SOME INTRODUCTORY DATES. 1558-1603. Elizabeth's Reign. 1575. 1576. The Lord Mayor expelled players from London. 3rd. Blackfriars, by Burbage, within. A great controversy arose as to morality of plays. Gosson writes for the stage. He alters his views, and brings out The Schoole of Abuse, censuring plays, &c.; dedicated to Sir Philip Sydney. Philip Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses, exposed and denounced Stage Plays and their Evils. Sydney died. Shakspere came to London. Greene, Chettle, Nash, and Harvey commenced a literary controversy. The Globe on Bankside built. 1576. 1579. 1583. 1586. 1592. 1593. 1593. 1594. Lucrece published. 1595. 1595. 1597 Venus and Adonis published and dedicated by the author to Lord Southampton. Sydney's Apology for Poetry, in which he took the opposite view to Stubbes, published. Clarke's Polimanteia gave first printed reference to Venus and Adonis and Lucrece as Shakspere's. Bacon's Essays published by the author. Shakspere's Richard II., Richard III., and Romeo and Juliet published by the printers as Shakspere's. 1598. 1599. 1601. Francis Meres, M.A., a graduate of both Universities, 1601-2 (Jan. 18). Merry Wives of Windsor, as originally written, licensed for the press; printed 4to, 1602. 1606. 1607. 1608. 1609. 1610. 1612. 1613. 1614. 1614. 1615. 1616. 1616. 1616. 1623. 1642. 1660. The Return from Pernassus, acted about 1602, printed with a highly eulogistic account and flattering estimate of Shakspere. Shakspere's daughter Susanna married Dr. Hall. Mary Shakspere died. Sonnets published. Histrio mastix; or, the Player Whipt. Apology for Actors, by Thomas Heywood, is printed. Great fire at Stratford. Greene's Refutation of the "Apology for Actors." Shakspere's daughter Judith married Richard Quiney. All Jonson's papers burned, and probably some of Shak- Shakspere's wife, Anne Hathaway, died. Heming and Edict against plays. Restoration. CONTEMPORARY BIOGRAPHICAL DATES. 1536-1608. Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and Earl of Dorset (dramatic poet). 1552-1596. George Peele (dramatic poet). 1552-1618. Sir Walter Raleigh (poet and historian). 1553-1599. Edmund Spenser (poet). 1554-1601. John Lyly (dramatic poet, and author of Euphues' Anatomy of Wit, 1569; Euphues, his England, 1582). 1554-1586. Sir Philip Sydney (soldier, poet, and author of the Arcadia and Sonnets and Apologie for Poetrie). 1554-1628. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (philosophic poet). 1556-1625. Thomas Lodge (dramatist and prose-writer). 1557-1634. George Chapman (dramatic poet, translator). 1558-1609. William Warner (author of Albion's England, historical poem). 1560-1592. Robert Greene (dramatist and pamphleteer). 1561-1612. Sir John Harrington: his translation of Ariosto published 1591. 1561-1626. Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban (philosopher, historian, &c.). 1562-1619. Samuel Daniel (poet). 1562-1593. Christopher Marlowe (dramatist and poet). 1563-1618. John Davies of Hereford (poet). 1563-1631. Michael Drayton (poet, author of Polyolbion). 1563-1618. Joshua Sylvester (translator of Du Bartas' Divine Weeks and Works). 1564-1616. William Shakspere. 1567-1600. Thomas Nash (dramatist and pamphleteer). 1568-1639. Sir Henry Wotton (essayist and poet). 1569-1640. John Webster (dramatic poet). 1569-1626. Sir John Davies (philosophic poet). 1570-1632. Edward Fairfax: published his version of Tasso, 1600. 1573-1631. Dr. John Donne (poet and preacher). 1574-1626. Richard Barnefield (poet). 1574-1637. Ben Jonson (dramatist, poet, and critic). 1575-1634. John Marston (dramatist). 1576-1625. John Fletcher (dramatist and poet). 1586-1615. Francis Beaumont (dramatist and poet). THE BACON-SHAKSPERE QUESTION ANSWERED. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE Bacon-Shakspere theory in one way benefits literary students. The opportunity of studying, on parallel lines of date and action, the lives of the two greatest writers of the greatest period of English literature is too good to be lost. The Baconian theory acts as a filum labyrinthi in the mass of materials of the period, and much matter that might otherwise be passed as unimportant is carefully sifted in reviewing what has come down to us from a Past that was once a Present. The proceedings of the Bacon Society tell us, “The contention of the Baconians is that William Shakspere had no hand whatever in the production of either the plays or the poems-that he was an uneducated man, who could just manage to write his own name; that there is not a particle of evidence that he ever wrote, or could write, anything else." They also accuse him of every sin and crime, short of murder, to take away his character, and thus argue from his want of character an incapacity to have produced his poems. It is reasoning in a circle with a vengeance, when the argumentum ad hominem is thus made to contradict the argumentum ad rem. The personal animus shown in the way their proofs are presented, discounts from the |