HN FLORIO AS SIR JOHN FALSTAFF'S ORIGINAL 181

APPENDIX--

1. Dedication of Florio's _Second Fruites_, 1591 223

2. Address to the Reader from Florio's _Second Fruites_,
1591 229

3. Dedication of Florio's _Worlde of Wordes_, 1598 233

4. Address to the Reader from Florio's _Worlde of
Wordes_, 1598 242

5. John Florio's Will, 1625 252

INDEX 257

SHAKESPEARE'S LOST YEARS
IN LONDON

1586-1592

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The most interesting and important fifteen years in the records of
English dramatic literature are undoubtedly those between 1588 and 1603,
within which limit all of Shakespeare's poems and the majority of his
plays were written; yet no exhaustive English history, intelligently
co-ordinating the social, literary, and political life of this period,
has ever been written.

Froude, the keynote of whose historical work is contained in his
assertion that "the Reformation was the root and source of the expansive
force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe," recognising
a logical and dramatic climax for his argument in the defeat of the
Spanish Armada in 1588, ends his history in that year; while Gardiner,
whose historical interest was as much absorbed by the Puritan Revolution
as was Froude's by the Reformation, finds a fitting beginning for his
subject in the accession of James I. in 1603. Thus an historical hiatus
is left which has never been exhaustively examined. To the resulting
lack of a clearly defined historical background for those years on the
part of Shakespearean critics and compilers--who are not as a rule also
students of original sources of history--may be imputed much of the
haziness which still exists regarding Shakespeare's relations to, and
the manner in which his work may have been influenced by, the literary,
social, and political life of this period.

The defeat of the Armada ended a long period of threatened danger for
England, and the following fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign were
passed in comparative security. The social life of London and the Court
now took on, by comparison with the troubled past, an almost Augustan
phase. During these years poetry and the drama flourished