Fes. 9. 1850.] 
(7) “ Wagner. Come hither, sirha! Boy ! 
Clown, Boy! O, disgrace to my person!” &e. 
—Faustus, vol. ii. p. 131. 
Leaying the question in this position for the 
present, I shall be glad of such information from 
any of your readers as may tend to throw a light 
on the date of Shakspeare’s Taming of the Shrew. | 
I find Mr. Collier’s opinion expressed in the fol- 
lowing words : — 
“The great probability is that Hamlet was written 
at the earliest in 1601, and the Taming of the Shrew 
perhaps came from the pen of its author not very long 
afterwards.” 
Tam anxious to ascertain whether I am acquainted | 
with all the circumstances on which the above 
opinion is founded; as those which I can, at this 
moment, recal, are to my mind hardly sufficiently | 
Rejecting the supposed allusion to | 
conclusive. 
Heywood’s Woman Kill’d with Kindness, which I 
see, by a note, Mr. Collier gives up as untenable 
ground, the facts, I believe, remain as follows : — 
First: The Taming of the Shrew was not men- 
tioned by Meres in 1593, whereupon it is assumed 
that “had it been written, he could scarcely have 
failed to mention it.” And, 
Second: it must have been written after Hamlet, 
because the name Baptista, used incorrectly in 
that play as a feminine name, is properly applied 
to a man in this. And these, I believe, are all. 
Now, the first of these assumptions I answer, by 
asking, “Does it follow?” Of all Shakspeare’s 
plays which had then appeared, only three had 
been published before 1598, and not one comedy. 
Meres, in all probability, had no list to refer to, 
nor was he making one: he simply adduced, in 
evidence of his assertion of Shakspeare’s excel- 
lence, both in tragedy and comedy, such plays of 
both kinds as he could recollect, or the best of | 
those which he did recollect. Let us put the case 
home; not in reference to any modern dramatist 
(though Shakspeare in his own day was not the | 
great exception that he stands with us), but to 
the world-honoured poet himself, who has founded 
a sort of religion in us: I, for my part, would not 
be bound not to omit, in a hasty enumeration, and 
having no books to refer to, more important 
works than the Taming of the Shrew. In short, 
the omission by Meres proves no more than that 
he either did not think of the play, or did not 
think it necessary to mention it. To the second 
assumption, I answer that the date of the first 
Hamlet is “not proven:” it may have been an 
early play. From the play of Hamlet, in its 
earlier form, is the name iste, where it is used 
in conjunction with Albertus, taken; the scene 
mentioned is Guiana; and there is nothing to lead 
one to suppose that the name is used as an Italian 
name at all. Both the date of Hamlet, therefore, 
and —whichever way decided —the conclusion | 
drawn from the supposed mistake, I regard as 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 
| open questions. "There is yet one other cireum- 
| stance which Mr. Collier thinks may strengthen his 
conclusion with regard to the date of this play. 
| He refers to the production of Dekker’s Medicine 
Sor a Curst Wife, which he thinks was a revival 
of the old Taming of a Shrew, brought out as a 
rival to Shakspeare’s play. This is easily an- 
swered. In the first place, Katharine, the Shrew, 
is not a “curst wife:” she becomes a wife, it is 
true, in the course of the play; but this is a part 
, of the process of taming her. But what seems at 
| once to disprove it is, that, according to Henslow’s 
account, Dekker was paid 10/. 10s. for the piece in 
question; as Mr. Collier observes, an ‘ unusually 
large sum” fora new piece, and not likely to be 
paid for the hashing up of an old one. Iam thus 
left entirely without a clue, derivable from ex. 
ternal evidence, to the date of this play; and shall 
be glad to know if there is any thing, throwing 
light upon the point, which I may have over- 
looked. That more important consequences are 
| involved in this question than appear upon the 
face of it, I think I shall be able to show in a 
future communication ; and this is my excuse for 
trespassing so much upon your space and your 
| readers’ patience. SamueE. Hickson, 
St. John’s Wood, Jan. 26, 1850. 
NOTES FROM FLY-LEAVES, No. 6. 
In a copy of Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra 
(in Latin), containing only the two first books 
(i vol. 4to., Lond. 1689), there is the following 
entry in Bishop Jebb’s hand-writing : — 
“ From the internal evidence, not only of additional 
matter in the margin of this copy, but of frequent 
erasures and substitutions, I was led to suppose it was 
the author’s copy, illustrated by his own annotations 
and improvements. The supposition is, perhaps, suf- 
ficiently corroborated by the following extract from 
the Biographia Britannica, vol. iii. p. 18. 
«© Tt seems it was usual with Dr. Burnet, before he 
published any thing in Latin, to have two or three 
| copies, and no more, printed off, which he kept by 
him for some time, in order to revise at leisure what 
he had written currente calamo, and sometimes, when 
he thought proper, to be communicated to his par- 
ticular friends for their opinions, &c.’ 
“ This copy, as it does not differ from any of the 
editions of 1689, was certainly not one of those proofs. 
But the Doctor’s habit of annotating on his own Latin 
books after they were printed, renders it extremely 
probable that this book was a preparation for a new 
edition. It would be well to compare it with the 
English translation.” 
The nature of many of the corrections and 
additions (which are very numerous), evidently 
shows a preparation for the press. I have com- 
pared this copy with the English edition, pub- 
| lished in the same year, and find that some of the 
