Other English dramatists dealing with the theme of _The Curious Impertinent_ between 1611 and 1615 followed Cervantes more or less closely in the main _motif_, in incident, and in dialogue: the author of _The Second Maiden's Tragedy_, for instance, who made use of Baudouin's translation; and Nathaniel Field, who used either Baudouin or Shelton's publication of 1612 in his _Amends for Ladies_. But Beaumont and Fletcher in their tale of a husband cuckolded and pommeled were drawing upon another source, one of the many variants of _Le Mari coccu, battu et content_, to be found in Boccaccio and before him in Old French poems, and French and Italian _Nouvelles_. If they derived anything from Cervantes, whose theme is lifted from the _Orlando Furioso_, it was merely the suggestion for a fresh drama of cuckoldry. That their play was regarded by others as thus inspired appears, I think, from a passage in Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_, IV, vii, 40-41, where, after Kastril has said to Surly, "You are a Pimpe, and a Trig, and an Amadis de Gaule, or a Don Quixote," Drugger adds, "Or a Knight o' the curious cox-combe, Doe you see?" Field and the rest, writing in or after 1611, had uniformly referred to Cervantes' cuckold as the Curious Impertinent. Jonson wrote his _Alchemist_ between July 12 and October 3, 1610, and up to that time the cuckold had been dramatized as Coxcomb only by Beaumont and Fletcher. The prefix 'Curious' indicates that in Jonson's mind his friend's play is associated with Cervantes' novel; and the further prefix of 'The Knight' looks very much like a reminiscence of "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," which had been played some two years before. This argument from contemporaneity of inspiration and allusion inclines me to date the upper limit of _The Coxcombe_ about 1609, after Baudouin's translation _Le Curieux Impertinent_ had reached England, and Shelton's manuscript had been put in circulation.