c_. 1591.

Footnote 145: _King John_, IV, 2.

Footnote 146: Queen Mab, in _Romeo and Juliet_.

Footnote 147: By Archdeacon Davies, in the seventeenth century.

Footnote 148: In 1709, nearly a century after the poet's death.

Footnote 149: Robert Greene, one of the popular playwrights of the time,
who attacked Shakespeare in a pamphlet called "A Groat's Worth of Wit
Bought with a Million of Repentance." The pamphlet, aside from its jealousy
of Shakespeare, is a sad picture of a man of genius dying of dissipation,
and contains a warning to other playwrights of the time, whose lives were
apparently almost as bad as that of Greene.

Footnote 150: _Love's Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of
Verona_.

Footnote 151: _Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, King John_. Prior to
1588 only three true Chronicle plays are known to have been acted. The
defeat of the Armada in that year led to an outburst of national feeling
which found one outlet in the theaters, and in the next ten years over
eighty Chronicle plays appeared. Of these Shakespeare furnished nine or
ten. It was the great popular success of _Henry VI_, a revision of an old
play, in 1592 that probably led to Greene's jealous attack.

Footnote 152: See Lee's _Life of William Shakespeare_, pp. 188-196.

Footnote 153: Like _Henry VIII_, and possibly the lost _Cardenio_.

Footnote 154: A name given to the privilege--claimed by the mediaeval
Church for its clergy--of being exempt from trial by the regular law
courts. After the Reformation the custom survived for a long time, and
special privileges were allowed to ministers and their families. Jonson
claimed the privilege as a minister's son.

Footnote 155: A similar story of quackery is found in Chaucer, "The
Canon's Yeoman's Tale."

Footnote 156: In this and in _A Fair Quarrel_ Middleton collaborated with
William Rowley, of whom little is known except that he was an actor from
_c_. 1607-1627.

Footnote 157: The reader will find wholesome criticism of these writers,
and selections from their works, in Charles Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_, an excellent book, which helps us to a better knowledge
and appreciation of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists.

Footnote 158: The first five books were published 1594-1597, and are as
Hooker wrote them. The last three books, published after his death, are of
doubtful authorship, but they are thought to have been completed