earean
affairs until 1913.[9] The revelations of the present volume regarding
the enmity between Florio and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's dramatic
characterisations of Florio, have never been anticipated, though the
possibility that they may have come at odds has been apprehended. The
Rev. J.H. Halpin suggested in 1856 that the "H.S." attacked by Florio in
his _Worlde of Wordes_ in 1590 may have been directed at Shakespeare,
but advanced no evidence to support his theory, which has since been
relegated by the critics to the limbo of fanciful conjecture. I was not
aware of Mr. Halpin's suggestion when I reached my present conclusions.

There has hitherto been no suspicion whatever on the part of critics
that anything of the nature of a continuous collusion between the
scholars existed against Shakespeare in these early years, and
consequently, when at a later period it was manifested in plays
presented upon rival stages, it was regarded as a new development and
named "The War of the Theatres"; but even this open phase of the
antagonism and the respective sides taken by its participants are still
misunderstood. This critical opacity is due largely to the fact that
Shakespearean criticism has for many years been regarded as the province
of academic specialists in literature who have neglected the social and
political history of Shakespeare's day as outside their line of
specialisation. It was probably Froude's recognition of this nebulous
condition in Shakespearean criticism that deterred him from continuing
his history to the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and prevented Gardiner
beginning his where Froude's ended. These great historians realised that
no adequate history of that remarkable period could be written that did
not include a full consideration of Shakespeare and his influence; yet,
making no pretensions themselves to Shakespearean scholarship, and
finding in extant knowledge no sure foundations whereon to build, they
evaded the issue, confining their investigations to the development of
those phases of history in which they were more vitally interested.

Froude's intimate knowledge of the characters and atmosphere of
Elizabethan social and political life, acquired by years of devoted
application to an exhaustive examination of documentary records and the
epistolatory correspondence of the period, convinced him that
Shakespeare drew his models and his atmosphere from concurrent life. He
writes: "We wonder at th