_Date._ Meres, as we have seen, terms one of Shakespeare's comedies "Love Labour's Won." Among our author's extant comedies there is none with that title, and we have no reason whatever for supposing any original play of his to be lost; while on the other hand the subject of the present play accords most accurately with that title. It has therefore been conjectured, with great probability, that this is one of Shakespeare's early plays, which he altered and improved at a later period, giving it at the same time a new title. We can certainly discern in it the style and mode of composition of two different periods--the riming scenes, for instance, belonging to the earlier one. It is to be observed of these riming scenes, that they only occur in the three preceding plays, and in Romeo and Juliet, in all which plays soliloquies, letters, &c. are in stanzas--like the sonnets in Spanish plays; and the very same is the case in the present play, and in it alone of the later ones; whence we may fairly conclude that it belonged to the early period. The second act seems to retain, both in the serious and the comic scenes, much of the original play unaltered; and every one must be struck with the resemblance of the style in it to that of Love's Labour's Lost. _Origin._ The tale of Giletta di Narbona in Boccaccio's Decameron, which Shakespeare may have read in the original, or in the translation in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The comic scenes are, of course, our author's own, as usual. A MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM. _Editions._ 4to (by Fisher), 1600; 4to (by Roberts), 1600; in the folio, 1623. _Date._ Anterior to 1598, as it is mentioned by Meres. I _do_ think that in Act II. Sc. 1 there is an allusion to the state of the weather in the summer of 1594, and that Shakespeare may have been writing this play at that very time. I therefore incline to give that year, or 1595, as the date of its composition. _Origin._ Purely and absolutely the whole the poet's own invention. He was well read in Chaucer, in Golding's Ovid, and in North's Plutarch, where he got the names of his characters and some circumstances. THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. _Edition._ Only in the folio, 1623. _Date._ We have no means of ascertaining the exact date of this play; but the style proves it to belong to Shakespeare's early period. The reason of its omission by Meres has been already given. _Origin._ It is a _rifacimento_ of an anonymous play, first printed in 1594, though perhaps written and acted some time earlier, and termed "The Taming of a Shrew," and it may be anterior to the Midsummer-Night's Dream; the date 1594 would seem to have some connexion with both plays. The incident of the Pedant personating Vincentio was taken from The Supposes, a translation by Gascoigne of Ariosto's I Suppositi. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.