If Burre, who was not a litterateur, did not know that Shelton's translation of _Don Quixote_ had been going the rounds for years before it was printed in 1612, everybody else did. Shelton had announced as much in his _Epistle Dedicatorie_ to Theophilus, Lord Howard of Walden, prefixed to the first quarto of 1612. He translated the book, as he says, "some five or six yeares agoe"--that would be in 1607, for he used the Brussels Reprint of that year as his text,--"out of the Spanish Tongue into the English in the space of forty daies: being thereunto more than half enforced through the importunitie of a very deere friende, that was desirous to understand the subject. After I had given him once a view thereof, I cast it aside, where it lay long time neglected in a corner, and so little regarded by me as I never once set hand to review or correct the same. Since when, at the entreatie of others my friends, I was content to let it come to light, conditionally that some one or other would peruse and amend the errours escaped"--because he had not time to revise it himself. In other words, Shelton had shown the manuscript translation of _Don Quixote_ to but one friend in 1607; and it was not till "long time" had elapsed that he began to circulate it among his other friends on condition that they should correct its errors. The date of circulation was, probably, about 1609, for in that year we have our earliest mention of the reading of _Don Quixote_ by an Englishman,--by a dramatic character, to be sure, but a character created by Ben Jonson. In his _Epicoene_, acted in 1610, and written the year preceding, that dramatist makes Truewit advise the young Sir Dauphine to cease living in his chamber "a month together upon _Amadis de Gaule_, or _Don Quixote_, as you are wont." There is no ascription of Spanish to Dauphine, who is a typical London gallant. He would read _Amadis_ in the French, or the English translation; and the only translation of _Don Quixote_ accessible to him in 1609 would be Shelton's manuscript of Part One.[207] Jonson may himself have been one of the friends to whom Shelton submitted the translation. There is no reason to believe that Jonson had read Cervantes in the original; for, as Professor Rudolph Schevill has conclusively demonstrated,[208] his knowledge of Spanish was extremely limited. "The Spanish phrases pronounced by the improvised 'hidalgo' in the _Alchemist_ (of 1610) prove nothing." They were caught, as Professor Schevill says, from the London vogue or may have been supplied by some Spanish acquaintance. Indeed, one may even doubt whether if he read Shelton's manuscript Jonson did so with any care, for not only in _The Alchemist_ but elsewhere he uniformly couples Don Quixote as if a character of chivalric romance with Amadis, of whom and his congeners Don Quixote is a burlesque.