when the
author was 33 years old, and _Richard the 2d_ and _3d_ in the next year,
viz. the 34th of his age." The two last had been printed in 1597.

_Mr. Dryden seems to think that Pericles_, etc. This sentence was omitted
by Pope.

5. _the best conversations_, etc. Rowe here controverts the opinion
expressed by Dryden in his _Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age_:
"I cannot find that any of them had been conversant in courts, except Ben
Johnson; and his genius lay not so much that way as to make an improvement
by it. Greatness was not then so easy of access, nor conversation so free,
as now it is" (_Essays_, ed. W. P. Ker, i., p. 175).

_A fair Vestal._ _Midsummer Night's Dream_, ii. 1, 158. In the original
Rowe adds to his quotations from Shakespeare the page references to his
own edition.

_The Merry Wives._ The tradition that the _Merry Wives_ was written at the
command of Elizabeth had been recorded already by Dennis in the preface to
his version of the play,--_The Comical Gallant, or the Amours of Sir John
Falstaffe_ (1702): "This Comedy was written at her command, and by her
direction, and she was so eager to see it acted, that she commanded it to
be finished in fourteen days; and was afterwards, as Tradition tells us,
very well pleas'd at the Representation." Cf. Dennis's _Defence of a
Regulated Stage_: "she not only commanded Shakespear to write the comedy
of the _Merry Wives_, and to write it in ten day's time," etc. (_Original
Letters_, 1721, i., p. 232).

_this part of Falstaff._ Rowe is here indebted apparently to the account
of John Fastolfe in Fuller's _Worthies of England_ (1662). But neither in
it, nor in the similar passage on Oldcastle in the _Church History of
Britain_ (1655, Bk. IV., Cent, XV., p. 168), does Fuller say that the name
was altered at the command of the queen, on objection being made by
Oldcastle's descendants. This may have been a tradition at Rowe's time, as
there was then apparently no printed authority for it, but, as
Halliwell-Phillips showed in his _Character of Sir John Falstaff_, 1841,
it is confirmed by a manuscript of about 1625, preserved in the Bodleian.
Cf. also Halliwell-Phillips's _Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare_, 1886,
ii., pp. 351, etc.; Richard James's _Iter Lancastrense_ (Chetham Society,
1845, p. lxv.); and Ingleby's _Shakespeare's Centurie of Prayse_, 1879,
pp. 164-5.

_name of Oldcastle._ Pope added in a footnote, "_See the Epilogue to_
Henry 4