The King’s unamiable repugnance to being gazed upon by throngs of admiring subjects is thus spoken of by a contemporary writer:  “In his public appearance, especially in his sports, the accesses of the people made him so impatient, that he often dispersed them with frowns, that we may not say, with curses.”  And his churlish bearing towards the crowds which, prompted by eager loyalty, flocked forth to hail his accession, is noted by several historians.  But he was a pretty free encourager of the Drama, as well as of other liberal preparations; and, with those who had tasted, or who sought, his patronage, it was natural that these symptoms of weakness should pass for tokens of a wise superiority to the dainties of popular applause.  All which renders it not unlikely that the Poet may have had an eye to the King in the passages cited by Malone in support of his conjecture: 

                       “I love the people,
    But do not like to stage me to their eyes: 
    Though it do well, I do not relish well
    Their loud applause and aves vehement;
    Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
    That does affect it.”

“So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons;
Come all to help him, and so stop the air
By which he should revive:  and even so
The general, subject to a well-wish’d king,
Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.”

The allusion here being granted, Malone’s inference, that the play was made soon after the King’s accession, and before the effect of his unlooked-for austerity on this score had spent itself, was natural enough.  Nor is the conjecture of Ulrici and others without weight, “that Shakespeare was led to the composition of the play by the rigoristic sentiments and arrogant virtue of the Puritans.”  And in this view several points of the main action might have been aptly suggested at the time in question:  for the King had scarcely set foot in England but he began to be worried by the importunities of that remarkable people; who had been feeding upon the hope, that by the sole exercise of his prerogative he would work through a radical change in the constitution of the Church, and so bring her into accordance with their ideas:—­all this on the principle, of course, that a minority however small, with the truth, was better than a majority however large, without it.

The accession of King James to the English throne was in March, 1603.  So that the forecited arguments would conclude the writing of the play to have been nearly synchronous with the revisal of All’s Well that Ends Well, and with the production of King Lear, perhaps also of Macbeth; at least, within the same period of four or five years.  The characteristics of style and temper draw to the same conclusion as regards the date of the writing.