* * * * *

We have no authentic contemporary notice of the play whatever, till it appeared in the folio of 1623.  I say authentic notice; because the item which, some years ago, Mr. Peter Cunningham claimed to have found among some old records preserved at Somerset House, and which makes the play to have been acted at Court in December, 1604, has been lately set aside as a fabrication.  Though printed much better than All’s Well that Ends Well, still the text set forth in the folio gives us but too much cause to regret the lack of earlier copies; there being several passages that are, to all appearance, incurably defective or corrupt.

The strongly-marked peculiarities of the piece in language, cast of thought, and moral temper, have invested it with great psychological interest, and bred a strange desire among critics to connect it in some way with the author’s mental history,—­with some supposed crisis in his feelings and experience.  Hence the probable date of the writing was for a long time argued more strenuously than the subject would otherwise seem to justify; and, as often falls out in such cases, the more the critics argued the point, the further they were from coming to an agreement.  And, in truth, the plain matter-of-fact critics have here succeeded much better in the work than their more philosophical brethren; which aptly shows how little the brightest speculation can do in questions properly falling within the domain of facts.

In default of other data, the critics in question based their arguments upon certain probable allusions to contemporary matters; especially on those passages which express the Duke’s fondness for “the life remov’d,” and his aversion to being greeted by crowds of people.  Chalmers brought forward also the very pertinent fact of a long-sleeping statute having been revived in 1604, which punished with death all divorced or divorcing persons who married again while their former husbands or wives were living.  This circumstance, he thinks, might well have suggested what is said by the Duke: 

    “We have strict statutes and most biting laws,—­
    The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds,—­
    Which for this fourteen years we have let sleep;
    Even like an o’ergrown lion in a cave,
    That goes not out to prey.”

Chalmers had the sagacity to discover also a sort of portrait-like resemblance in the Duke to King James the First.  As the King was indeed a much better theologian than statesman or ruler, the fact of the Duke’s appearing rather more at home in the cowl and hood than in his ducal robes certainly lends some colour to this discovery.