The difficulty with commentators is the knowledge that the play might have been written yesterday, while the treatment of the subject, in its modernity, is as far removed from "The Tempest" as it is from "Henry V." Now, if the drama be recognized as a satire written under provocation and with extraordinary mental energy, the date of the composition can be as well fixed for 1598, when Shakespeare was thirty-four years old, as for the year 1609. There is, besides, something to be said with regard to its vocabulary, as Mr. Richard Simpson has shown, which is peculiar to this play alone. Shakespeare introduces into it a large number of new words which he had never used before and never employed afterwards. The list is a long one. There are 126 latinized words that are coined or used only for this play, words such as propugnation, protractive, Ptisick, publication, cognition, commixture, commodious, community, complimental. And in addition to all the latinized words there are 124 commoner words simple and compound, not elsewhere to be found in the poet's plays, showing an unwonted search after verbal novelty. We will now, with the help of the new information, attempt to unravel the mystery as to the history of the play. The creation of the character of Falstaff in "Henry IV." (Part I.) brought Shakespeare's popularity, as a dramatist, to its zenith, and he seized the opportunity to reply to the attacks made upon himself, as a poet, by his rival poet, Chapman, and wrote a play giving a modern interpretation to the story of Troy, and working into the underplot some political allusion to Essex and the Court. The play may have been acted at the Curtain late in 1598, or at the Globe in the spring of 1599, or, perhaps, privately at some nobleman's mansion, who might have been one of Essex's faction. It was not liked, and Shakespeare experienced his first and most serious reverse on the stage. But he quickly retrieved his position by producing another Falstaff play, "Henry IV." (Part II.), in the summer of 1599, followed by "Henry V." in the same autumn, when Essex's triumphs in Ireland are predicted. Shakespeare, none the less, must have felt both grieved and annoyed by the treatment his satirical comedy had received from the hands of the "grand censors." So at Christmas, 1601, when Ben Jonson produced his "Poetaster" at Blackfriars, the younger dramatist defended his friend from the silly objections which had been made to the Trojan comedy. Then early in 1603 a revival of "Troilus and Cressida" may have been contemplated at the Globe, and also its publication, but the death of Essex was still too near to the memory of Londoners to make this possible, and the suggestion may have been dropped on the eve of its fulfilment; Shakespeare, meanwhile, had written a prologue, to be spoken by an actor in armour, in imitation of Jonson's prologue, with a view to protect his play from further hostility. In 1609 Shakespeare was preparing to give up his connection