words:--

"The great probability is that _Hamlet_ was written
at the earliest in 1601, and the _Taming of the Shrew_
perhaps came from the pen of its author not very long afterwards."

I am anxious to ascertain whether I am acquainted with all the
circumstances on which the above opinion is founded; as those which
I can, at this moment, recall, are to my mind hardly sufficiently
conclusive. Rejecting the supposed allusion to Heywood's _Woman
Kill'd with Kindness_, which I see, by a note, Mr. Collier gives
up as untenable ground, the facts, I believe, remain as follows:--

First: _The Taming of the Shrew_ was not mentioned by Meres in
1598, whereupon it is assumed that "had it been written, he could
scarcely have failed to mention it." And,

Second: it must have been written after _Hamlet_, because the
name Baptista, used incorrectly in that play as a feminine name, is
properly applied to a man in this. And these, I believe, are all.
Now, the first of these assumptions I answer, by asking, "Does it
follow?" Of all Shakspeare's plays which had then appeared, only
three had been published before 1598, and not one comedy. Meres, in
all probability, had no list to refer to, nor was he making one: he
simply adduced, in evidence of his assertion of Shakspeare's
excellence, both in tragedy and comedy, such plays of both kinds as
he _could_ recollect, or the best of those which he _did_
recollect. Let us put the case home; not in reference to any modern
dramatist (though Shakspeare in his own day was not the great
exception that he stands with us), but to the world-honoured poet