I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw _King John_ apparently still “coloured on the card” among “Shakespeare’s lot.” We are now left with _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _Midsummer Night’s Dream_, _Comedy of Errors_, and _Romeo and Juliet_, out of Dr. Furnivall’s list of plays up to 1593. The phantom force of miraculously early plays is “following darkness like a dream.” We do not know the date of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, we do not know the date of _Romeo and Juliet_. Mr. Gollancz dates the former “about 1592,” and the latter “at 1591.” {114c} This is a mere personal speculation. Of _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, we only know that our version is one “corrected and augmented” by William Shakespeare in 1598. I dare say it is as early as 1591–2, in its older form. Of _The Comedy of Errors_, Mr. Collins wrote, “It is all but certain that it was written between 1589 and 1592, and it is quite certain that it was written before the end of 1594.” {114d} The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished. The miracle is very considerably abated. In place of introducing the airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps, more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare’s earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591–3. There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be credited by Stratfordians to Will. But even so, we have sufficient to “give us pause,” says Mr. Greenwood, with justice. It gives _me_ “pause,” if I am to believe that, between 1587 and 1592, Will wrote _Love’s Labour’s Lost_, _The Comedy of Errors_, _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and _Romeo and Juliet_. There is a limit even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man. But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal. VI THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST” WE now come to consider another “miracle” discovered in the plays,—a miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests is often conspicuously absent. How could the rude actor learn his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits? This question I have tried to answer already,—the whole of these fashions abound in the literature of the day.