(6) “And show your pleasure to the Persian
     As fits the legate of the stately Turk.”
       —­Tamb. vol. i. p.87.
{226}

(7) “Wagner.  Come hither, sirha!  Boy!
     Clown.  Boy!  O disgrace to my person!” &c.
       —­Faustus, vol. ii, p. 131.

Leaving the question in this position for the present, I shall be glad of such information from any of your readers as may tend to throw a light on the date of Shakspeare’s Taming of the Shrew.  I find Mr. Collier’s opinion expressed in the following words:—­

   “The great probability is that Hamlet was written
    at the earliest in 1601, and the Taming of the Shrew
    perhaps came from the pen of its author not very long afterwards.”

I am anxious to ascertain whether I am acquainted with all the circumstances on which the above opinion is founded; as those which I can, at this moment, recall, are to my mind hardly sufficiently conclusive.  Rejecting the supposed allusion to Heywood’s Woman Kill’d with Kindness, which I see, by a note, Mr. Collier gives up as untenable ground, the facts, I believe, remain as follows:—­

First:  The Taming of the Shrew was not mentioned by Meres in 1598, whereupon it is assumed that “had it been written, he could scarcely have failed to mention it.”  And,

Second:  it must have been written after Hamlet, because the name Baptista, used incorrectly in that play as a feminine name, is properly applied to a man in this.  And these, I believe, are all.  Now, the first of these assumptions I answer, by asking, “Does it follow?” Of all Shakspeare’s plays which had then appeared, only three had been published before 1598, and not one comedy.  Meres, in all probability, had no list to refer to, nor was he making one:  he simply adduced, in evidence of his assertion of Shakspeare’s excellence, both in tragedy and comedy, such plays of both kinds as he could recollect, or the best of those which he did recollect.  Let us put the case home; not in reference to any modern dramatist (though Shakspeare in his own day was not the great exception that he stands with us), but to the world-honoured poet himself, who has founded a sort of religion in us:  I, for my part, would not be bound not to omit, in a hasty enumeration, and having no books to refer to, more important works than the Taming of the Shrew.  In short, the omission by Meres proves no more than that he either did not think of the play, or did not think it necessary to mention it.  To the second assumption, I answer that the date of the first Hamlet is “not proven:”  it may have been an early play.  From the play of Hamlet, in its earlier form, is the name Baptiste, where it is used in conjunction with Albertus, taken; the scene mentioned is Guiana; and there is nothing to lead one to suppose that the name is used as an Italian name at all.  Both the date of Hamlet,