some ideas that chime with what Burton says in the passage in question. In his analysis of love-melancholy in the Third Part of The Anatomy of Melancholy he remarked casually:

Our new Ariostoes, Boyards, Authors of Arcadia, Urania, Faerie Queene, &c., Marullus, Leotichius, Angerianus, Stroza, Secundus, Capellanus, &c., with the best of these facete modern poets have written in this kind, are but so many symptoms of love. Their whole books are a synopsis or breviary of love, the portuous of love, legends of lovers' lives and deaths, and of their memorable adventures, nay more, quod leguntur, quod laudantur, amori debent.

The first of the “Two other very commendable letters” in the correspondence between Spenser and Harvey has been reprinted in every complete edition of the poet's works since it was first printed by Hughes in 1715 and has been frequently cited by scholars during the past century, either because of the general light which it throws on this oddly assorted pair, or because of its famous reference to the the “surceasing and silence of balde Rymers,” or because of the evidence which it supplies of a close relationship at this time between Spenser and the Earl of Leicester. Nevertheless, there seems to be no general agreement among editors and scholars as to the precise date at which this letter was written; and as a result, every one who has quoted it has put forward his own assumption as its proper interpretation. It is the object of this paper to discuss these assumptions, and to determine, if possible, the true explanation of the date at which this letter was composed.

Three and a half centuries of criticism confront the student of today who attacks the problem of Spenser's diction. The purpose of the following study is not so much to present new material in the field of Spenserian scholarship as to effect a synthesis of the many theories which have been put forward and thus to present the whole subject more comprehensively.

Gradually the mists veiling Shakespeare's dramatic production prior to the year 1594 are thinning, and we are enabled with clearer vision to isolate his early steps in play-writing and study his development in artistry. We are becoming more keenly sensible of the fact that his earliest plays in their present form have a false aspect of maturity. On the basis of internal allusions, Professor Charlton would place the Love's Labour's Lost so late as the autumn of 1592; and to the duplications in the text of the same play clearly illustrating Shakespeare's method of amplifying and remodeling, Professor H. D. Gray has added other considerations in an attempt to reconstruct its first form, from which he would entirely eliminate the characters of Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes. Over a decade ago Dr. Tucker Brooke recognized the fact that 1 Henry VI underwent some revision as late as 1599, and pointed out that in 2 and 3 Henry VI the dramatic strength is largely that of Marlowe. Mr. J. M. Robertson has recently renewed the attack upon the problem of Richard III. Professor Pollard's new angle of approach to the history of the texts in the First Folio and the quartos has had fruitful results in the invaluable studies of the editors of the New Cambridge edition, revealing, among other disclosures, an extremely immature Midsummer-night's Dream of 1592 or earlier. Professor Adams, in his new Life of Shakespeare, has discussed the probable significance of the plague years, 1592-93, in the poet's intellectual development. Students of Shakespeare are thus enabled to clarify, and partly to reconstruct, their conceptions of his mentality and professional production in the years 1590-94. We no longer need to assume that Shakespeare came to London in 1586 or 1587 in order to account for his apparent professional maturity in 1591-92; nor do we need to thrust the original form of 1 Henry VI back to 1589 or earlier under the assumption that Shakespeare's connection with a work so immature in parts as the present 1 Henry VI cannot be later than Henslowe's entry of harey the vj in March, 1592.

It is strange that contemporary criticism of the Hamlet of Romantic psychology has failed to reckon with an important document of Elizabethan psychology. Professor Stoll has invoked Burton and Professor Schücking, Sir Thomas Overbury; but both the Anatomy and Characters are Jacobean, first published in 1621 and 1614, respectively. There was, however, a book of Elizabethan psychology accessible from 1586, written in English, avowedly to win the general reader, and popular enough for two editions in 1586 and a third in 1613. That Shakespeare used Dr. Timothy Bright's A treatise of melancholie was suggested in 1894 by Richard Loening in support of his theory of Hamlet's physiological melancholy; and in 1899, apparently from independent observation, by Dowden in his edition of Hamlet (p. 77). This suggestion, however, seems to have fallen flat. The title of Bright's Treatise—but not the contents—was known to Stoll, to Schücking, and to Dr. G. A. Bieber, though it is not mentioned by J. M. Robertson, and no reference is made to it in the later studies by Stoll and Schücking. To suggest anew that the Treatise influenced Shakespeare and more particularly Hamlet, is the object of this paper.

The mystery in Hamlet is a ghost that has haunted the minds of many a generation of scholars and critics. Perhaps the full secret of this mystery was to be known only by Shakespeare himself, even as that other secret was told only to Hamlet by the ghost on the platform at Elsinore

These studies represent an attempt to determine Shakspere's debt to the voyagers in The Tempest. No article or book, to my knowledge, has set out to examine the subject as a whole; and my aim to supply such an article has forced me to review much material published heretofore. Broadly speaking, one-third of my studies contains material substantially as it has appeared elsewhere; one-third presents old material from a new point of view; and one-third presents material completely new. I wish to return the fullest possible acknowledgment to the excellent work of Morton Luce and Charles M. Gayley, on whose studies I have based my own.

Several bibliographies have been compiled, during the last fifty years, of those altered versions of Shakespeare's plays which form so illuminating a chapter in the history of the Restoration stage, and indeed of the English theatre in general. Unfortunately, the most scholarly of these lists have usually been minor appendices to works of wider scope, and are not unnaturally here and there inaccurate in detail. Perhaps the best is the most recent, Miss Bartlett's, in her handy bibliography, Mr. William Shakespeare; but there is no entirely trustworthy list, since all of them neglect to include at least one important item, the altered Hamlet, and most of them do include several plays which are either not adaptations of Shakespeare or not adaptations at all. I propose, therefore, to supply a more accurate bibliography, preceding it by a list of those now available, and supplementing it with a statement of the reasons for not counting as Shakespeare adaptations certain dramas which have long held their places in this inglorious roll of theatrical ineptitude.