cepted by the
candid and careful Rowe; Pope, also, Theobald, and others, made no
scruple of receiving it,--men who would not be very apt to let such a
matter pass unsifted, or help to give it currency, unless they thought
there was good ground for it. Besides, the thing is not at all
incredible in itself, either from the alleged circumstances of the
case, or from the character of the Queen; and there are some points in
the play that speak not a little in its support. One item of the story
is, that the author, hastening to comply with her Majesty's request,
wrote the play in the brief space of fourteen days. This has been
taken by some as quite discrediting the whole story; but, taking the
play as it stands in the copy of 1602, it does not seem to me that
fourteen days is too brief a time for Shakespeare to have done the
work in, especially with such a motive to quicken him.

This matter has a direct bearing in reference to the date of the
writing. _King Henry the Fourth_, the First Part certainly, and
probably the Second Part also, was on the stage before 1598. And in
the title-page to the first quarto copy of _The Merry Wives_, we have
the words, "As it hath been divers times acted by the Right Honourable
my Lord Chamberlain's Servants, both before her Majesty and
elsewhere." This would naturally infer the play to have been on the
stage a considerable time before the date of that issue. And all the
_clear_ internal evidences of the play itself draw in support of the
belief, that the Falstaff of Windsor memory was a continuation from
the Falstaff of Eastcheap celebrity. And the whole course of
blundering and exposure which Sir John here goes through is such, that
I can hardly conceive how the Poet should have framed it, but that he
was prompted to do so by some motive external to his own mind. That
the free impulse of his genius, without suggestion or inducement from
any other source, could have led him to put Falstaff through such a
series of uncharacteristic delusions and collapses, is to me wellnigh
incredible. So that I can only account for the thing by supposing the
man as here exhibited to have been an after-thought sprung in some way
from the manner in which an earlier and fairer exhibition of the man
had been received.

All which brings the original composition of the play to a point of
time somewhere between 1598 and 1601. On the other hand, the play, as
we have it, contains at least one passage, inferring, a