Mr. Ray Heffner's article, “Shakespeare, Hayward, and Essex,” is confused and at times self-contradictory; but the main points which he attempts to maintain against my paper, “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” seem to be these:

1. That the play, founded on Hayward's history of Henry IV, which Essex is said, in Item 5 of the “Analytical abstract of the evidence in support of the charge of treason against the Earl of Essex,” to have witnessed, could not have been the play on the deposition of Richard II which the Essex conspirators are known to have attended in a group on February 7, 1601, the day before the rebellion; and that the performances referred to in this Abstract were not of a play by Shakespeare, nor acted by his company, but of an unknown play, performed perhaps by Essex's own actors at his house on some unknown occasion, which Mr. Heffner dates first as necessarily “after February, 1599,” later, as “in February, 1599,” and, in conclusion, as “in January, 1599.”

In spite of the fact that Spenser, less than three years befor his death, published An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie and An Hymne of Heavenly Love, which show a mixture of strongly Christian elements with Platonic idealism, there has been a tendency of late to classify Spenser as pre-eminently pagan, or even atheistic. A moderate view is that of Denis Saurat, who, in his “Les idées philosophiques de Spenser,” concludes that religion was necessary to Spenser's temperament but impossible to his intellect. He credits Spenser with no systematic cosmogony or reasoned agnosticism; and, though he quotes Professor Greenlaw on Spenser's interest in contemporary scientific thought, he does not seem inclined to rate it so highly. Spenser, as Saurat depicts him, is by temperament a pagan: though he has a sincere desire for religious faith, he has at the same time an intellectual inability to believe.

The relation between the first Folio and the first Quarto text of Shakespeare's Henry V has long been a subject of discussion. In 1874, Daniel, in his edition of the play for the New Shakespeare Society, argued that the Quarto is a stage abridgment of the Folio version. Some years later Brinsley Nicholson attempted to refute Daniel. His arguments have not met with much acceptance, perhaps because of an underlying assumption that a fuller and, on the whole, much better text implies revision and expansion from the shorter, poorer one,—an assumption certainly open to challenge with reference to Shakespeare texts.

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.

Possibly no entry in the Stationers' Register has given rise to more discussion than the puzzling “to be staied” entered in the margin beside the titles of four plays on one of the fly-leaves of “Register C.”