Now, it is certainly a fact that William Shakespeare, from his box-office at the Globe, or from his country-seat at Stratford, never corroborated the printers by admitting, or contradicted them by denying his authorship of any of the above enumerated plays. The "Hamlet" had been previously published in or about 1603, and the "Lucrèce" had made its appearance in 1594. It is certainly a fact that none of these--from "Hamlet" to "Fair Em," from "Lucrece" to "The Merry Devil of Edmonton"--did William Shakespeare ever either deny or claim as progeny of his. He fathered them all as they came, "and no questions asked." And, had Mr. Ireland been on hand with his "Vortigern," it might have gone in with the rest, with no risk of the scrutiny and the scholarship which exploded it so disastrously in 1796. No plays, bearing the name of William Shakespeare on their title-page, now appeared from 1609 to 1622. But in the year 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare's death, a folio of _thirty-six_ plays is brought out by Heminges and Condell, entitled "The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare." Of the many plays which had appeared during his life, and been circulated and considered as his, or of which mention can (according to the Shakes-peareans) be anywhere found, only twenty-six appeared in this folio, while ten plays are included which never appear to have been seen or heard of until their presence in this Heminges and Condell collection. The Shakespeareans allow that this is "mysterious," but precisely the same "mystery" would have been discovered in the days of Heminges and Condell them{288}selves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then living to look into the question. Nothing has happened, since, the death of William Shakespeare, to make the Shakespeare question any more "mysterious" than he left it himself. To make this apparent at a glance, let us present the whole in a tabulated statement, only asking the reader to observe that we have in every case given the Shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and accepted the mention of a similar name of any play as proof positive of its being the play nowadays attributed to William Shakespeare; and their own chronology everywhere. The following table shows the plays passing as William Shakespeare's, in London, in the years when he resided in London, as part proprietor and concerned in the management of the Globe and Blackfriars Theaters; the dates of their earliest mention or appearance, and which of them were included in the first folio, edited by Heminges and Condell, in 1628: on the supposition that the plays mentioned by Meres (of which, however, no other traces can be found, during William Shakespeare's life), besides those names in Manningham's and Forman's diaries, and the "Account of the Levels at Court," are the identical plays now included in the Shakespearean drama. The dates are Mr. Grant White's. {289} [Illustration: 0289]