24440 quence of its receiving a new name, a new prologue ་་་་་་་་་ and epilogue, and new decorations of unprecedented splendour, the players might, as Mr. Malone has 1 suggested, have called it in the bills of that time a new play; an epithet which we find Sir Henry Wotton has adopted, when describing the accident at the Globe Theatre, and which, if writing in haste, or with less attention to the history of the stage than occurs in the letter of Mr. Lorkin, he might, from similar causes, naturally be expected to repeat. In adjusting the chronology of this play, Mr. Malone has remarked, that Shakspeare, having produced so many plays in the preceding years, "it is not likely that King Henry the Eighth was written before 1601. It might, perhaps, with, equal propriety, be ascribed to 1602." We have fixed upon the latter date, for this obvious reason, that our enquiries, having led us to supply the preceding year with two plays, it has been thought more consonant to probability to assign it to the less occupied period of 1602. It appears to us, therefore, to have been composed about a twelvemonth previous to the death of the Queen, an event which occurred in March, 1603. It need scarcely be added, that, from Mr. Gifford's complete refutation of the slander which has been so long indulged in against the character of Ben Jonson, we utterly disbelieve that this calumniated poet had any concern in the revival of Henry the Eighth. The entire interest of this tragedy turns upon the characters of Queen Katharine and Cardinal Wolsey; the former being the finest picture of suffering and defenceless virtue, and the latter of disappointed ambition, that poet ever drew. The close of the second scene of the third act, which describes the fall of Wolsey, and the whole of the second scene of the fourth, which paints the dying sorrows and devout resignation of the persecuted Queen, have, as lessons of moral worth, a never-dying value; and of the latter, especially, it may without extravagance be said, that, in its power of exciting sympathy and compassion, it stands perfectly unrivalled by any dramatic effort of ancient or of modern time. 24. TIMON OF ATHENS: 1602. The existence of a manuscript play on this subject, to which our author has been evidently indebted, ought, in the absence of all other direct testimony, to be considered as our guiding star. Here, says Mr. Malone, our poet "found the faithful steward, the banquet scene, and the story of Timon's being possessed of great sums of gold which he had dug up in the woods: a circumstance which he could not have had from Lucian, there being then no translation of the dialogue that relates to this subject;" and, in another place he remarks, that this manuscript comedy "appears to have been written after Ben Jonson's "Every Man out of his Humour," (1599) to which it contains a reference; but I have not discovered the precise time when it was composed. If it were ascertained, it might be some guide to us in fixing the date of our author's Timon of Athens, which I suppose to have been posterior to this anonymous play." Now Mr. Steevens, who accurately inspected the manuscript play, tells us that it appears to have been written about the year 1600, whilst Mr. Chalmers has brought forward several intimations which, he thinks, prove that Shakspeare's drama was written during the reign of Elizabeth. These statements, it is obvious, bring the subject into a small compass; for as the anonymous comedy must have been composed after 1599, referring, as it does, to a drama of that date, and as some incidents in Shakspeare's Timon are evidently founded upon it, whilst the death of Elizabeth took place in March, 1603, the play of our poet must necessarily, if Mr. Chalmers's intimations be relied upon, have been completed in the interim. Indeed the only argument on the other side for fixing the date of this play in 1609, is built upon the supposition that Shakspeare commenced the study of Plutarch in 1605, and that having once availed himself of this historian for one of his plays, he was induced to proceed, until Julius Cæsar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Timon, and Coriolanus, had been written in succession. But, as it has been clearly ascertained by Mr. Chalmers, that Shakspeare was perfectly well |