on, that at the beginning of
Shakespeare's career stage plays were hardly regarded as literature at
all and were not published by their authors, deprives us of the evidence
usually afforded by date of publication. We are thus forced to have
recourse to a variety of more or less casually recorded data, and to
indications of differences of maturity in style and matter which are
often much less clear than could be wished. Before giving the results of
the research that has been pursued for a century and a half, it will be
worth while to enumerate the most fruitful methods which have been
employed, and the sorts of evidence available.

Of purely external evidence, the chief kinds are these: records of the
performance of plays in letters, diaries, accounts, and the like;
quotation, allusion, imitation, or parody in other works; entries in the
books of the Master of the Revels at Court, and in the Register of the
Stationers' Company; dates on the title-pages of the plays themselves;
facts and traditions about the life of the author; dates in the lives of
actors and in the careers of companies known to have performed the
plays, and in the histories of theaters in which they were presented.
Instances of some of these are the manuscript which tells of a
performance of _The Comedy of Errors_ at Gray's Inn in 1594; the diary
of the quack, Dr. Simon Forman, who witnessed performances of _Macbeth,
Cymbeline_, and _The Winter's Tale_ at the Globe in 1610 and 1611; the
appreciation of Shakespeare, with a list of a dozen plays by him, in the
_Palladis Tamia_[4] of Francis Meres, 1598; and the pamphlets on
Somers's voyage to Virginia, which offered suggestions for _The
Tempest_.

[4] See Appendix A, 13.

Partly external and partly internal are the evidences derived from
allusions in the plays to current events, personal or political, such as
the reference in the Prologue to _Henry V_ to the expedition of Essex to
Ireland in 1599; references to other books, like the quotation from
Marlowe in _As You Like It_, III. v. 82; references from one play of
Shakespeare's to another, like the promise in the Epilogue to _2 Henry
IV_ to "continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with
fair Katherine of France."

[Page Heading: Kinds of Evidence]

The purely internal evidence is seldom as specific as the external, and
requires to be handled with much judgment and caution. Most difficult in
this class is the weighing of considera